First, there is the fact of man’s brotherhood to man—­a fact quite independent of man’s willingness to acknowledge that brotherhood.  Second, there is the common bond of tradition, and all our debt to the past, which is a fact equally independent of our willingness to acknowledge it.  Third, there is the natural and inevitable fact of man’s necessity for reverencing some one above him.  Obedience and reverence are forthcoming, whenever man is in the presence of what he ought to reverence, and so hero-worship is secure.

These three bonds of social reality are inseparable from one another.  The first, the brotherhood of man, has often been used as the watchword of a false independence.  It is only possible on the condition of reverence and obedience for that which is higher than oneself, either in the past or the present.  “Suspicion of ‘Servility,’ of reverence for Superiors, the very dog-leech is anxious to disavow.  Fools!  Were your Superiors worthy to govern, and you worthy to obey, reverence for them were even your only possible freedom.”  These three, then, are the social realities, and all other social distinctions and conventionalities are but clothes, to be replaced or thrown away at need.

But there is a fourth bond of social reality—­the greatest and most powerful of all.  That reality is Religion.  Here, too, we must distinguish clothes from that which they cover—­forms of religion from religion itself.  Church-clothes, indeed, are as necessary as any other clothes, and they will harm no one who remembers that they are but clothes, and distinguishes between faith and form.  The old forms are already being discarded, yet Religion is so vital that it will always find new forms for itself, suited to the new age.  For religion, in one form or in another, is absolutely essential to society; and, being a grand reality, will continue to keep society from collapse.

4.  From this we pass naturally to the great and final doctrine in which the philosophy of clothes is expounded.  That doctrine, condensed into a single sentence, is that “the whole Universe is the Garment of God.”  This brings us back to the song of the Erdgeist in Goethe’s Faust:—­

“In Being’s floods, in Action’s storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion! 
Birth and Death,
An infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving
The fire of Living: 
’Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,
And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by.”

This is, of course, no novelty invented by Goethe.  We find it in Marius the Epicurean, and he found it in ancient wells of Greek philosophy.  Carlyle’s use of it has often been taken for Pantheism.  In so mystic a region it is impossible to expect precise theological definition, and yet it is right to remember that Carlyle does not identify the garment with its Wearer.  The whole argument of the book is to distinguish