Note 192 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Despite his anxious caution, Carlyle’s writing conveyed to susceptible readers a non-Christian view of things. We know from a posthumous writing of Mr. Froude’s that, when that writer had gone through the university and taken holy orders without ever having had a single doubt as to his creed, Carlyle’s books “taught him that the religion in which he had been reared was but one of many dresses in which spiritual truth had arrayed itself, and that the creed was not literally true so far as it was a narrative of facts.”192 It was presumably from the Sartor Resartus and some of the Essays, such as that on Voltaire—perhaps, also, negatively from the general absence of Christian sentiment in Carlyle’s works—that such lessons were learned; and though it is certain that many non-zealous Christians saw no harm in Carlyle, there is reason to believe that for multitudes of readers he had the same awakening virtue. It need hardly be said that his friend Emerson exercised it in no less degree. Mr. Froude was remarkable in his youth for his surrender of the clerical profession, in the teeth of a bitter opposition from his family, and further for his publication of a freethinking romance, The Nemesis of Faith (1849); but he went far to conciliate Anglican orthodoxy by his History. The romance had a temporary vogue rather above its artistic merits as a result of being publicly burned by the authorities of Exeter College, Oxford, of which he was a Fellow.193