religious feeling, is the only link which binds us to the Infinite.  That severed, broken, or destroyed, and man is an alien and an orphan; lost to him forever is the key to all spiritual mystery, to the hieroglyph of the soul, to the symbolism of nature, of time, and of eternity.  Such, as we understand it, is Carlyle’s teaching.  But this is not all.  Man is to be man in that high sense we have spoken his robes of immortality around him, as if God had done with him for all practical purposes, and he with God,—­but for action,—­action in a world which is to prove his power, his beneficence, his usefulness.  That spiritual fashioning by the Great Fashioner of all things is so ordained that we ourselves may become fashioners, workers, makers.  For it is given to no man to be an idle cumberer of the ground, but to dig, and sow, and plant, and reap the fruits of his labor for the garner.  This is man’s first duty, and the diviner he is the more divinely will he execute it.

That such a gospel as this could find utterance in the pages of the “Edinburgh Review” is curious enough; and it is scarcely less surprising that the “Sartor Resartus” should make its first appearance in the somewhat narrow and conservative pages of Fraser.  Carlyle has clearly written his own struggles in this book,—­his struggles and his conquests.  From the “Everlasting No,”—­that dreadful realm of enchantment, where all the forms of nature are frozen forever in dumb imprisonment and despair,—­the great vaulted firmament no longer serene and holy and loving as God’s curtain for his children’s slumbers, but flaming in starry portents, and dropping down over the earth like a funeral pall; through this region of life-semblance and death-reality the lonely and aching pilgrim wanders,—­questioning without reply,—­wailing, broken, self-consuming,—­looking with eager eyes for the waters of immortality, and finding nothing but pools of salt and Marahs of bitterness.  Herein is no Calvary, no Cross-symbolism, by whose miraculous power he is relieved of his infinite burden of sorrow, starting onward with hope and joy in his heart; nor does he ever find his Calvary until the deeps of his spiritual nature are broken up and flooded with celestial light, as he knocks reverently at the portals of heaven for communion with his Father who is in heaven.  Then bursts upon him a new significance from all things; he sees that the great world is but a fable of divine truth, hiding its secrets from all but the initiated and the worthy, and that faith, and trust, and worship are the cipher, which unlocks them all.  He thus arrives at the plains of heaven in the region of the “Everlasting Yes.”  His own soul lies naked and resolved before him,—­its unspeakable greatness, its meaning, faculty, and destiny.  Work, and dutiful obedience to the laws of work, are the outlets of his power; and herein he finds peace and rest to his soul.