them together into one continuous, all-including case, the farewell service of his all! Stitch away, thou noble Fox; every prick of that little instrument is pricking into the heart of slavery, and world-worship, and the Mammon-god! Thy elbows jerk, as in strong swimmerstrokes, and every stroke is bearing thee across the prison-ditch, within which vanity holds her workhouse and rag-fair, into lands of true liberty; were the work done, there is in broad Europe one 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, Diogenes, 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 shores; yet not, in halfsavage pride, undervaluing 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 were scornfully 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? Not out of blind sectarian parti

sanship; 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 Baotian simplicity, (if, indeed, there be not an underhand satire in it), with which that "incident" is here brought forward; and, in the Professor's ambiguous way, as clearly perhaps as he durst in Weissnichtwo, recommended 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 Rag-fair," 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 second-skin 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 day-dream, 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 realized. 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 cow-hide being left to the drudges and Gibeonites of the world; and so all the old distinctions reëstablished?

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 mean 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 vocabulary, 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 lifegiving 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 cloven tongues of fire'), and seeks to be embodied in a visible communion 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 earthward, 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 quiet soul is straightway involuntary 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 hulls 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 properly 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 chapter-houses and catherals, or by Preaching and Prophesying, mere speech and chanting, 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 Church Clothes 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 continue, but must gradually issue in universal selfish discord, hatred, savage isolation, and dispersion; whereby, as we might continue to say, the very dust and dead body of society would have evaporated and become abolished. Such, and so all-important, all-sustaining, are the Church Clothes, to civilized or even to rational man.

"Meanwhile, in our era of the world, those same