ed them,
should be made an elect object of favour. Who was he, Clement
Sclater, to intrude upon the divine prerogative, and presume to act
on the doctrine of election! Was a child with a Sir to his name,
anything more in the eyes of God than a child without a name at all?
Would any title--even that of Earl or Duke, be recognized in the
kingdom of heaven? His relatives ought to do something: they
failing, of whom could further requisition be made? There were
vessels to honour and vessels to dishonour: to which class this one
belonged, let God in his time reveal. A duty could not be passed
on. It could not become the duty of the minister of a parish, just
because those who ought and could, would not, to spend time and
money, to the neglect of his calling, in hunting up a boy whom he
would not know what to do with if he had him, a boy whose home had
been with the dregs of society.

In justice to Mr. Sclater, it must be mentioned that he did not know
Gibbie, even by sight. There remains room, however, for the
question, whether, if Mr. Sclater had not been the man to change his
course as he did afterwards, he would not have acted differently
from the first.

One morning, as he sat at breakfast with his wife, late Mrs.
Bonniman, and cast, as is, I fear, the rude habit of not a few
husbands, not a few stolen glances, as he ate, over the morning
paper, his eye fell upon a paragraph announcing the sudden death of
the well-known William Fuller Withrop, of the eminent ship-building
firm of Withrop and Playtell, of Greenock. Until he came to the end
of the paragraph, his cup of coffee hung suspended in mid air. Then
down it went untasted, he jumped from his seat, and hurried from the
room. For the said paragraph ended with the remark, that the not
unfrequent incapacity of the ablest of business men for looking the
inevitable in the face with coolness sufficient to the making of a
will, was not only a curious fact, but in the individual case a
pity, where two hundred thousand pounds was concerned. Had the
writer been a little more philosophical still, he might have seen
that the faculty for making money by no means involves judgment in
the destination of it, and that the money may do its part for good
and evil without, just as well as with, a will at the back of it.

But though this was the occasion, it remains to ask what was the
cause of the minister's precipitancy. Why should Clement Sclater
thereupon spring fr