18 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



moral of Russia in 1917, nor was he hysterically unjust to the last of 

 the Capets as so many have been to the last of the Romanoffs. On 

 the contrary, Carlyle has expressly said in the chapter on the execution 

 that here was another case of the children suffering for their fathers' 

 sins, that the outrageous line of French monarchs transmitted to one 

 of the least guilty a long inherited curse : 



It is ever so; and thou shouldst know it, O haughty tyrannous 

 man; injustice breeds injustice; curses and falsehoods do verily 

 return "always home," wide as they may wander. Innocent Louis 

 bears the sins of many generations; he too experiences that man's 

 tribunal is not in this Earth; that if he had no Higher one it were 

 not well with him. 



Equally misleading is Professor Sherman's account of the doctrine 

 taught in Heroes. It is difficult to understand how anyone who had 

 read the lecture on Mohammed could represent Carlyle as applying to 

 Islam no other test than that of winning battles, or could regard the 

 paragraph on Charlemagne's mission to the Saxons as an approval of 

 Shrecklichkeit. Even a hurried glance at the text will show that the 

 point made is utterly different. Carlyle is exposing the old delusion 

 that Mohammed's success is completely explained by his use of the 

 sword for propagandism. He very pertinently remarks that the 

 prophet began in a minority of one, that he had first to get his sword, 

 and that he got this by convincing the Arabs of his noble vocation. 

 In fact the whole argument of this striking lecture is that Islam made 

 its way because, morally gross in many details as Carlyle admits it to 

 be, the new faith was an immense improvement on that which it dis- 

 placed. The Christian religion, he reminds us, has the far finer boast 

 of diffusing itself by preaching; yet even the record of Christianity 

 is not unsullied, for Charlemagne and others had recourse to the carnal 

 weapon. Hence one should not indulge in wholesale condemnation 

 of any faith upon this ground alone. And in general one may be sure 

 that if a creed has no intrinsic value even the sword will not in the end 

 avail for it. "Nature is umpire," and only the true can last. How 

 remote this is from Professor Sherman's version! I have spent so 

 much time upon this critic, because he is so similar in vituperative 

 rashness to others that are seeking to accelerate the decline of Carlyle's 

 fame. 



Mr. Courtney is a much more formidable antagonist, just because 

 he is so much more restrained, and because he has lighted upon some 

 unquestionable blemishes, the same to which attention had been drawn 

 fifty years earlier by Mill and by Mr. Frederic Harrison and by many 

 others. One must add, however, that his new point, the so-called 



