Act," because it enables us to value life for itself and not because it smiles on our ambition to enjoy the best of everything, to prosper in all our undertakings, and to remain the center of cosmic attention. When we learn to reduce our claim of cosmic "wages" to a "zero," we will find the world under our feet again. "What Act of Legislation was there that thou shouldst be Happy? A little while ago, thou hadst no right to be at all." Carlyle's analysis of religious experience, if not conventionally Christian, is nevertheless consistent with the reports issued over the centuries by Christian saints and prophets. Carlyle agrees with them, in particular, in his account of the preconditions for spiritual health. "Love not pleasure; love God." Demand less of life, more of yourself. Learn to recognize the problem of evil—the eternal question of whether a loving God could have admitted human suffering into the world—as the "vain interminable controversy" it is.

What distinguishes Sartor Resartus as the product of the nineteenth century and not of the fifth is that Carlyle's spiritual confession took the form of social criticism, a genre Carlyle helped to invent. A full account of spiritual disintegration and renewal appeared to demand an account of their social effects, as well as an account of the social conditions that contributed to unbelief in the first place and made it more than usually difficult to overcome. It was not just a few individuals, Carlyle could see, who were going through the old experience of alienation and reaffirmation. The experience of unbelief had now become pervasive, thanks precisely to the forward-looking philosophies that assured mankind of health, wealth, and happiness. The celebrated "progress of the age," even with all its glaring inequities, made it much more difficult than before to grasp the fraudulence of this assurance or the inadequacy of a morality that identified good with pleasure and evil with pain.

"Pain is itself an evil," said Bentham, "and indeed, without exception, the only evil." This might have been shallow, but many people clearly found it persuasive. Blinded to the "wonder everywhere lying close on us" by the sheer profusion of human inventions, the triumph of human

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