one of the most moral things a man, in common cases, has it in his power to do. Strip thyself, go into the bath, or were it into limpid pool and running brook, and there wash and be clean--thou wilt step out again a purer and a better man. This consciousness of perfect outer pureness, that to thy skin there now adheres no foreign speck of imperfection, how it radiates -in on thee, with cunning symbolic influences to thy very soul! Thou hast an increase of tendency toward all good things whatsoever. The oldest Eastern Sages, with joy and holy gratitude, had felt it so—and that it was the Maker's gift and will. Whose else is it? It remains a religious duty, from oldest times, in the East. Nor could Herr Professor Strauss, when I put the question, deny that for us at present it is still such here in the West! To that dingy fuliginous operative, emerging from his soot-mill, what is the first duty I will prescribe, and offer help toward? That he clean the skin of him. Can he pray, by any ascertained method? One knows not entirely; but with soap and a sufficiency of water he can wash. Even the dull English feel something of this; they have a saying, “Cleanliness is near of kin to Godliness;" yet never, in any country, saw I operative men work washed, and, in a climate drenched with the softest cloud-water, such a scarcity of baths!" Alas, Sauerteig, our "operative men are at present short even of potatoes; what "duty" can you prescribe to them!

Or let us give a glance at China. Our new friend, the Emperor there, is Pontiff of three hundred million men; who do all live and work, these many centuries now, authentically patronized by Heaven so far; and, therefore, must have some "religion" of a kind. This Emperor-Pontiff has, in fact, a religious belief of certain Laws, Laws of Heaven; observes with a religious rigour his "three thousand punctualities,"-given out by men of insight, some sixty generations since, as a legible transcript of the samethe Heavens do seem to say, not totally an incorrect one. He has not much of a ritual, this Pontiff-Emperor; believes, it is like, with the old Monks, that "Labour is Worship.' His most public Act of Worship, it appears, is the drawing solemnly at a certain day, on the green bosom of our Mother Earth, when the Heavens, after dead black winter, have again with their vernal radiances awakened her, a distinct red Furrow with the Ploughsignal that all the Ploughs of China are to begin ploughing and worshipping! It is notable enough. He, in sight of the Seen and Unseen Powers, draws his distinct red Furrow there-saying, and praying, in mute symbolism, so many most eloquent things!

If you ask this Pontiff "Who made him? what is to become of him and us?" he maintains a dignified reserve-waves his hand and pontiff eyes over the unfathomable deep of Heaven, the "Tsien" the azure kingdoms of Infinitude; as if asking, "Is it doubtful that we are right well made? Can aught that is wrong become of us?" He and his three hundred millions, it is their chief" punctuality," visit yearly the Tombs of their Fathers; each man the Tomb of his Father and his Mother: alone there, in silence, with what of "worship" or other thought there may be, pauses solemnly each man; the divine skies all silent over him; the divine Graves, and this divinest Grave, all silent under him-the pulsings of his own soul, if he have any soul, alone audible. Truly, it may be a kind of worship! Truly, if a man cannot get some glimpse into the Eternities, looking through this portal-through what other need he try it?

Our friend the Pontiff Emperor permits cheerfully, though with contempt, all manner of Buddists, Bonzes, Talapoins, and such-like, to build brick Temples on the voluntary principle; to worship with what of chauntings, paper lanterns, and tumultuous brayings pleases them, and make night hideous-since they find some comfort in it. Cheerfully, though with contempt. He is a wiser Pontiff than many persons think! He is as yet the one Chief Potentate or Priest in this Earth who has made a distinct systematic attempt at what we call the ultimate result of all religion, Practical Hero-worship: he

does incessantly, with true anxiety, in such way as he can, search and sift (it would appear) his whole enormous population for the Wisest born among them; by which Wisest, as by born kings, these three hundred million men are governed. The Heavens, to a certain extent, do appear to countenance him. These three hundred millions actually make porcelain, Souchong tea, with innumerable other things; and fight, under Heaven's flag against Necessity; and have fewer Seven-years' Wars, Thirty-years' Wars, French Revolution Wars, and infernal fightings with each other, than certain millions elsewhere have!

