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 breathing became a sob--"each man's lot is unto
the glory of God."

It was not only skilled theologians like Lachlan Campbell and Burnbrae,
but even mere amateurs, who understood that they were that night to be
conducted to the farthest limit of Calvinism, and that whoever fell
behind through the hardness of the way, their guide would not flinch.

As the Rabbi gave the people a brief space wherein to grasp his heads
in their significance, Carmichael remembered a vivid incident in the
Presbytery of Muirtown, when an English evangelist had addressed that
reverend and austere court with exhilarating confidence--explaining the
extreme simplicity of the Christian faith, and showing how a minister
ought to preach. Various good men were delighted, and asked many
questions of the evangelist--who had kept a baby-linen shop for twenty
years, and was unspoiled by the slightest trace of theology--but the
Rabbi arose and demolished his "teaching," convicting him of heresy at
every turn, till there was not left one stone upon another.

"But surely fear belongs to the Old Testament dispensation," said the
unabashed little man to the Rabbi afterwards. "'Rejoice,' you know, my
friend, 'and again I say rejoice.'"