Given such a condition of things, and we shall find religion degenerating into formalism and the worship of the dead letter, and, side by side with this, the impatient rejection of all religion, and the spread of a crude and debasing materialism.

Religious symbols, then, must be renewed.

But their renewal can come only from within.
Form, to have any real value, must grow out of life and be fed by it.
The revolutionary quality in the philosophy of "Sartor Resartus" cannot, of course, be overlooked.

Everything that man has woven for himself must in time become merely "old clothes"; the work of his thought, like that of his hands, is perishable; his very highest symbols have no permanence or finality.

Carlyle cuts down to the essential reality beneath all shows and forms and emblems: witness his amazing vision of a naked House of Lords.