“To speak a little pedantically,” says our author himself, in a paper called Signs of the Times, “there is a science of Dynamics in man’s fortune and nature, as well as of Mechanics.  There is a science which treats of, and practically addresses, the primary, unmodified, forces and energies of man, the mysterious springs of love, and fear, and wonder, of enthusiasm, poetry—­religion, all which have a truly vital and infinite character; as well as a science which practically addresses the finite, modified developments of these, when they take the shape of immediate ‘motives,’ as hope of reward, or as fear of punishment.  Now it is certain, that in former times the wise men, the enlightened lovers of their kind, who appeared generally as moralists, poets, or priests, did, without neglecting the mechanical province, deal chiefly with the dynamical; applying, themselves chiefly to regulate, increase, and purify, the inward primary powers of man; and fancying that herein lay the main difficulty, and the best service they could undertake.”—­Misc. vol. ii. p. 277.

In such Dynamics it is that Mr Carlyle deals.  To speak in our own plain common-place diction, it is to the elements of all religious feeling, to the broad unalterable principles of morality, that he addresses himself; stirring up in the minds of his readers those sentiments of reverence to the Highest, and of justice to all, even to the lowest, which can never utterly die out in any man, but which slumber in the greater number of us.  It is by no means necessary to teach any peculiar or positive doctrine in order to exert an influence on society.  After all, there is a moral heart beating at the very centre of this world.  Touch it, and there is a responsive movement through the whole system of the world.  Undoubtedly external circumstances rule in their turn over this same central pulsation:  alter, arrange, and modify, these external circumstances as best you can, but he who, by the word he speaks or writes, can reach this central pulse immediately—­is he idle, is he profitless?

Or put it thus:  there is a justice between man and man—­older, and more stable, and more lofty in its requisitions, than that which sits in ermine, or, if our author pleases, in “horse-hair,” at Westminster Hall; there is a morality recognized by the intellect and the heart of all reflective men, higher and purer than what the present forms of society exact or render feasible—­or rather say, a morality of more exalted character than that which has hitherto determined those forms of society.  No man who believes that the teaching of Christ was authorized of heaven—­no man who believes this only, that his doctrine has obtained and preserved its heavenly character from the successful, unanswerable, appeal which it makes to the human heart—­can dispute this fact.  Is he an idler, then, or a dreamer in the land, who comes forth, and on the high-road