Nay, in our poor distracted Europe itself, in these newest times, have there not religious voices risen-with a religion new, and yet the oldest; entirely indisputable to all hearts of men? Some I do know who did not call or think themselves "Prophets," far enough from that; but who were, in very truth, melodious Voices from the eternal Heart of Nature once again; souls for ever venerable to all that have a soul. A French Revolution is one phenomenon; as complement and spiritual exponent thereof, a Poet Goethe and German Literature is to me another. The old Secular or Practical World, so to speak, having gone up in fire, is not here the prophecy and dawn of a new Spiritual World, parent of far nobler, wider new Practical worlds? A life of Antique devoutness, Antique veracity and heroism, bas again become possible, is again seen actual there for the most modern man. A phenomenon, as quiet as it is, comparable for greatness to no other! "The great Event for the world is, now as always, the arrival in it of a new Wise Man." Touches there are, be the Heavens ever thanked, of new Sphere-melody; audible once more in the infinite jargoning discords and poor scrannel-pipings of the thing called Literature-priceless there, as the voice of new Heavenly Psalms! Literature, like the old Prayer-collections of the first centuries, were it "well selected from and burnt," has precious things! For Literature, with all its printing-presses, puffing-engines, and shoreless deafening triviality, is yet "the Thought of Thinking Souls." A sacred" religion,' if you like the name, does live in the heart of that strange froth-ocean, not wholly froth, what we call Literature; and will more and more disclose itself therefrom: not now as scorching fire: the red smoky scorching fire has purified itself into white sunny Light. Is not Light grander than Fire? It is the same element in a state of purity.

My candid readers, we will march out of this Third Book with a rythmic word of Goethe's on our tongue; a word which perhaps has already sung itself, in dark hours and in bright, through many a heart. To me, finding it devout yet whole, credible and veritable, full of piety yet free of cant; to me joyfully finding much in it, and joyfully missing so much in it, this little snatch of music by the greatest German Man, sounds like a stanza in the grand Road Song and Marching-Song of our great Teutonic kindred wending, wending, valiant and victorious, through the undiscovered Deeps of Time! He calls it Mason Lodge-not Psalm or Hymn:

1. "The Mason's ways are
A type of Existence,
And his persistance
Is as the days are
Of Men in this world.

2. The Future hides in it
Good hap and sorrow;
We press still thorow,
Naught that abides in it
Daunting us-onward.

3. And solemn before us,
Veiled, the dark Portal,
Goal of all mortal :
Stars silent rest o'er us,
Graves under us silent.

4. But heard are the Voices,
Voice of the Sages,
The Worlds and the Ages:
'Choose well, your choice is
Brief and yet endless;

5. Here eyes do regard you,
In Eternity's stillness;

Here is all fulness,
Ye brave, to reward you;
Work and despair not.'"

BOOK IV.

HOROSCOPE.

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CHAPTER I.

ARISTOCRACIES.

To perdict the Future, to manage the Present, would not be so impossible, had not the Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled; effaced and, what is worse, defaced! The Past cannot be seen; the Past, looked at through the medium of Philosophical History" in these times, cannot even be not Been: it is mis-seen; affirmed to have existed-and to have been a godless Impossibility. Your Norman Conquerors, true royal souls, crowned kings as such, were vulturous irrational Tyrants: your Becket was a noisy Egoist and Hypocrite; getting his brains spilt on the floor of Canterbury Cathedral, to secure the main chance-somewhat uncertain how! "Enthusiasm " and even "honest Enthusiasm,”—yes, of course :

"The Dog, to gain his private ends,

Went mad; and bit the man !”

For, in truth, the eye sees in all things what it brought with it the means of seeing. A godless century, looking back on centuries that were godly, produces portraitures more miraculous than any other. All was inane discord in the Past; brute force bore rule everywhere; Stupidity, savage unreason, fitter for Bedlam than for a human world! Whereby, indeed, it becomes sufficiently natural that the like qualities, in new sleeker habiliments, should continue in our own time to rule. Millions enchanted in Bastille Workhouses; Irish widows proving their relationship by typhus fever: what would you have? It was ever so, or worse. Man's History, was it not always even this: The cookery and eating up of imbecile Dupedom by successful Quackhood; the battle, with various weapons of vulturous Quack and Tyrant against vulturous Tyrant and Quack! No God was in the Past Time; nothing but Mechanisms and chaotic Brute Gods: how shall the poor "Philosophic Historian," to whom his own century is all godless, see any God in other centuries?

