On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

Lecture I. The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology.

Carlyle argues that all universal history is the biography of great men, and that hero-worship—beginning with the deification of figures like Odin—is the deepest root of all religion and society, expressing man’s sincere, wonder-filled recognition of the divine in the world and in exceptional human beings.

• Universal history is at bottom the biography of great men: they are the lightning that kindles the dry fuel of their age, not mere products of their time, because no epoch can summon a great man into existence if Providence has not sent him.
  • Critics who say ’the Time called him forth’ mistake the matter—many times have called loudly for a great man and gone to ruin because he did not come.
  • The great man is ’the living light-fountain’ whose native insight illuminates the darkness of the world, not a kindled lamp but a natural luminary.
• A man’s religion—meaning what he practically and sincerely believes about his vital relations to the universe—is the chief fact about him, determining all else, and is distinct from mere professed creeds or church formulas.
  • Whether a people’s religion was Heathenism, Christianism, or Scepticism tells us the soul of their history, because ’the thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did.'
  • The unseen and spiritual in men determined the outward and actual; religion was the great fact.
• Paganism was not quackery or mere allegory but a sincere, earnest recognition of the divine in Nature by minds that stood face-to-face with the world before scientific nomenclature had veiled it; the early thinker’s wonder was genuine worship.
  • Quackery was never the originating principle of any religion—it was only its disease and the precursor of its death; even Grand Lamaism contains a kernel of truth in its belief that a greatest man exists and ought to be obeyed.
  • The primitive Pagan, like Plato’s cave-dweller brought suddenly into sunlight, saw the world naked and flashing—‘all was Godlike or God’—because he had no hearsays to wrap around reality.
• The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great Men.
• Hero-worship is the deepest root of all Paganism and of all religion: the admiration of a great man without limit, which Carlyle identifies as the germ of Christianity itself and the indestructible foundation of human society, expressed in every social hierarchy from kings to dukes.
  • Society is founded on Hero-worship; ‘Duke’ means Dux (Leader), ‘King’ means Kan-ning (able man)—all social dignities are representations of a graduated reverence for heroes, like bank-notes representing gold.
  • Even in the age of Voltaire, the French—least prone to admiration—burst into hero-worship around the old man of Ferney, proving the impulse indestructible.
• Odin was most likely a real historical man—a great Teacher and Captain whose people, having no scale to measure their admiration, elevated him to godhood through the magnifying power of tradition and time, the Norse mythology being in some sense the enormous shadow of his likeness.
  • Grimm’s etymological argument that ‘Wuotan’ means divine Movement and therefore no man ever bore the name proves nothing—an adjective can derive from a proper name, as ‘Lope’ came to mean ‘godlike’ in Spain from the poet Lope de Vega.
  • Snorro Sturleson’s Prose Edda records Odin as a historical prince who led his people out of Asia and was later worshipped as chief god; in thirty years without books any great man would grow mythic, and in three thousand years—!
• The Norse mythology embodies a genuinely sincere, manlike thought—its creation myth, the tree Igdrasil, the Ragnarok, and Thor legends reveal a rude but heartfelt recognition of Nature’s divinity and the phoenix-like law of destruction and rebirth that governs all things.
  • The tree Igdrasil—Ash-tree of Existence with roots in Hela and boughs spreading over all the universe—is Carlyle’s preferred symbol of human interconnection: ’the infinite conjugation of the verb To do.’
  • The Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, encodes the insight that ‘all death is but a phoenix fire-death, and new-birth into the Greater and the Better’—a fundamental law of Being for a creature made of Time.
  • The core practical belief of the Norse faith was the duty of being brave: ‘Valor is still value. The first duty for a man is still that of subduing Fear.’
• The Norse system, preserved in Iceland’s Eddas, represents the Teutonic ancestors’ best attempt to articulate the divine mystery of existence, and traces of it survive in English language, place names, and even in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which derives from the Norse myth of Amleth.
  • Wednesday is still Odin’s Day; Wednesbury, Wansborough, Wanstead, Wandsworth are leaves from that same root still growing in England.
  • Hamlet/Amleth is a Norse mythic personage; old Saxo Grammaticus made it Danish history, and Shakespeare made it what we see—‘a twig of the world-tree that has grown.’

