repented.

"Yes, religion is profitable for both worlds," one of them would exhort
by the junior common-room fire, "and if you doubt it, look at me;
five-and-twenty shillings a week as a draper's assistant was all I had,
and no chance of rising. Now I 'm a gentleman"--here Carmichael used
to look at the uncleanly little man and snort--"and in two years I
could ask any girl in religious society, and she would take me. A
minister can marry any woman, if he be evangelical. Ah," he would
conclude, with a fine strain of piety, "the Gospel is its own reward."

What enraged Carmichael as he listened in the distance to these paeans
of Pharisaism was the disgusting fact that the "fruits" did carry off
great spoil in the marriage field, so that to a minister without
culture, manners, or manliness, a middle-class family would give their
pet daughter, when they would have refused her to a ten times better
man fighting his way up in commerce. If she died, then this
enterprising buccaneer would achieve a second and third conquest, till
in old age he would rival the patriarchs in the number of his wives and
possessions. As for the girl, Carmichael concluded that she was still
under the glamour of an ancient superstition, and took the veil after a
very commonplace and squalid Protestant fashion. This particular
"fruit" against whom Carmichael in his young uncharitableness
especially raged, because he was more self-complacent and more
illiterate than his fellows, married the daughter of a rich self-made
man, and on the father's death developed a peculiar form of throat
disease, which laid him aside from the active work of the ministry--a
mysterious providence, as he often explained--but allowed him to enjoy
life with a guarded satisfaction. What Carmichael said to him about
his ways and his Gospel was very unpleasant and quite unlike
Carmichael's kindly nature, but the only revenge the victim took was to
state his conviction that Scotland would have nothing to do with a man
that was utterly worldly, and in after years to warn vacant churches
against one who did not preach the Cross.

After one of those common-room encounters, Carmichael used to fling
himself out into the east wind and greyness of Edinburgh, fuming
against the simplicity of good people, against the provincialism of his
college, against the Pharisaism of his church, against the Philistinism
of Scottish life. He would go down to Holyrood and pity Queen Mary,
tra