Men believe in Bibles, and disbelieve in them: but of all Bibles the frightfullest to disbelieve in is this "Bible of Universal History." This is the Eternal Bible and God's Book, "which every born man," till once the soul and eyesight are extinguished in him, "can and must see with his own eyes the God's-Finger writing?" To discredit this is an infidelity like no other. Such infidelity you would punish, if not by fire and fagot, which are difficult to manage in our times, yet by the most peremptory order, to hold its peace till it got something wiser to say. Why should the blessed Silence be broken into noises to communicate only the like of this? If the Past have no God's-Reason in it, nothing but Devil's-Unreason, let the Past be eternally forgotten: mention it no more; we whose ancestors were all hanged, why should we talk of ropes!

It is, in brief, not true that men ever lived by Delirium, Hypocrisy, Injustice, or any form of Unreason, since they came to inhabit this Planet. It is not true that they ever did, or ever will, live except by the reverse of these. Men will again be taught this. Their acted History will then again be a Heroism; their written History, what it once was, an Epic. Nay, for ever it is either such; or else it virtually is-Nothing. Were it written in a thousand volumes, the unheroism of such volumes hastens incessantly to be forgotten; the net content of an Alexandrian Library of Unheroics is,

and will ultimately show itself to be, zero. What man is interested to remember it; have not all men, at all times, the liveliest interest to forget it? "Revelations," if not celestial then infernal, will teach us that God is; we shall then, if needful, discern without difficulty that He has always been! The Dryasdust Philosophisms and enlightened Scepticisms of the Eighteenth Century, historical and other, will have to survive for a while with the Physiologists-as a memorable Nightmare Dream. All this haggard epoch, with its ghastly Doctrines and death's head Philosophies "teaching by example" or otherwise, will one day have become, what to our Moslem friends their godless ages are, the "Period of Ignorance."

If the convulsive struggles of the last Half-century have taught poor struggling convulsive Europe any truth, it may perhaps be this as the extreme of innumerable others: That Europe requires a real Aristocracy, real Priesthood, or it cannot continue to exist. Huge French Revolutions, Napoleonisms, then Bourbonisms with their corollary of Three Days, finishing in very unfinal Louis Phillipisms: all this ought to be didactic! All this may have taught us that False Aristocracies are insupportable; that No-Aristocracies, Liberty-and-Equalities are impossible; that true Aristocracies are at once indispensable, and not easily attained!

Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing Class and a Teaching Class : these two, sometimes separate, and endeavouring to harmonize themselves, sometimes conjoined as one, and the King a Pontiff-King: then did no society exist without these two vital elements, then will none exist. It lies in the very nature of man: you will visit no remotest village in the most republican country of the world, where virtually or actually you do not find these two powers at work. Man, little as he may suppose it, is necessitated to obey superiors. He is a social being in virtue of this necessity; nay, he could not be gregarious otherwise. He obeys those whom he esteems better than himself, wiser, braver; and will for ever obey such, and even be ready and delighted to do it. The Wiser, Braver: these, a Virtual Aristocracy everywhere and everywhen, do, in all societies that reach any articulate shape, develope themselves into a ruling class, an Actual Aristocracy, with settled modes of operating, what are called laws and even private-laws or privileges, and so forth; very notable to look upon in this world. Aristocracy and Priesthood, we say, are sometimes united. For, indeed, the Wiser and the Braver are properly but one class; no wise man but needed first of all to be a brave man, or he never had been wise. The noble Priest was always a noble Aristos to begin with, and something more to end with. Your Luther, your Knox, your Anselin, Becket, Abbot Samson, Samuel Johnson, if they had not been brave enough, by what possibility could they ever have been wise? If, from accident or forethought, this your Actual Aristocracy have got discriminated into two classes, there can be no doubt but the Priest class is the more dignified; supreme over the other, as governing head is over active hand. And yet in practice, again, it is likeliest the reverse will be found arranged; a sign that the arrangement is already vitiated; that a split is introduced into it, which will widen and widen till the whole be rent asunder.