Lecture II. The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam.

Carlyle defends Mahomet as a genuine, sincere Prophet—not a scheming impostor—arguing that Islam’s core message of submission to the one divine reality (‘Allah akbar’) is a true insight into the universe’s nature, and that any religion believed and lived by 180 million people over twelve centuries cannot be founded on falsehood.

• The Hero as Prophet marks the second phase of hero-worship: the great man is no longer taken for a god but for one god-inspired, and the manner in which an age receives its great men—whether as gods, prophets, or mere entertainers—is the clearest window into that age’s spiritual condition.
  • The reception of Burns as an ‘idle artificial firework’ to amuse idleness and then discard is, on reflection, a more troubling spectacle than the Norse worship of Odin as a god.
  • The first and last distinction of the Hero—across all forms, Odin, Luther, Johnson, Burns—is sincerity: he cannot help being sincere because the great Fact of Existence glares in upon him undeniably.
• Mahomet was not an impostor but a sincere, deep-hearted man of the Arabian desert whose solitary nature—no books, no schooling—forced him into direct communion with reality and with God, making his message a genuine voice from the heart of Nature.
  • He was called ‘Al Amin, The Faithful’ by his companions from youth; lived quietly with Kadijah for fifteen years without ambition; only at forty, after long retirement in Mount Hara, did revelation come.
  • That he lived in ’entirely unexceptionable, quiet and commonplace’ domesticity until past fifty goes entirely against the impostor theory—no charlatan invents celestial documents in his fifties when the heat of ambition is spent.
• Islam’s essential message—‘Allah akbar, God is great; Islam, we must submit to God’—is not a novel doctrine but the perennial truth that man’s strength lies in conforming to the deep law of the universe, which Carlyle identifies as ’the only true morality known’ and as the soul of Christianity as well.
  • “‘If this be Islam,’ says Goethe, ‘do we not all live in Islam?’” —Goethe
  • Islam means Denial of Self, Annihilation of Self—’the highest Wisdom that Heaven has revealed to our Earth’—and is properly a confused form of Christianity, having emerged from the same spiritual root.
• A false man found a religion? Why, a false man cannot build a brick house! If he do not know and follow truly the properties of mortar, burnt clay and what else he works in, it is no house that he makes, but a rubbish-heap.
• The Koran is not a pious fraud but the ‘confused ferment of a great rude human soul’—genuine, breathless, written in battle-haste—and its primary merit is sincerity: it is a bona-fide book that comes from the heart and therefore reaches other hearts.
  • Though the Koran reads to Europeans as ‘a wearisome confused jumble,’ this is partly because it was published without discoverable order from fragments written on shoulder-blades of mutton; read in historical sequence it would be far less chaotic.
  • Through all the crude masses of tradition and repetition, ‘a vein of true direct insight, of what we might almost call poetry, is found straggling’—the eye that flashes direct into the heart of things.
• The spread of Islam by the sword does not disprove its truth, because every new opinion starts as a minority of one and must struggle for existence by whatever means it has; Nature herself is umpire in the great duel of ideas, and only what is deepest-rooted in her will conquer in the long run.
  • Christianity too ‘did not always disdain the sword when once it had got one’—Charlemagne’s conversion of the Saxons was not by preaching.
  • Mahomet’s creed was ‘a bastard kind of Christianity, but a living kind; with a heart-life in it’—it consumed the vain jangling Syrian sects because it was a Reality direct from the heart of Nature, and they were mere dead fuel.
• Mahomet’s sensual Paradise and Hell, though crude in form, embody the everlasting truth of the infinite nature of Duty—that man’s moral actions are of infinite moment and never die—which Carlyle contrasts favorably with Benthamite utilitarianism’s reduction of ethics to profit-and-loss calculation.
  • To Mahomet the Right is not ‘better’ than Wrong as a matter of preference—’the one is to the other as life is to death, as Heaven is to Hell. The one must in nowise be done, the other in nowise left undone. You shall not measure them; they are incommensurable.’
  • Islam was not an easy religion—rigorous fasts, five daily prayers, abstinence from wine—and succeeded not by flattering appetites but by awakening the heroic that slumbers in every heart.
• Arabia’s transformation from an obscure shepherd people to a world civilization spanning from Granada to Delhi within one century is the supreme historical demonstration that belief is great and life-giving—the great man as lightning that ignites the waiting fuel of his nation.
  • ‘A spark had fallen, one spark, on a world of what seemed black unnoticeable sand; but lo, the sand proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to Grenada!’
  • No Christians since the early ages, except perhaps the English Puritans, have stood by their faith as the Moslem do—‘believing it wholly, fronting Time with it, and Eternity with it.’

