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tedium to his consultations, and advised him, as the solution of such doubts, to "drink beer, and dance with the girls." Blind 'leaders of the blind! For what end were their tithes levied and 'eaten; for what were their shovel-hats scooped out, and their surplices and cassock-aprons girt on; and such a church-repair'ing, and chaffering, and organing, and other racketing, held over that spot of God's Earth,-if Man were but a Patent Digester, and the Belly with its adjuncts the grand Reality? Fox turned from them, with tears and a sacred scorn, back to his Leather-parings and his Bible. Mountains of encumbrance, higher than Etna, had been heaped over that Spirit: but it was a Spirit, and would not lie buried there. Through long 'days and nights of silent agony, it struggled and wrestled, with a man's force, to be free: how its prison-mountains heaved and 'swayed tumultuously, as the giant spirit shook them to this 'hand and that, and emerged into the light of Heaven! That 'Leicester shoe-shop, had men known it, was a holier place than 'any Vatican or Loretto-shrine." So bandaged, and hampered, ' and hemmed in," groaned he, "with thousand requisitions, obli'gations, straps, tatters, and tagrags, I can neither see nor move: 'not my own am I, but the World's; and Time flies fast, and Heaven is high, and Hell is deep: Man! bethink thee, if thou hast power of Thought! Why not; what binds me here? 'Want, want!-Ha, of what? Will all the shoe-wages under the Moon ferry me across into that far Land of Light? Only • Meditation can, and devout Prayer to God. I will to the woods: 'the hollow of a tree will lodge me, wild berries feed me; and for ' Clothes, cannot I stitch myself one perennial suit of Leather.”

'Historical Oil-painting,' continues Teufelsdröckh, 'is one of 'the Arts I never practised; therefore shall I not decide whethor 'this subject were easy of execution on the canvass. Yet often has it seemed to me as if such first outflashing of man's Freewill, to lighten, more and more into Day, the Chaotic Night that 'threatened to engulph him in its hindrances and its horrors, 'were properly the only grandeur there is in History. Let some living Angelo or Rosa, with seeing eye and understanding heart, 'picture George Fox on that morning, when he spreads out his 'cutting-board for the last time, and cuts cow-hides by unwonted

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'patterns, and stitches them together into one continuous 'including Case, the farewell service of his awl! Stitch aw thou noble Fox: every prick of that little instrument is pris 'ing into the heart of Slavery, and World-worship, and the Ma 'mon-god. Thy elbows jerk, as in strong swimmer-strokes, and 'every stroke is bearing thee across the Prison-ditch, with 'which Vanity holds her Workhouse and Ragfair, into lands of 'true liberty; were the work done, there is in broad Europe : 'Free Man, and thou art he!

'Thus from the lowest depth there is a path to the loftiest 'height; and for the Poor also a Gospel has been published 'Surely, if, as D'Alembert asserts, my illustrious namesake, Die'genes, was the greatest man of Antiquity, only that he wanted 'Decency, then by stronger reason is George Fox the greatest of 'the Moderns; and greater than Diogenes himself: for he too 'stands on the adamantine basis of his Manhood, casting aside 'all props and shoars; yet not, in half-savage Pride, undervalu 'ing the Earth; valuing it rather, as a place to yield him warmth ' and food, he looks Heavenward from his Earth, and dwells in an 'element of Mercy and Worship, with a still Strength, such as 'the Cynic's Tub did nowise witness. Great, truly, was that 'Tub a temple from which man's dignity and divinity was scors 'fully preached abroad; but greater is the Leather Hull, for the same sermon was preached there, and not in Scorn but in Love

George Fox's 'perennial suit,' with all that it held, has been worn quite into ashes for nigh two centuries: why, in a discussion on the Perfectibility of Society, reproduce it now?

of blind sectarian partisanship: Teufelsdröckh himself is no Quaker; with all his pacific tendencies, did we not see him, in that scene at the North Cape, with the Archangel Smuggler, exhibit fire-arms?

