EZEKIEL xxxvu. 3 239
through an American friend, Mrs. Carroll, and a German friend,
Countess von B (a cousin of Humboldt), who was engaged in
philanthropic church settlement work in New York. We hoped we had persuaded the millionairess to employ our poor seamstress, but I unluckily added that when she worked for Mrs. Carroll or myself we paid her tram fares, as she lived in a remote and cheap part of the city. On hearing this, the poor possessor of all this wealth (for I think she was poor in all but her banking account) exclaimed, ' Is that so ? I call that just extortion. She'll have no car fares from me. Why no, I guess I won't employ her.' The fares in question amounted to ten cents, about 5d. of our money." 1
(3) But the dry bones of Ezekiel's vision may be discovered, and that not seldom, within the human soul. When a soul has lost its hold on truth or grace, when it has ceased to believe, or ceased to love, all the traces of what it once has been do not forthwith disappear. There are survivals of the old believing life — fragments of the skeleton of the old convictions, bits of stray logic which once guarded a creed, phrases which expressed the feeling that once winged a prayer. There may remain on in the arid desolation a very valley full of dry bones — of aspirations which have no goal ; of opinions which have no real basis, no practical consequences ; of friendships which are felt to be hollow, but which are still kept up ; of habits which have lost all meaning, but which it is hard to surrender. Not seldom may we meet with writers and with talkers, with historians, with poets, whose language shows that they have once known what it is to believe, but for whom a living faith has perished utterly, and left behind it only these dried-up relics of its former life.
Tj Earlier in his life, while Carlyle was young and confident, and the effects of his religious training were fresh in him, the existence, the omnipresence, the omnipotence of God, were then the strongest of his convictions. The faith remained unshaken in him to the end ; he never himself doubted ; yet he was perplexed by the indifference with which the Supreme Power was allowing its existence to be obscured. I once said to him, not long before his death, that I could only believe in a God which did something. With a cry of pain, which I shall never forget, he said, "He does nothing." For himself, however, his faith stood firm. He did not believe in historical Christianity. He did not believe that the
1 Memorials of Henry Forbes Julian (1914), 124.
240 LIFE FROM THE DEAD
facts alleged in the Apostles' Creed had ever really happened. The resurrection of Christ was to him only a symbol of a spiritual truth. As Christ rose from the dead, so were we to rise from the death of sin to the life of righteousness. Not that Christ had actually died and had risen again. He was only believed to have died and believed to have risen in an age when legend was history, when stories were accepted as true from their beauty or their significance. The body of the belief was now perishing, and the soul of it being discredited by its connexion with discovered error, was suspected not to be a soul at all; half mankind, betrayed and deserted, were rushing off into materialism.1
(4) Again there is restlessness and aimlessness. If there is one thing which the awakening man feels, it is the scatteredness, the disjointedness, of his being. I am made up of countless parts — innumerable elements of thought and feeling, desire and will, affection and ambition, interest and occupation. I do not complain of a want of variety, of diversity, of manifoldness of gifts; that which I bewail is a want of unity. I give this fragment of myself to this, and another fragment of myself to that — I bestow here a wish, and there an effort, and there a taste, and there a liking ; here an outlay of time, and there of money, and there of toil, and there of affection — one lord after another has dominion over me, many by turns, no one in perpetuity — and when I look at my life it is a thing of shreds and frag- ments; it has no coherence, no continuity, no plan, or, if any, only one of roving, straying, sinning. And now the grey hairs are upon me. I have eaten and drunken, I have played and toiled, almost my entire portion, and nothing is done, nothing is gained — nothing which can be called mine, nothing which can go with me when I die, or welcome me at the other side into ever- lasting habitations. The bones of my complex frame are dry, and lo, they lie all along the valley of my being, no two in one!
Tf If proof of the fact that the forces of materialism have been at work among us were needed, nothing could afford it more clearly than our loss of peace and dignity in modern society. Many costly luxuries have become necessities, and they have increased the pace of life to a rush and fury which makes business a turmoil and social life a fever. A symbolic embodiment 1 J. A. Froude, Thomas Carlyle, 1834-1881, ii. 268.