yhood he prayed fervently once, and only once, a week: the
prayer in question was said on Sunday evening, and consisted of a
heartfelt ejaculation of thanks to Heaven that the holy day was over for
another week.

Church-going is a splendid and salutary practice, and every man who does
not base his life on some religious sanction, is leading a mutilated
life. There is such a thing, however, as ecclesiastical dyspepsia, a
disease engendered by forced attendance at too many religious services
when one is young. The disease is unfortunately apt to develop in mature
years, into complete indifference to doctrine of all kinds.

After all, doctrine is largely useful as a mental exercise, and may
easily become divorced from practical honesty. Not once but fifty times
have I been told that the village experts in theology were precisely the
men who needed most watching in mundane matters. "So-and-so is a
specialist on the millennium: _beware of him_." "Old Duncan is the
strictest Sabbatarian in the island, but on Monday he's worth keeping an
eye on." "Many a man that keeps the fourth commandment is not so
particular about the others." Such are the phrases one is perpetually
hearing, and they go far to prove how inoperative are ritual,
profession, and form, in the life of some Christians.

To keep the ten commandments, or rather, I should say, the eleven, is no
easy matter for either Celt or Saxon. It is far easier to be
ostentatiously religious than scrupulously moral, to say prayers than to
pay debts, to split hairs of doctrine than to love your enemies. I never
read a more markedly scriptural book than _The Men of Skye_, nor one
that displays such intolerance to the school of Laodiceans. I am not
insensible to the intense enthusiasm of the author for the memory of the
illiterate catechists who went round the island preaching to the people
in a homely and graphic way. The unlovely feature of the book is the
antagonism displayed towards those who wish to bring about a union of
the Presbyterian bodies. "Not all the cement outside of heaven," one man
says, "could bring about a union of the Free and U.P. Churches." The
Declaratory Act, secular teaching in schools, instrumental music, and
such like, all come in for severe treatment or ironical reference.

_THE MEN OF SKYE._

The book to which I have referred (_The Men of Skye_) gives a wonderful
insight into the religious psychology of the Celtic zealot. It was in
Portree that