that no man ever saw a duty beyond his strength, and that “man can because he ought” and ought only because he can?  The evils an individual cannot overcome are the moral opportunities of his fellows.  The good are not lone workers of God’s purposes, and there is no need of despair.  Carlyle, like the ancient prophet, was too conscious of his own mission, and too forgetful of that of others.  “I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts; because the children of Israel have forgotten Thy covenant, thrown down Thine alters, and slain Thy prophets, and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.”  He needed, beside the consciousness of his prophetic function, a consciousness of brotherhood with humbler workers.  “Yet I have left Me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.”  It would have helped him had he remembered, that there were on all sides other workers engaged on the temple not made with hands, although he could not hear the sound of their hammers for the din he made himself.  It would have changed his despair into joy, and his pity into a higher moral quality, had he been able to believe that, amidst all the millions against whom he hurled his anathemas, there is no one who, let him do what he will, is not constrained to illustrate either the folly and wretchedness of sin, or the glory of goodness.  It is not given to any one, least of all to the wicked, to hold back the onward movement of the race, or to destroy the impulse for good which is planted within it.

But Carlyle saw only one side of the truth about man’s moral nature and destiny.  He knew, as the ancient prophets did, that evil is potential wreck; and he taxed the power of metaphor to the utmost to indicate, how wrong gradually takes root, and ripens into putrescence and self-combustion, in obedience to a necessity which is absolute.  That morality is the essence of things, that wrong must prove its weakness, that right is the only might, is reiterated and illustrated on all his pages; they are now commonplaces of speculation on matters of history, if not conscious practical principles which guide its makers.  But Carlyle never inquired into the character of this moral necessity, and he overlooked the beneficence which places death at the heart of sin.  He never saw wrong except on its way to execution, or in the death throes; but he did not look in the face of the gentle power that led it on to death.  He saw the necessity which rules history, but not the beneficent character of that necessity.

The same limitations marred his view of duty, which was his greatest revelation to his age.  He felt its categorical authority and its binding force.  But the power which imposed the duty was an alien power, awful in majesty, infinite in might, a “great task-master”; and the duty itself was an outer law, written in letters of flame across the high heavens, in comparison with which man’s action at its