Thus any enormous and unaltered human
settlement--as the Norman Conquest or the secession of America--we must
suppose to be the will of God. It lent itself to picturesque treatment;
and Carlyle and the Carlyleans were above all things picturesque. It
gave them at first a rhetorical advantage over the Catholic and other
older schools. They could boast that their Creator was still creating;
that he was in Man and Nature, and was not hedged round in a Paradise or
imprisoned in a pyx. They could say their God had not grown too old for
war: that He was present at Gettysburg and Gravelotte as much as at
Gibeon and Gilboa. I do not mean that they literally said these
particular things: they are what I should have said had I been bribed to
defend their position. But they said things to the same effect: that
what manages finally to happen, happens for a higher purpose. Carlyle
said the French Revolution was a thing settled in the eternal councils
to be; and therefore (and not because it was right) attacking it was
"fighting against God." And Kingsley even carried the principle so far
as to tell a lady she should remain in the Church of England mainly
because God had put her there.
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