d your cousin Henry been
spared to me, he would now have been much about Robert's age."

The conversation passed to other matters, and in about half an hour, my
new friend entered the room; when we sat down to a homely, but cheerful
repast.

"I have been engaged in argument, for the last twenty minutes, with
our parish schoolmaster," he said--"a shrewd, sensible man, and a
prime scholar, but one of the most determined Calvinists I ever knew.
Now, there is something, Mr. Lindsay, in abstract Calvinism, that
dissatisfies and distresses me; and yet, I must confess, there is so
much of good in the working of the system, that I would ill like to see
it supplanted by any other. I am convinced, for instance, there is
nothing so efficient in teaching the bulk of a people to think as a
Calvinistic church."

"Ah, Robert," said my aunt, "it does meikle mair nor that. Look round
ye, my bairn, an' see if there be a kirk in which puir sinful creatures
have mair comfort in their sufferings or mair hope in their deaths."

"Dear mother," said my companion, "I like well enough to dispute with
the schoolmaster, but I must have no dispute with you. I know the heart
is everything in these matters, and yours is much wiser than mine."

"There is something in abstract Calvinism," he continued, "that
distresses me. In almost all our researches we arrive at an ultimate
barrier, which interposes its wall of darkness between us and the last
grand truth, in the series which we had trusted was to prove a
master-key to the whole. We dwell in a sort of Goshen--there is light
in our immediate neighbourhood, and a more than Egyptian darkness all
around; and as every Hebrew must have known that the hedge of cloud
which he saw resting on the landscape, was a boundary not to things
themselves, but merely to his view of things--for beyond there were
cities, and plains, and oceans, and continents--so we in like manner
must know that the barriers of which I speak exist only in relation to
the faculties which we employ, not to the objects on which we employ
them. And yet, notwithstanding this consciousness that we are
necessarily and irremediably the bound prisoners of ignorance, and that
all the great truths lie outside our prison, we can almost be content
that, in most cases, it should be so--not, however, with regard to
those great unattainable truths which lie in the track of Calvinism.
They seem too important to be wanted, and yet want them we must--