For us, aware of his deep Sansculottism, there is more meant in this passage than meets the ear. At the same time, who can avoid smiling at the earnestness and Boeotian simplicity (if indeed there be not an underhand satire in it), with which that Inci dent' is here brought forward; and, in the Professor's ambiguous way, as clearly perhaps as he durst in Weissnichtwo, recommended

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to imitation! Does Teufelsdröckh anticipate that, in this age of refinement, any considerable class of the community, by way of testifying against the Mammon-god,' and escaping from what he calls Vanity's Workhouse and Ragfair,' where doubtless some of them are toiled and whipped and hoodwinked sufficiently,— will sheathe themselves in close-fitting cases of Leather? The idea is ridiculous in the extreme. Will Majesty lay aside its robes of state, and Beauty its frills and train-gowns, for a secondskin of tanned hide? By which change Huddersfield and Manchester, and Coventry and Paisley, and the Fancy-Bazaar, were reduced to hungry solitudes; and only Day and Martin could profit. For neither would Teufelsdröckh's mad daydream, here as we presume covertly intended, of levelling Society (levelling it indeed with a vengeance, into one huge drowned marsh!), and so attaining the political effects of Nudity without its frigorific or other consequences,-be thereby realised. Would not the rich man purchase a waterproof suit of Russia Leather; and the highborn Belle step forth in red or azure morocco, lined with shamoy; the black cowhide being left to the Drudges and Gibeonites of the world; and so all the old Distinctions be re-established?

Or has the Professor his own deeper intention; and laughs in his sleeve at our strictures and glosses, which indeed are but a part thereof?

CHAPTER II.

CHURCH-CLOTHES.

NOT less questionable is his Chapter on Church-Clothes, which has the farther distinction of being the shortest in the Volume We here translate it entire :

'By Church Clothes, it need not be premised, that I mear 'infinitely more than Cassocks and Surplices; and do not at all 'mean the mere haberdasher Sunday Clothes that men go to 'Church in Far from it! Church-Clothes are, in our vocabe 'lary, the Forms, the Vestures, under which men have at various 'periods embodied and represented for themselves the Religious 'Principle; that is to say, invested the Divine Idea of the World 'with a sensible and practically active Body, so that it might 'dwell among them as a living and life-giving WORD.

These are unspeakably the most important of all the vestures and garnitures of Human Existence. They are first spun and 'woven, I may say, by that wonder of wonders, SOCIETY; for it 'is still only when "two or three are gathered together" that ‹ Religion, spiritually existent, and indeed indestructible however 'latent, in each, first outwardly manifests itself (as with "clover 'tongues of fire"), and seeks to be embodied in a visible Commu 'nion, and Church Militant. Mystical, more than magical, is 'that Communing of Soul with Soul, both looking heavenward. 'here properly Soul first speaks with Soul; for only in looking 'heavenward, take it in what sense you may, not in looking earth'ward, does what we can call Union, mutual Love, Society, begin 'to be possible. How true is that of Novalis: "It is certain, my 'Belief gains quite infinitely the moment I can convince another 'mind thereof!" Gaze thou in the face of thy Brother, in those 'eyes where plays the lambent fire of Kindness, or in those where rages the lurid conflagration of Anger; feel how thy own so

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quiet Soul is straightway involuntarily kindled with the like, and ye blaze and reverberate on each other, till it is all one limitless confluent flame (of embracing Love, or of deadly-grappling Hate); and then say what miraculous virtue goes out of man into man. But if so, through all the thick-plied hull of our Earthly Life; how much more when it is of the Divine Life we speak, and inmost ME is, as it were, brought into contact with inmost ME!

Thus was it that I said, the Church-Clothes are first spun and woven by Society; outward Religion originates by Society, Society becomes possible by Religion. Nay, perhaps every conceivable Society, past and present, may well be figured as pro'perly and wholly a Church, in one or other of these three 'predicaments: an audibly preaching and prophesying Church, 'which is the best; second, a Church that struggles to preach and prophesy, but cannot as yet, till its Pentecost come; and 'third and worst, a Church gone dumb with old age, or which only mumbles delirium prior to dissolution. Whoso fancies that by Church is here meant Chapterhouses and Cathedrals, or by preaching and prophesying, mere speech and chaunting, let 'him,' says the oracular Professor, read on, light of heart '(getrosten Muthes).

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'But with regard to your Church proper, and the ChurchClothes specially recognised as Church-Clothes, I remark, fearlessly enough, that without such Vestures and sacred Tissues Society has not existed, and will not exist. For if Government 'is, so to speak, the outward SKIN of the Body Politic, holding the 'whole together and protecting it; and all your Craft-Guilds, and Associations for Industry, of hand or of head, are the Fleshly Clothes, the muscular and osseous Tissues, (lying under such SKIN), whereby Society stands and works;-then is Religion the inmost Pericardial and Nervous Tissue, which ministers Life and warm Circulation to the whole. Without which Pericardial Tissue the Bones and Muscles (of Industry) were 'inert, or animated only by a Galvanic vitality; the SKIN would 'become a shrivelled pelt, or fast-rotting raw-hide; and Society 'itself a dead carcass,-deserving to be buried. Men were no 'longer Social, but Gregarious; which latter state also could not

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