Thomas Carlyle (July 17, 1803 – January 28, 1855) was born in King's Grange near Dumfries in Scotland.
He studied and finished law at University of Edinburgh. In 1824 he was registered as lawyer at the Scottish bar. In October 1824 he inherited the title "Baron Carlyle of Torthorwald".
From 1830 on, he came in contact with the Scottish reverend Edward Irving and was named "apostle" of the Catholic Apostolic Church on 1 May 1835. He took responsibility for Northern Germany.
He is not to be confused with the better-known man of letters Thomas Carlyle, born a few years earlier also in Scotland. He too was connected to Irving, who introduced him to his wife, Jane Welsh. One biographer asserts that the similarities did cause confusion: "As a 'double-goer', perplexing strangers in foreign parts as well as at home, the 'Apostle' was occasionally an innocent, inadvertent nuisance to 'our Tom'."
Famous quotes containing the words thomas and/or carlyle:
“Under the heavens that know not what years be
The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements
Uttered even what they will in times far hence—
All of us gone out of the reach of change—
Immortal in a picture of an old grange.”
—Edward Thomas (1878–1917)
“For the “superior morality” of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this “superior morality” is properly rather an “inferior criminality” produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)