Carlyle's appreciation of the demoralizing effects of an excessively critical self-consciousness does not imply a lament for lost innocence. "In no time was man's life what he calls a happy one; in no time can it be so." Carlyle's Puritanism discloses itself in the reminder that labor is the human lot; that the age-old dream of paradise, "where the the brooks should run wine, and the trees bend with ready-baked viands," is an "impossible dream"; that labor alone, necessarily the "interruption of that ease, which man foolishly enough fancies to be his happiness," provides him with such ease as he ever enjoys; and that "what we call Evil"— the "dark, disordered material out of which man's Freewill has to create an edifice of order and Good"—will exist as long as humanity exists. Work is our lot; and our works, indeed, bring order out of chaos—as long as they are carried out in good faith, with the understanding that the creative power that makes them possible comes to us as a gift of the gods. ^*

The record of our works, as Carlyle reads it, provides us not with a reassuring fabric of customs or with evidence of our material and moral progress but with evidence of the "inward willingness" without which labor becomes a disagreeable necessity and nothing more. In works lovingly and loyally conceived and carried out, we triumph over necessity, though not by surrounding ourselves with technologies that eliminate the need for labor. (Here again, the ideology of progress reveals its kinship with the nostalgic dream of a lost Eden; modern abundance, according to the myth of progress, will eventually relieve us of the need to work.) Our triumph lies in our ability to transform labor, a necessity, into an act of faith and free will. In our works, we triumph over necessity even in its most grievous form, the inevitable force of ceaseless change. Renewed in memory, our collective works remain a source of hope, since their memory shows that "nothing that was worthy in the Past departs." For this reason, "the true venerator of the Past," Carlyle says, "... sorrows not over its departure, as one utterly bereaved."

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If evil is the absence of life, vitality, coherence, order, and creative purpose, then evil, not vice, is the proper antithesis of virtue. The familiar opposition between virtue and vice refers to a secondary and much weaker sense of virtue (not to mention a weaker sense of sin, which should be thought of rather as the antithesis of affirmation, obedience, and submission; in short, as an everlasting no). Vice is a pallid concept, which sheds its pallor on virtue as well when the two are conventionally paired.

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