through heart and brain the stately thought that such
experimental dealings between a minister and a people might be
sublimated before reverent eyes, hallowed as a holy venture, and
destined to play its part in the economy of God.

His claim seemed loftier far than any obligation between my heart and
man, and so uplifted was I by the sense of a commission which even
candidature could neither invalidate nor deform, that all sense of
servility, all cringing thought of livelihood, all fear of faltering and
all faltering of fear, seemed to flee away even as the blasphemy of
darkness retreats before the sanctities of the morn. In very truth I
forgot that I was a candidate of St. Cuthbert's and seemed but to
remember that I was a minister of God.

Whether my sermon was good or ill I could not then have told; but I
could well have told that a victorious secret is to him who strives
after earnestness of heart, unvexed by the clamour of his own rebellious
and ambitious soul.

The congregation was vast and reverent as befitted the purpose of the
hour; the most careless eye could mark the strong and reflective cast of
those Scottish faces, whose native adamant was but little softened by
their sojourn beneath Canadian skies. Reverence seemed to clothe these
worshippers like a garment. They were as men who believed in God,
whereby are men most fearsome and yet most glorious to look upon. It was
the fearsomeness of such a face, garrisoned in God, which had beat back
the haughty gaze of Mary when she met the eye of Knox, burning with a
fire which no torch of time had kindled.

And when they sang their opening hymn, they seemed to stride upwards as
mountaineers, for they lifted up their eyes as men who would cast them
down again only before God Himself. From word to word they climbed, and
from line to line, as though each word or line were some abutting crag
of the very hill of God. Besides, the psalm they sung was this--

"I to the hills will lift mine eyes
From whence doth come mine aid."

Their intensity steadied my very soul. They seemed to look at me as if
to say, "We are in earnest if you are; our kirk is vacant but our hearts
are full," and the pulpit in which I stood, and in which many a hapless
man had stood before, was hallowed by its solemn garrison of waiting
souls, and redeemed of all taint of treason towards its sacred trust.

When I called them unto prayer, they answered as the forest answers
when the