er with profound respect and admiration; towards his mother his
heart goes forth with a devotion which became stronger as the years
rolled on. Carlyle's love of his mother was as beautiful as it was
sacred. Long after Carlyle had parted with the creed of his childhood,
his heart tremulously responded to the old symbols. His system of
thought, indeed, might well be defined as Calvinism minus Christianity.
Had Carlyle not come into contact with German thought, he would probably
have jogged along the path of literature in more or less conventional
fashion. In fact, nothing is more remarkable than the comparatively
commonplace nature of Carlyle's early contributions to literature.
Germany touched the deepest chords of his nature. With German ideas and
emotions his mind was saturated, and _Sartor Resartus_ was the outcome.
To that book students must go for a glance into Carlyle's mind while he
was wrestling with the great mysteries of Existence. In June 1821, as Mr
Froude tells us, took place what may be called Carlyle's conversion--his
triumph over his doubts, and the beginning of a new life. To understand
this phase of Carlyle's life, we must pause for a little to consider
German literature, whence Carlyle derived spiritual relief and
consolation.

What, then, was the nature of the message of peace which Germany,
through Kant, Fichte, and Goethe, brought to the storm-tossed soul of
Carlyle? When Carlyle began to think seriously, two antagonistic
conceptions of life, the orthodox and the rationalist, were struggling
for mastery in the field of thought. The orthodox conception, into which
he had been born, and with which his father and mother had fronted the
Eternities, had given way under the solvent of modern thought. Carlyle's
belief in Christianity as a revelation seems to have dropped from him
without much of a struggle, somewhat after the style of George Eliot.
His mental tortures appear to have arisen from spiritual hunger, from an
inability to fill the place vacated by the old beliefs. Had he lived
fifty years earlier, Carlyle would have been invited to find salvation
in the easy-going, drawing-room rationalism of Hume and Gibbon, or to
content himself with the ecclesiastical placidity known as Moderatism.

Much had occurred since the arm-chair philosophers of Edinburgh taught
that this was the best possible world, and that the highest wisdom
consisted in frowning upon enthusiasm and cultivating the comfortable.
The