let the Fathers go so lightly unless under severe constraint. What was
it? Surely he would not attack their minister in face of his
people. . . . The Rabbi do that, who was in all his ways a gentleman?
Yet . . . and then the Rabbi abruptly quitted historical exposition and
announced that he would speak on four heads. Carmichael, from his
corner behind the curtains, saw the old man twice open his mouth as if
to speak, and when at last he began he was quivering visibly, and he
had grasped the outer corners of the desk with such intensity that the
tassels which hung therefrom--one of the minor glories of the Free
Kirk--were held in the palm of his hand, the long red tags escaping
from between his white wasted fingers. A pulpit lamp came between
Carmichael and the Rabbi's face, but he could see the straining hand,
which did not relax till it was lifted in the last awful appeal, and
the white and red had a gruesome fascination. It seemed as if one had
clutched a cluster of full, rich, tender grapes and was pressing them
in an agony till their life ran out in streams of blood, and dripped
upon the heads of the choir sitting beneath, in their fresh, hopeful
youth. And it also came to Carmichael with pathetic conviction even
then that every one was about to suffer, but the Rabbi more than them
all together. While the preacher was strengthening his heart for the
work before him, Carmichael's eye was attracted by the landscape that
he could see through the opposite window. The ground sloped upwards
from the kirk to a pine-wood that fringed the great moor, and it was
covered with snow, on which the moon was beginning to shed her faint,
weird light. Within, the light from the upright lamps was falling on
the ruddy, contented faces of men and women and little children, but
without it was one cold, merciless whiteness, like unto the justice of
God, with black shadows of judgment.

"This is the message which I have to deliver unto you in the name of
the Lord, and even as Jonah was sent to Nineveh after a strange
discipline with a word of mercy, so am I constrained against my will to
carry a word of searching and trembling.

"First"--and between the heads the Rabbi paused as one whose breath had
failed him--"every man belongs absolutely to God by his creation.

"Second. The purpose of God about each man precedes his creation.

"Third. Some are destined to Salvation, and some to Damnation.

"Fourth"--here the hard breat