ext from the parable of the
Prodigal Son, the Rabbi closed his eyes with great expectation, as one
about to be fed with the finest of the wheat.

Carmichael has kept the sermon unto this day, and as often as he finds
himself growing hard or supercilious, reads it from beginning to end.
It is his hair shirt, to be worn from time to time next his soul for
the wrongness in it and the mischief it did. He cannot understand how
he could have said such things on a Sacrament morning and in the
presence of the Rabbi, but indeed they were inevitable. When two tides
meet there is ever a cruel commotion, and ships are apt to be dashed on
the rocks, and Carmichael's mind was in a "jabble" that day. The new
culture, with its wider views of God and man, was fighting with the
robust Calvinism in which every Scot is saturated, and the result was
neither peace nor charity. Personally the lad was kindly and
good-natured, intellectually he had become arrogant, intolerant, acrid,
flinging out at old-fashioned views, giving quite unnecessary
challenges, arguing with imaginary antagonists. It has ever seemed to
me, although I suppose that history is against me, that if it be laid
on any one to advocate a new view that will startle people, he ought of
all men to be conciliatory and persuasive; but Carmichael was, at least
in this time of fermentation, very exasperating and pugnacious, and so
he drove the Rabbi to the only hard action of his life, wherein the old
man suffered most, and which may be said to have led to his death.

Carmichael, like the Rabbi, had intended to preach that morning on the
love of God, and thought he was doing so with some power. What he did
was to take the Fatherhood of God and use it as a stick to beat
Pharisees with, and under Pharisees he let it be seen that he included
every person who still believed in the inflexible action of the moral
laws and the austere majesty of God. Many good things he no doubt
said, but each had an edge, and it cut deeply into people of the old
school. Had he seen the Rabbi, it would not have been possible for him
to continue, but he only was conscious of Lachlan Campbell, with whom
he had then a feud, and who, he imagined, had come to criticise him.
So he went on his rasping way that Sacrament morning, as when one
harrows the spring earth with iron teeth, exciting himself with every
sentence to fresh crudities of thought and extravagances of opposition.
But it only flashed on h