On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History | Page 5

such
things; it was not the health and life of such things, but their disease,
the sure precursor of their being about to die! Let us never forget this. It
seems to me a most mournful hypothesis, that of quackery giving birth
to any faith even in savage men. Quackery gives birth to nothing; gives
death to all things. We shall not see into the true heart of anything, if
we look merely at the quackeries of it; if we do not reject the
quackeries altogether; as mere diseases, corruptions, with which our
and all men's sole duty is to have done with them, to sweep them out of
our thoughts as out of our practice. Man everywhere is the born enemy
of lies. I find Grand Lamaism itself to have a kind of truth in it. Read
the candid, clear-sighted, rather sceptical Mr. Turner's Account of his
Embassy to that country, and see. They have their belief, these poor
Thibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of
Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope!
At bottom still better, belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is
discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an
obedience which knows no bounds! This is the truth of Grand Lamaism;
the "discoverability" is the only error here. The Thibet priests have
methods of their own of discovering what Man is Greatest, fit to be
supreme over them. Bad methods: but are they so much worse than our
methods,--of understanding him to be always the eldest-born of a
certain genealogy? Alas, it is a difficult thing to find good methods
for!--We shall begin to have a chance of understanding Paganism,

when we first admit that to its followers it was, at one time, earnestly
true. Let us consider it very certain that men did believe in Paganism;
men with open eyes, sound senses, men made altogether like ourselves;
that we, had we been there, should have believed in it. Ask now, What
Paganism could have been?
Another theory, somewhat more respectable, attributes such things to
Allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists; a
shadowing forth, in allegorical fable, in personification and visual form,
of what such poetic minds had known and felt of this Universe. Which
agrees, add they, with a primary law of human nature, still everywhere
observably at work, though in less important things, That what a man
feels intensely, he struggles to speak out of him, to see represented
before him in visual shape, and as if with a kind of life and historical
reality in it. Now doubtless there is such a law, and it is one of the
deepest in human nature; neither need we doubt that it did operate
fundamentally in this business. The hypothesis which ascribes
Paganism wholly or mostly to this agency, I call a little more
respectable; but I cannot yet call it the true hypothesis. Think, would
we believe, and take with us as our life-guidance, an allegory, a poetic
sport? Not sport but earnest is what we should require. It is a most
earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for a man.
Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality, altogether a
serious matter to be alive!
I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists are on the way
towards truth in this matter, they have not reached it either. Pagan
Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol of what men felt and knew
about the Universe; and all Religions are symbols of that, altering
always as that alters: but it seems to me a radical perversion, and even
inversion, of the business, to put that forward as the origin and moving
cause, when it was rather the result and termination. To get beautiful
allegories, a perfect poetic symbol, was not the want of men; but to
know what they were to believe about this Universe, what course they
were to steer in it; what, in this mysterious Life of theirs, they had to
hope and to fear, to do and to forbear doing. The Pilgrim's Progress is
an Allegory, and a beautiful, just and serious one: but consider whether

Bunyan's Allegory could have preceded the Faith it symbolizes! The
Faith had to be already there, standing believed by everybody;--of
which the Allegory could then become a shadow; and, with all its
seriousness, we may say a sportful shadow, a mere play of the Fancy,
in comparison with that awful Fact and scientific certainty which it
poetically strives to emblem. The Allegory is the product of the
certainty, not the producer of it; not in Bunyan's nor in any other case.
For Paganism, therefore, we have