ingenuity over nature, the men and women of the nineteenth century lived in a mechanical world "void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility." Formerly a "region of the Wonderful," the world had become "one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference to grind [man] limb from limb."

Not the collapse of custom but the collapse of faith summed up Carlyle's indictment of the modern world. Note, however, that his was not another lament for the decay of organized religion. "All inferior worships," including the institutionalized church as well as the law, the state, and the economy, fell into the category of "wearing-apparel." The old faith could no longer find embodiment in the old ceremonies, the old incantations, the old dogmas. "It is man's nature to change his Dialect from century to century," and the dialect of predestination, double predestination, prevenient grace, baptism, and atonement, even the dialect of original sin, no longer served to point the way. Because Carlyle spoke a new and often rather exotic idiom—spoke it, moreover, with a German accent acquired from Goethe, Schiller, and other Romantics—many commentators have missed his Calvinism altogether, explaining him either as a forerunner of the fascist cult of leadership or merely as a farsighted critic of industrial capitalism. Neither his interest in great men nor his early championship of the working classes, however, can be understood outside the context of religious beliefs that remained, in their essentials, surprisingly conventional if not exactly orthodox.

Not that Carlyle was indifferent to social issues in their concreteness and immediacy. The widening gulf between wealth and poverty, "dandyism" and "drudgery," horrified him, as it horrified so many of his contemporaries, thanks in part to his own early writings. His social criticism— "Signs of the Times" (1829), "Characteristics" (1831), Chartism (1839), Past and Present (1843)—named the "condition of England question" and made it the subject of excited debate. But Carlyle advocated neither a working‐ class revolution (though his criticism of the "cash nexus" appealed to Marx) nor a revival of custom, organic solidarity, and paternalism (though his contrast between medieval unity and modern disorganization appealed to paternalists like John Ruskin, George Fitzhugh, and Henry Adams). If he had a program at all, it consisted of "heroes and heroworship." But even that was religious in conception, not the expression of a blind cult of power. Hero worship was an act of "true religious

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