heart. I fell asleep, his great quotations
and his earnest words flowing about my soul even as the ocean laves the
shore.

III

_OUR MUTUAL TRIAL_

The Sabbath morning broke serene and fair. Thus also awoke my spirit,
still invigorated by its contact with one I felt to be an honest and
God-fearing man, whose ardour I knew was chastened by a long-waged
conflict of the soul.

Our morning worship was led by Mr. Blake himself, who besought the
Divine blessing upon the labours of him who was "for this day 'our
servant for Jesus' sake.'"

We walked to the church together, mingling with the silent and reverent
multitude pressing towards a common shrine.

As he left me at the vestry door, he said earnestly--

"Forget that you are a candidate of St. Cuthbert's, and remember that
you are a minister of God."

The beadle recognized me with a confidential nod, inspected the pulpit
robe which I had donned, and taking up the "Books," he led the way to
the pulpit steps with an air which might have provoked the envy of the
most solemn mace-bearer who ever served his king.

He opened the door, and then there appeared to my wondering view a sea
of expectant faces, vast beyond my utmost dream. They were steeped in
silence, a silence so intense that it left the impress on my mind of an
ocean, majestic in its heaving grandeur; for the stiller you find the
sea of human faces the more reasonably may you dread the trough of human
waves.

The wonder of the reverent and the sneer of the scornful have alike been
prompted by the preaching of a candidate. Something strange and
incongruous seems to pertain to the performance of a man whose
acknowledged purpose is the dual one of winning alike the souls and the
smiles of men. He seeks, as all preachers are supposed to do, the uplift
of his hearers' souls, while his very appearance is a pledge of his
desire to so commend himself as to be their favourite and their choice.
Much hath been written, and more hath been said, of the humiliation to
which he must submit who occupies a vacant pulpit as the applicant for a
vacant kirk.

But, whatever ground there be for these reflections, I felt the force of
none of them that radiant Sabbath morning in St. Cuthbert's. My
Calvinism, which is regarded by those who know it not as dragonlike and
altogether drastic, proved now my comfort and my stay, and within its
vast pavilion I seemed to hide as in the covert of the Eternal. For
there surged