Lecture III. The Hero as Poet. Dante: Shakspeare.

Carlyle argues that the Poet, unlike the Divinity or Prophet, belongs to all ages because poetic genius—the capacity to see into the divine mystery of the universe and render it in musical thought—is the universal form of heroism, exemplified most perfectly in Dante (who gave the Middle Ages’ faith its eternal form) and Shakespeare (who gave its practice its immortal record).

• The Prophet and Poet are fundamentally the same—both Vates who have penetrated into the open secret of the universe—differing only in that the Prophet seizes the divine mystery on its moral side (Good and Evil, Duty) while the Poet seizes it on the aesthetic side (Beauty), and these provinces cannot ultimately be disjoined.
  • Goethe’s saying that ’the Beautiful is higher than the Good; the Beautiful includes in it the Good’ points in the same direction—the true beautiful and the true good are inseparable for the genuine Vates.
  • Poetry is ‘musical Thought’—a mind that has penetrated to the inmost heart of a thing detects its melody; ‘all inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song.’
• Dante’s Divine Comedy is the sincerest of all poems because it came from the deepest heart of a man whose earthly existence—exile, poverty, lifelong battle against Florence—forced his soul home into the Eternal world, which he experienced not as allegory but as solid fact.
  • The people of Verona, seeing Dante on the streets, said ‘Eccovi l’uom ch’e stato all’ Inferno—See, there is the man that was in Hell!’ He had been in Hell enough—in long severe sorrow and struggle.
  • Florence sentenced him to be burnt alive wherever caught; Dante answered the city’s later offer to return on condition of apology: ‘If I cannot return without calling myself guilty, I will never return, nunquam revertar.’
• Dante’s genius is characterized above all by intensity—he is world-deep rather than world-wide, piercing through every object into the heart of Being with a fiery precision that Carlyle compares to Tacitus in brevity, but which in Dante is natural and spontaneous rather than labored.
  • The Inferno’s painting is not graphic only but morally vast: Francesca and her lover are ‘woven as out of rainbows on a ground of eternal black’—infinite pity coexisting with infinite rigor of law, because ‘a man who does not know rigor cannot pity either.’
  • The Purgatorio is ‘perhaps even more excellent’ than the Inferno—the tremolar dell’ onde, the trembling of ocean waves under the first gleam of morning, is the type of hope dawning after despair, the grand Christian act of Repentance made visible.
• As Dante, the Italian man, was sent into our world to embody musically the Religion of the Middle Ages, the Religion of our Modern Europe, its Inner Life; so Shakspeare, we may say, embodies for us the Outer Life of our Europe as developed then.
• The Divine Comedy is the spokesman of ten silent centuries—Dante did not invent but rather finished and articulated the Christianity all good men of the Middle Ages had lived by—and its depth guarantees longevity beyond any political structure because what issues from the inmost soul of a man speaks forever to all true souls.
  • Napoleon in Saint Helena was ‘charmed with the genial veracity of old Homer’—the oldest Hebrew Prophet speaks to all men’s hearts across millennia because ‘he speaks from the heart of man.’
  • Dante contrasted with Mahomet: Mahomet spoke ’to great masses of men in the coarse dialect adapted to such,’ while Dante ‘burns as a pure star’ for the noble and great in all ages—‘one calculates, Dante may long survive Mahomet.’
• Shakespeare, as the most gifted intellect in recorded human literature, embodies the outer practical life of European chivalry and human character with a calm creative perspicacity—a perfectly level mirror—that reveals not surfaces but the inmost heart and generic secret of everything he looks at.
  • “Goethe’s remark captures it: ‘His characters are like watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible.’” —Goethe
  • Shakespeare’s intellect is ‘unconscious’—his plays are products of Nature as deep as Nature herself; ’the latest generations of men will find new meanings in Shakspeare, new elucidations of their own human being.’
• Shakespeare is more truly great than Mahomet precisely because he was unconscious of a heavenly mission—his greatness springs from the inarticulate deeps of Nature rather than from calculated self-promotion—and he thus serves as a permanent ‘King’ of all English-speaking peoples more durably than any political empire.
  • Carlyle asks whether England would give up its Indian Empire or its Shakespeare: ‘Indian Empire will go, at any rate, some day; but this Shakspeare does not go, he lasts forever with us; we cannot give up our Shakspeare!’
  • Italy produces its Dante and thereby becomes one nation in spirit despite political dismemberment; the Czar of Russia with all his bayonets and Cossacks is ‘a great dumb monster’ because he has had no voice of genius—‘His cannons and Cossacks will all have rusted into nonentity, while that Dante’s voice is still audible.’

