ves to cook and wash for you if you mean to ecstaticise and see
beatific visions: you must get the most fashionable and picturesque
specialists to come and feel your religious pulse, and you must on no
account neglect the subscription lists. But only those rich enough to be
hypochondriac can afford such luxuries. Now, in the toiling classes
there are often good ears for music, and exquisite responsiveness to
religious sensations. What satisfies such natures and such wants must be
cheap. The Plymouth Brethren (I ought rather to say _Christian_
Brethren), have no General Assembly, little or no pedantry of a costly
kind, and yet, I believe, they supply all the exhilaration of schisms,
splits, counter-splits, and heresy-hunts. Every man his own General
Assembly! There may be a lack of the finer touches in such a system, but
what is lacking in elegance is fully made up in clearness of view and
rombustious vigour.

In many of the fishing villages on the east coast of Scotland, there are
large congregations of these worthy men raising their Ebenezers, and
making a joyful noise on the first day of the week. I have a good deal
of sympathy with their democratic and direct style of worship. In
Scotland, when a man gets converted, he feels constrained to _do
something_, but very often there is little outlet for his energy in the
calm routine of the fashionable churches--hence the necessity for
bethels and mission-houses. At their revivals, let me add, one is in
presence of that mysterious awakening to which every religion owes its
birth.

In the autumn of 1906, I had an interesting talk with the minister of a
seaside village on the shore of the Moray Firth, and was distressed to
find that he was sorely harassed by the lively sect I have mentioned.
Every now and again a wandering evangelist comes along the coast,
pitches a tent, and begins a series of gospel services. Those who are
converted, neglect the church and all its ordinances, and begin
preaching on their own account; nay, they even buttonhole the minister
and preach to _him_, accusing him of being an unjust steward, a
hireling, and no shepherd, and so on. Such conduct creates a very
painful situation. With a good deal of detail, the long-suffering
clergyman gave me an account of a visit he had paid to an old woman
recently converted. The narrative of her conversion as told by herself
was quaint and touching: "They were a' gettin' it," she said, "and I
wasna gettin' it. So