Such teaching is neither sympathetic enough nor positive enough to be of much use to poor mortals wrestling with their deepest problems.  Yet in the very negation of happiness he discovers a positive religion—­the religion of the Cross, the Worship of Sorrow.  Expressed crudely, this seems to endorse the ascetic fallacy of the value of self-denial for its own sake.  But from that it is saved by the divine element in sorrow which Christ has brought—­“Love not Pleasure; love God.  This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved:  wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him.”

This still leaves us perilously near to morbidness.  The Worship of Sorrow might well be but a natural and not less morbid reaction from the former morbidness, the worship of self and happiness.  From that, however, it is saved by the word “works,” which is spoken with emphasis in this connection.  So we pass to the last phase of the Everlasting Yea, in which we return to the thesis upon which we began, viz., that “Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by action.”  “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a Duty!  Thy second Duty will already have become clearer....  Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free....  Produce!  Produce!  Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name!  ’Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it, then.  Up, up!  Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might.  Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.”

Thus the goal of human destiny is not any theory, however true; not any happiness, however alluring.  It is for practical purposes that the universe is built, and he who would be “in tune with the universe” must first and last be practical.  In various forms this doctrine has reappeared and shown itself potent.  Ritschl based his system on practical values in religion, and Professor William James has proclaimed the same doctrine in a still wider application in his Pragmatism.  The essential element in both systems is that they lay the direct stress of life, not upon abstract theory but upon experience and vital energy.  This transference from theorising and emotionalism to the prompt and vigorous exercise of will upon the immediate circumstance, is Carlyle’s understanding of the word Conversion.

When it comes to the particular question of what work the Professor is to do, the answer is that he has within him the Word Omnipotent, waiting for a man to speak it forth.  And here in this volume upon Clothes, this Sartor Resartus, is his deliberate response to the great demand.  At first he seems here to relapse from the high seriousness of the chapters we have just been reading, and to come with too great suddenness to earth again.  Yet that is not the