Lecture IV. The Hero as Priest. Luther; Reformation: Knox; Puritanism.

Carlyle presents Luther and Knox as heroic idol-breakers and prophets whose Reformation was not destructive but a necessary return to reality against accumulated falsehood; Luther’s stand at Worms is the greatest moment in modern history, and Knox’s Puritanism constitutes the only phasis of Protestantism that achieved genuine faith, producing fruits—from Scotland’s national character to the Glorious Revolution to American civilization—that endure to the present day.

• All idolatry—the worship of dead forms emptied of sincere belief—becomes condemnable not when the idol is crude but when the worshipper’s heart is no longer honestly filled by it; blamable idolatry is Cant, which Carlyle calls ’the beginning of all immorality’ because it paralyzes the moral soul.
  • “‘You do not believe,’ said Coleridge; ‘you only believe that you believe.’ This is the final scene in all kinds of worship and the sure symptom that death is nigh.” —Coleridge
  • The Prophet’s inextinguishable aversion to idolatry is not to honest primitive worship of fetishes but to the insincere clinging to symbols men have ceased to truly believe—‘a human soul seen clinging spasmodically to an Ark of the Covenant which it half feels to have become a Phantasm.’
• Luther was above all a breaker of idols—returning men from the show of things to reality—whose poverty and hardship from birth kept him in contact with actual fact rather than with semblance, making him fit to bring a world back to truth after it had dwelt too long with forms.
  • Luther’s pivotal conversion came when, studying law at Erfurt, his friend Alexis was struck dead by lightning at his side: ‘What is this Life of ours?—gone in a moment, burnt up like a scroll, into the blank Eternity!’ He became an Augustinian monk at Erfurt.
  • He found an old Latin Bible in the Erfurt Library—‘He had never seen the Book before’—which taught him that a man was saved not by singing masses but by the infinite grace of God; on this rock he stood for life.
• Luther’s nailing of the Ninety-Five Theses against Tetzel’s indulgences on October 31, 1517 was not a calculated rebellion but a man faithfully discharging his duty at his own post—the beginning that would become the Reformation—and the Pope’s response of condemning him to fire made Luther’s revolt both just and inevitable.
  • When the Pope condemned Luther’s writings to be burnt and ordered him bound to Rome, Luther burned the Pope’s fire-decree at the Elster-Gate of Wittenberg on December 10, 1520: ‘It was the shout of the awakening of nations.’
  • Tetzel’s pardons of sin were to Luther what the wooden idols of the Koreish were to Mahomet—‘a bit of rag-paper with ink’—and the Reformer’s function in both cases was identical: ‘Come back to reality.’
• The Diet of Worms, Luther’s appearance there on the 17th of April, 1521, may be considered as the greatest scene in Modern European History; the point, indeed, from which the whole subsequent history of civilization takes its rise.
