have gone to dwell.

It may be set down as certain that I would never have won them back to
church had it not been that I abandoned argument and adopted friendship.

For argument, to my mind, satisfies a people's souls as well as a bill
of fare will suffice a hungry man; but the heart's food is a different
matter. Argument may be botany, but friendship is a flower; and one
little violet is better than one big volume, or a thousand of them, as
far as that goes. This is perhaps the same thing as to say that a living
dog is better than a dead lion, for most big books are sepulchres--but I
think that my figure hath a sweeter flavour than the other.

And when I deliver the Yale lectures to young ministers, I shall tell
them that there is a blessed guile, a holy cozenage of the heart whereby
they may win their people's souls by stealth. And if a parson hath some
obdurate parishioner or some gnarled and snarling elder, let him attack
him as a thief in the night, and turn its darkness into day.

I had to build my friendship with Donald brick by brick, and oftentimes
it swayed before his blasts. A hundred times I could have been justly
angry and forever done with him. But I knew a man, a very near relation,
with whom God might oftener have done the same, and had not; besides, I
remembered that adroit petition in the Lord's Prayer, which is the
plummet of the soul's sincerity--and I had read of One who reviled not
again.

"In days far by," he charged, "oor faithers said wi' pride as hoo the
ministers o' God were dyin' for the truth; but in thae modern days, a'
men say as hoo they're dyin' for their steepin'" (stipend).

Now this was hard to bear, for I had declined larger stipends than I
accepted from St. Cuthbert's, and some would say that this was a right
and proper time to stand upon my dignity. But what is so dignified as
the Cross, planted in the very centre of shame's garden? I had long
before determined that no man can stand on dignity, for it must be
dignity that stands upon the man, and by no act or word of his, be it
remarked, but by the high act of God. For those men who stand on dignity
are top-heavy things, pigmies upon stilts, triangles upside down.

Therefore I was patient with Donald, and guarded our infant friendship
as a lost hunter shields his last remaining match. I said little to him
about church, and much about the Highlands. For Donald was a belated
Highlander, his parents having lapsed to the lowlan