In England, in Europe generally, we may say that these two Virtualities have unfolded themselves into Actualities, in by far the noblest and richest manner any region of the world ever saw. A spiritual Guideship, a practieal Governorship, fruit of the grand conscious endeavours, say rather of the immeasurable unconscious instincts and necessities of men, have established themselves; very strange to behold. Everywhere, while so much has been forgotten, you find the King' Palace, and the Vice-King's Castle, Mansion, Manor-house; till there is not an inch of ground from sea to sea but has both its King and Vice-King, long due series of Vice-Kings, its Squire, Earl, Duke, or whatever the title of him-to whom you have given the land, that he may govern you in it.

More touching still, there is not a hamlet where poor peasants congregate but by one means and another a Church-Apparatus has been got together-roofed edifice with revenues and belfries; pulpit, reading-desk, with Books and Methods: possibility, in short, and strict prescription, that a man stand there and speak of spiritual things to men. It is beautiful; even in its great obscuration and decadence is among the beautifullest, most touching objects one sees on the earth. This speaking Man has indeed, in these times, wandered terribly from the point; has, alas! as it were, totally lost sight of the point: yet, at bottom, whom have we to compare with him? Of all public functionaries boarded and lodged on the Industry of Modern Europe, is there one worthier of the board he has? A man even professing, and never so languidly making still some endeavours, to save the souls of men: contrast him with a man professing to do little but shoot the partridges of men! I wish he could find the point again, this speaking one and stick to it with tenacity, with deadly energy-for there is need of him yet! The speaking Function, this of Truth coming to us with a living voice-nay, in a living shape and as a concrete practical Exemplar: this, with all our Writing and Printing Functions, has a perennial place. Could he but find the point again-take the old spectacles off his nose, and, looking up, discover, almost in contact with him, what the real Satanas, and soul-devouring, world-devouring Devil, now is? Original Sin and such-like are bad enough, I doubt not: but distilled Gin, dark Ignorance, Stupidity, dark Cornlaw, Bastille and Company, what are they! Will he discover our new real Satan, whom he has to fight; or go on droning through his old nose-spectacles about old extinct Satans-and never see the real one, till he feel him at his own throat and ours! That is a question for the world! Let us not intermeddle with it here.

Sorrowful, phantasmal as this same Double Aristocracy of Teachers and Governors now looks, it is worth all men's while to know that the purport of it is, and remains, noble and most real. Dryasdust, looking merely at the surface is greatly in error as to those ancient Kings. William Conqueror, William Rufus or Redbeard, Stephen Curthose himself, much more Henry Beauclerc and our brave Plantagenet Henry: the life of these men was not a vulturous Fighting; it was a valorous Governing, to which occasionally Fighting did, and, alas, must yet, though far seldomer now, superadd itself as an accident, a distressing impedimental adjunct. The Fighting too was indispensable, for ascertaining who had the might over whom-the right over whom. By much hard fighting, as we once said, "the unrealities, beaten into dust, flew gradually off," and left the plain reality and fact, "thou stronger than I; thou wiser than I; thou king, and subject I," in a somewhat clearer condition!

Truly, we cannot enough admire, in those Abbot-Samson and WilliamConqueror times, the arrangement they had made of their Governing Classes. Highly interested to observe how the sincere insight, on their part, into what did, of primary necessity, behoove to be accomplished, had led them to the way of accomplishing it; and, in the course of time, to get it accomplished! No imaginary Aristocracy would serve their turn; and accordingly they attained a real one. The Bravest men, who it is ever to be repcated and remembered, are also on the whole the Wisest, Strongest, every way Best, had, here, with a respectable degree of accuracy, been got selected; seated each on his piece of territory, which was lent him, then gradually given him, that he might govern it. These Vice-Kings, each on his portion of the common soil of England, with a Head King over all, were a " Virtuality perfected into an Actuality" really to an astonishing extent.

For those were rugged stalwart ages; full of earnestness, of a rude God'struth: nay, at any rate, their quilting was so unspeakably thinner than ours Fact came swiftly on them, if at any time they had yielded to Phantasm!