From the year 1818, when Carlyle was two-and-twenty years of age, the Church of Scotland had lost the chance of seeing him among her clergy. In his _Reminiscences_ he speaks of his dropping off as but the natural, and in a manner accidental, termination of the languid, half-willing, half-reluctant, state of mind in which he had himself always been on that subject of his clerical calling which his parents had so much at heart. There can be little doubt, however, that stronger forces were at work. In Kirkcaldy he had been reading omnivorously, not only laying Irving’s library under contribution, but getting over books from the Edinburgh University library as well. Bailly’s _Histoire de l’Astronomie_ was one of those received from Edinburgh; and among those from Irving’s library he mentions “Gibbon, Hume, etc.,” besides a number of the French classics in the small Didot edition. He dwells on his reading of _Gibbon_, informing us that he read the book with “greedy velocity,” getting through a volume a day, so as to finish the twelve volumes of which Irving’s copy consisted in just as many days. He adds:—“It was, of all the books, perhaps the most impressive on me in my then stage of investigation and state of mind. I by no means completely admired Gibbon, perhaps not more than I do now; but his winged sarcasms, so quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing and killing dead, were often admirably potent and illuminative to me.” In one of the most intimate conversations I ever had with Carlyle he spoke even more distinctly of this his first complete reading of Gibbon in Kirkcaldy. The conversation was in his back-garden in Chelsea, and the occasion was his having been reading Gibbon, or portions of him, again. After mentioning, rather pathetically, as he does in his _Reminiscences_, his wonder at the velocity of his reading in his early days as compared with the slow rate at which he could now get through a book, he spoke of Gibbon himself in some detail, and told me that it was from that first well-remembered reading of Gibbon in twelve days, at the rate of a volume a day, that he dated the extirpation from his mind of the last remnant that had been left in it of the orthodox belief in miracles. This is literally what he said, and it is of consequence in our present connection. The process of extirpation can hardly have been complete at the moment of the call on Dr. Ritchie,—else the call would not have been made; but there can be no doubt that it was not mere continued languor that stopped Carlyle in his clerical career. There were the beginnings in his mind of the crash of that system of belief on which the Scottish Church rested, and some adherence to which was imperative on any one who would be a clergyman of that Church in any section of it then recognised or possible.