-contemplating the exercise before
the Glen--"but ye'll aye get eneuch here and there tae cairry hame."
Which shows what a man the Rabbi was, that on the strength of his
possession a parish like Kilbogie could speak after this fashion to
Drumtochty.

"He'll hae a fair trial, Mains"--Netherton's tone was distinctly
severe--"an' mony a trial he's hed in his day, they say: wes't
three-an'-twenty kirks he preached in afore ye took him? But mind ye,
length's nae standard in Drumtochty; na, na, it's no hoo muckle wind a
man hes, but what like is the stuff that comes. It's bushels doon bye,
but it's wecht up bye."

Any prejudice against the Rabbi, created by the boasting of a foolish
parish not worthy of him, was reduced by his venerable appearance
before the pulpit, and quite dispelled by his unfeigned delight in
Carmichael's conduct of the "preliminaries." Twice he nodded approval
to the reading of the hundredth Psalm, and although he stood with
covered face during the prayer, he emerged full of sympathy. As his
boy read the fifty-third of Isaiah the old man was moved well-nigh to
tears, and on the giving out of the text, 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