• Luther’s appearance before the Diet of Worms in April 1521—one poor German monk standing against all the pomp and power of Europe, saying ‘Here stand I; I can do no other’—is the greatest scene in modern history because in it lay the germ of all subsequent European civilization: English Puritanism, American democracy, the French Revolution.
  • His speech was distinguished by ‘its respectful, wise and honest tone; submissive to whatsoever could lawfully claim submission, not submissive to any more than that.’
  • “‘Here stand I; I can do no other: God assist me!’” —Martin Luther
• Protestantism did not abolish hero-worship but rather called for a whole world of heroes by insisting on sincerity: ‘private judgment’ faithfully exercised leads not to isolation but to unity among sincere men, whereas insincere men clinging to dead formulas are the true anarchists.
  • Luther’s revolt was against false sovereigns, not sovereignty itself—it was the ‘painful but indispensable first preparative for true sovereigns getting place among us.’
  • The merit of originality is not novelty but sincerity: ‘A man can believe, and make his own, in the most genuine way, what he has received from another.’ Whole ‘ages of Faith’ are original because all men in them are sincere.
• Knox, the Scottish Reformer, was an instance of how sincerity itself becomes heroic: a man of good but not transcendent intellect who had no superior in heartfelt adherence to truth, his inflexibility before Queen Mary and his establishment of Presbyterianism constituted a ‘resurrection from death’ for Scotland.
  • Knox was called to preach suddenly by public acclamation in St. Andrews Castle when he was already forty years old and had sought no prominence; he ‘burst into a flood of tears, and ran out’—the genuine man overwhelmed by the magnitude of what was asked.
  • “‘He lies there,’ said the Earl of Morton at Knox’s grave, ‘who never feared the face of man.’” —Earl of Morton
  • The fruits of Knox’s Reformation include Scotch Literature and Thought—‘James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns: I find Knox and the Reformation acting in the heart’s core of every one of these.’
• Puritanism—the most historically consequential phase of Protestantism—was a genuine faith of the heart that produced New England, the Glorious Revolution, and modern constitutional liberty; the sailing of the Mayflower from Delft Haven is one of Nature’s own epic poems, the true beginning of America.
  • The Puritans’ minister joined them at the beach; ‘all joined in solemn prayer, That God would have pity on His poor children, and go with them into that waste wilderness, for He also had made that, He was there also as well as here.’
  • Puritanism ‘has firearms, war-navies; it has cunning in its ten fingers, strength in its right arm; it can steer ships, fell forests, remove mountains;—it is one of the strongest things under this sun at present!’

