Through all the material struggles Carlyle's mind at Craigenputtock was gradually shaping itself round a theory of the Universe and Man, from which he drew inspiration in his future life work. Through his contributions to Magazines and Reviews there is traceable an original vein of thought and feeling which had its origin in the study of German literature. Carlyle's studies and musings took coherent, or, as some would say incoherent, shape in _Sartor Resartus_,--a book which appropriately was written in the stern solitude of Craigenputtock. In order to acquire an adequate understanding of Carlyle as a thinker, attention has to be paid to the two dominating influences of his mental life--his early home training and German literature. In regard to the former, ancestry with Carlyle counts for much. He came of a sturdy Covenanting stock. Carlyle himself has left a graphic description of the religious environment of the Burghers, to which sect his father belonged. The congregation, under the ministry of a certain John Johnston, who taught Carlyle his first Latin, worshipped in a little house thatched with heath. Of the simple faith, the stern piety and the rugged heroism of the old Seceders, Carlyle himself has left a photograph: 'Very venerable are those old Seceder clergy to me now when I look back.... Most figures of them in my time were hoary old men; men so like evangelists in modern vesture and poor scholars and gentlemen of Christ I have nowhere met with among Protestant or Papal clergy in any country in the world.... Strangely vivid are some twelve or twenty of those old faces whom I used to see every Sunday, whose names, employments or precise dwellingplaces I never knew, but whose portraits are yet clear to me as in a mirror. Their heavy-laden, patient, ever-attentive faces, fallen solitary most of them, children all away, wife away for ever, or, it might be, wife still there and constant like a shadow and grown very like the old man, the thrifty cleanly poverty of these good people, their well-saved coarse old clothes, tailed waistcoats down to mid-thigh--all this I occasionally see as with eyes sixty or sixty-five years off, and hear the very voice of my mother upon it, whom sometimes I would be questioning about these persons of the drama and endeavouring to describe and identify them.' And what a glimpse we have into the inmost heart of the primitive Covenanting religion in the portrait drawn by Carlyle of old David Hope, the farmer who refused to postpone family worship in order to take in his grain. David was putting on his spectacles when somebody rushed in with the words: 'Such a raging wind risen will drive the stooks into the sea if let alone.' 'Wind!' answered David, 'wind canna get ae straw that has been appointed mine. Sit down and let us worship God.' Far away from the simple Covenanting creed of his father and mother Carlyle wandered, but to the last the feeling of life's mystery and solemnity remained vivid