m
well, but in spite of his heredity Pollock had ever carried a more
open mind than Graham. During his university days he had heard the
saint and scholar of the Covenant, Samuel Rutherford, who was
principal and professor in the university and a most distinguished
preacher of his day in Scotland. No doubt Rutherford raged furiously
against prelacy as a work of the devil, and the enemy of Scots
freedom; no doubt he also wrote books which struck hard at the
authority of the King, and made for the cause of the people. His name
was a reproach among Pollock's friends, and Pollock began with no
sympathy towards Rutherford's opinions, but the lad's soul was stirred
when, in the college chapel of St. Andrew's and also in the parish
kirk where Rutherford was colleague with that servant of the Lord Mr.
Blair, he listened to Rutherford upon the love of God and the
loveliness of Christ. One day he was present, standing obscure among a
mass of townsfolk, when Rutherford, after making a tedious argument on
the controversies of the day which had almost driven Pollock from the
Kirk, came across the name of Christ and then, carried away out of his
course as by a magnet, began to rehearse the titles of the Lord Jesus
till a Scots noble seated in the kirk cried out, "Hold you there,
Rutherford." And Pollock was tempted to say "Amen." With his side he
resented the Covenanting regime, because it frowned on gayety and
enforced the hateful Covenant, but even then the lad wished that his
side had preachers to be compared with Rutherford and Blair, and the
words of Rutherford lay hidden in his heart. When the Restoration came
he flung up his cap with the rest of them, and drank only too many
healths to King Charles. For a while he was intoxicated with the
triumph of the Restoration, but there was a vein of seriousness in him
as well as candor, and as the years passed and the people were still
drinking, and as the tyranny of Cromwell gave place to the brutality
of the infamous crew, Lauderdale, the renegade, and others, who
misruled Scotland in the name of the King, Pollock was much shaken,
and began to wonder within himself whether the Presbyterians, with all
their bigotry, may not have had the right of it. If they did not dance
and drink they prayed and led God-fearing lives, and if they would not
be driven to hear the curates preach, there was not too much to hear
if they had gone. When the Covenant was the symbol of oppression,
Pollock hated