Lecture V. The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns.

Carlyle argues that the Man of Letters is the supreme modern form of heroism—replacing priest, prophet, and king as society’s spiritual teacher through the miracle of print—but that the eighteenth-century sceptical age made genuine heroism nearly impossible, so Johnson, Rousseau, and Burns stand as fallen heroes whose tombs we must honor rather than as victorious ones, their tragedy born of the spiritual paralysis of a godless mechanistic century.

• Writing and printing constitute the most miraculous human invention—Books are the soul of the whole Past Time, the true Church and Parliament of modern civilization—because through them one man can preach to all men in all times, superseding pulpit, senate, and university alike.
  • Burke’s ‘Fourth Estate’ in the Reporters’ Gallery is literally true: ‘Literature is our Parliament too. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy.’
  • What built St. Paul’s Cathedral? ‘Look at the heart of the matter, it was that divine Hebrew BOOK,—the word partly of the man Moses, an outlaw tending his Midianitish herds, four thousand years ago, in the wildernesses of Sinai!’
• The eighteenth century was a sceptical, spiritually paralyzed age—its living Tree Igdrasil reduced to the clanking of a World-Machine—that made genuine heroism nearly impossible, because Scepticism means not merely intellectual doubt but moral paralysis: the inability to believe in any reality beyond mechanism and self-interest.
  • Benthamism is ’eyeless Heroism’—a laying-down of cant, a fearless commitment to what it finds true—but it has fatally ‘discerned nothing but Mechanism in the Universe’ and thereby ‘missed the secret of the Universe altogether.’
  • In this world without God, genuine acting ceases: ‘Heroes have gone out; Quacks have come in.’ Even Chatham ’lives the strangest mimetic life, half-hero, half-quack’—forgets he is acting the sick man and oratorically swings the arm he had in a sling.
• Samuel Johnson is, by nature, one of England’s great souls—a man of rugged sincerity and deep loyalty who found the old Formulas credible for himself and lived heroically under them—but the disorganized literary life of his age kept the largest soul in England laboring for ‘fourpence-halfpenny a day.’
  • The story of Johnson pitching the new shoes out of his window at Oxford captures the man: ‘Wet feet, mud, frost, hunger or what you will; but not beggary: we cannot stand beggary! Rude stubborn self-help here; a whole world of squalor yet of nobleness and manfulness withal.’
  • Johnson’s gospel was double: ‘In a world where much is to be done, and little is to be known, do not sink into boundless Doubt’—and ‘Clear your mind of Cant!’ These two joined constitute ’the greatest Gospel perhaps that was possible at that time.’
• The writer of a Book, is not he a Preacher preaching not to this parish or that, on this day or that, but to all men in all times and places?
• Rousseau’s fatal flaw was Egoism—a morbid hunger for the praises of men—which, combined with genuine intensity and a real spark of heavenly fire that drove him to proclaim life as a Truth rather than a Scepticism, made him a Prophet who nearly destroyed what he meant to save: his semi-delirious speculations directly inspired the French Revolution.
  • Banished to Paris garrets, ‘fretted, exasperated till the heart of him went mad, he had grown to feel deeply that the world was not his friend’—yet he could not be hindered from ‘setting the world on fire’: the French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau.
  • Rousseau’s literary style is ‘rose-pink, artificial bedizenment’—not white sunlight but something operatic—lacking the genuine poetic quality of Shakespeare, Goethe, or Walter Scott.
• Robert Burns was the most gifted British soul of his century—a giant Original Man who reached down to the perennial deeps in the shape of an Ayrshire peasant—whose tragedy lay in the false, parasitic reception he received from a ‘Lion-hunting’ society that admired him to death without ever giving him the conditions in which to work.
  • Burns’s gifts in conversation outran his poetry: waiters and ostlers would get out of bed to hear him speak, and ‘witty Duchesses’ said his speech ’led them off their feet’—his poetry was only ‘a poor fragment of him.’
  • ‘Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity’—Burns’s visit to Edinburgh showed him tranquil, unastonished, neither abashed nor inflated; yet the Lion-hunters who came to see him ‘rendered it impossible for him to live.’
• The disorganized condition of the literary class—in which the Man of Letters wanders like an unrecognized Ishmaelite with no institutional support, subject to blind Chance—is the heart of all social anomalies, yet the only true remedy is not money but the world’s learning to recognize sincerity and genuine greatness.
  • “‘Literature will take care of itself,’ answered Mr. Pitt, when applied to for some help for Burns. ‘Yes,’ adds Mr. Southey, ‘it will take care of itself; and of you too, if you do not look to it!’” —Robert Southey
  • China’s attempt to make Men of Letters its Governors—searching for talented youths and promoting them through schools to government positions—is ’the most interesting fact I hear about the Chinese,’ and ‘of all governments the one most promising to one’s scientific curiosity.’

Lecture VI. The Hero as King. Cromwell, Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism.

Carlyle argues that the Hero as King—the Able Man found and invested with power—is the practical summary of all heroism, and that all revolutions from the Reformation through the French Revolution are the world’s painful return to this truth; Cromwell is vindicated as a genuine sincere hero unjustly maligned by a sceptical century, while Napoleon is shown as a greater but ultimately flawed hero who began in true faith but apostatized into vanity and theatrical sham.

