Sartor Resartus

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: " This," says our Professor, " was the Center Of Indifference I had now reached; through which whoso travels from the Negative Pole to the Positive must necessarily pass." CHAPTER IX. THE EVERLASTING YEA. " Temptations in the wilderness ! " exclaims Teufelsdrockh: " Have we not all to be tried with such ? Not so easily can the old Adam, lodged in us by birth, be dispossessed. Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force: thus have we a warfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard-fought battle. For the God-given mandate, Work thou in Welldoing, lies mysteriously written, in Promethean Prophetic Characters, in our hearts; and leaves us no rest, night or day, till it be deciphered and obeyed; till it burn forth, in our conduct, a visible, acted Gospel of Freedom. And as the clay-given mandate, Eat thou and be filled, at the same time persuasively proclaims itself through every nerve, must not there be a confusion, a contest, before the better Influence can become the upper? " To me nothing seems more natural than that the Son of Man, when such God-given mandate first prophetically stirs within him, and the Clay must now be vanquished or vanquish, should be carried of the spirit into grim Solitudes, andthere fronting the Tempter do grimmest battle with him; defiantly setting him at naught, till he yield and fly. Name it as we choose: with or without visible Devil, whether in the natural Desert of rocks and sands, or in the populous moral Desert of selfishness and baseness, to such Temptation are we all called. Unhappy if we are not! Unhappy if we are but Half- men, in whom that divine handwriting has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in true sun- splendor; but quivers dubiously amid me...