the ministry. His mother
could look forward to the exquisite pleasure of seeing "her own bairn
wag his head in a pulpit!" But at this point Carlyle's individuality
first asserted itself. He could not step into any of the ordinary
grooves. His college teachers appeared to him to offer "sawdust"
instead of manna from heaven. The sacred formulae of their ancestral
creed had lost their savor. Words once expressive of the strongest
faith were either used to utter the bigotry of narrow pedants, or were
adopted only to be explained away into insipid commonplace. Carlyle
shared the intellectual movement of his time too much to profess any
reverence for what he called the "Hebrew old-clothes." Philosophers
and critics had torn them to rags. His quarrel however was with the
accidental embodiment, not with the spirit of the old creeds. The old
morality was ingrained in his very nature; nor was he shocked, like
some of his fellows, by the sternness of the Calvinistic views of the
universe and life. The whole problem was with him precisely to save
this living spirit. The skeptics, he thought, were, in the German
phrase, "emptying out the baby with the bath." They were at war with
the spirit as well as with the letter; trying to construct a Godless
universe; to substitute a dead mechanism for the living organism; and
therefore to kill down at the root every noble aspiration which could
stimulate the conscience, or strengthen a man to bear the spectacle of
the wrongs and sufferings of mankind.

[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE.]

The crisis of this struggle happened in 1821. After giving up the
ministry, Carlyle had tried "schoolmastering" and found himself to
be least fitted of mankind for a function which demands patience
with stupidity. He had just glanced at the legal profession only to be
disgusted with its chicaneries. Hack authorship was his only chance.
The dyspeptic disorder which tormented him through life was tormenting
him. "A rat was gnawing at the pit of his stomach." Then he was
embittered by the general distress of his own class. Men out of work
were threatening riots and the yeomanry being called out to suppress
them. Carlyle was asked by a friend why he too did not come out with a
musket. "Hm! yes," he replied, "but I haven't quite settled on which
side." It was while thus distracted, that after three weeks of
sleeplessness he experienced what he called his "conversion." The
universe had seemed to him "void of life, o