• The King—literally the Konning or Able Man—is the practical summary of all heroism, and all political history is at bottom the story of finding or failing to find such a man; revolutions occur when incapable simulacra are placed in power, because Nature’s laws do not forget to act even when men do.
  • The ‘Divine Right of Kings’ means something true beneath its rubbish: ‘in Kings, and in all human Authorities, there is verily either a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong; one or the other of these two!’
  • The French Revolution, the English Puritanism, and the Reformation are three acts of the same drama—the world’s explosive return from semblance to fact, which Carlyle calls ‘a Truth clad in hell-fire, since they would not but have it so.’
• The Puritan struggle was a war of Belief against Unbelief—sincere men fighting the hollow shows of a decayed Catholicism—and Cromwell’s career can only be understood by recognizing that he was not a scheming hypocrite but an earnest man whose every step was unforeseen, shaped by Providence rather than a pre-written dramatic program.
  • The ‘vulpine intellect’ that detects Cromwell as a hypocrite commits the cardinal error of ‘substituting the goal of his career for the course and starting-point of it’—imagining he had planned his Protectorship while ploughing the marsh lands of Cambridgeshire.
  • Not one proved falsehood has been brought home to Cromwell despite mountains of calumny: ‘A prince of liars, and no lie spoken by him. Not one that I could yet get sight of.’
• Cromwell’s early life—melancholic, hypochondriac, quietly farming at St. Ives and Ely, reading his Bible and holding daily prayers—reveals not a schemer but a man of deep sincere piety whose sole aim was to walk well through this world and serve God; it was only when the Gospel Cause was directly threatened that he was compelled into public life.
  • His Ironsides were the embodiment of his insight: ‘men fearing God; and without any other fear. No more conclusively genuine set of fighters ever trod the soil of England.’
  • His prayers before great enterprises—officers and he alternating in tears and intercession until ‘some door of hope disclosed itself’—were not hypocrisy but the most genuine method of decision available: ‘devout prostration of the earnest struggling soul before the Highest, the Giver of all Light.’
• Find in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit.
• Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump Parliament and acceptance of the Protectorship was not a seizure of power for personal ambition but the only alternative to anarchy: one man bearing the unbearable burden of holding England together when no constitutional formula could produce any workable result.
  • When the Rump Parliament attempted to pass a Reform Bill in its splenetic despair—throwing the hard-won Cause back to a numerical vote where Royalists might outnumber Puritans—Cromwell walked in and ordered them to begone: ‘The Reality had swept the Formulas away before it. John Milton, who looked on it all near at hand, could applaud him.’
  • To his Parliaments he said: ‘You have had such an opportunity as no Parliament in England ever had’—to make Christ’s Law the Law of the land—and squandered it on constitutional cavilling: ‘God be judge between you and me!’
• Great men are not ambitious in the petty sense—the hunger for notice comes from emptiness, not greatness—and Cromwell’s ‘ambition’ was of the noble kind: an irrepressible necessity to unfold what Nature had put in him and to realize the Theocracy (government of God’s truth) as the practical culminating point of Protestantism.
  • Cromwell had lived till his hair was gray in obscurity, content; only when it became possible that the Law of Christ’s Gospel could establish itself in the world did the whole soul of the man blaze into action: ‘Was it not true, God’s truth? And if true, was it not then the very thing to do?’
  • His last words were broken prayers to God to judge him and his Cause, since man could not, ‘in justice yet in pity’—the words of a Christian heroic man, not a hypocrite.
• Napoleon was a genuine hero of the second rank—beginning with a true democratic faith (’la carrière ouverte aux talents’) and a real instinct for fact—but he apostatized when success tempted him into theatrical sham: connecting himself with Austrian dynasties, papal coronations, and ‘his dynasty,’ thereby losing the reality that had made him strong.
  • “Napoleon’s instinct for reality persisted even amid quackery: looking up at the stars when his savants argued there was no God, he answered, ‘Very ingenious, Messieurs: but who made all that?’” —Napoleon
  • ‘False as a bulletin’ became a proverb in Napoleon’s time—and lying destroyed him, because ‘a man always is to be himself the judge how much of his mind he will show to other men,’ but no man has liberty to tell lies, and the world will not believe the liar next time when truth is of the last importance.
• Hero-worship—the faculty and necessity of recognizing and reverencing genuine greatness—is the indestructible polestar through all the revolutionary confusion of modern times, and the world’s salvation depends not on ballot-boxes or constitutions but on learning to know a true King when he appears.
  • ‘The sincere alone can recognize sincerity. Not a Hero only is needed, but a world fit for him; a world not of Valets’—for the Valet-World is the natural property of the Quack, and no constitutional machinery can remedy this.
  • ‘Light; or, failing that, lightning: the world can take its choice’—whether it welcomes the Hero as blessed sunshine or forces him to come as destructive storm depends entirely on whether it has learned to recognize truth.