ness in the faith of the
candidates before them. On this score, however, few indulged serious
anxiety. Once the Hebraic shoals and snags were safely passed,
both examiner and examined could disport themselves with a jaunty
self-confidence born of a thorough acquaintance with the Shorter
Catechism received during the plastic years of childhood.

It was, however, just in these calm waters that danger lurked for Boyle.
On the side of scholarship he was known to be invulnerable. Boyle
was the hero and darling of the college men, more especially of the
"sinners" among them, not simply by reason of his prowess between the
goal posts where, times without number, he had rescued the college from
the contempt of its foes; but quite as much for the modesty with which
he carried off his brilliant attainments in the class lists. Throughout
the term, in the college halls after tea, there had been carried on
a series of discussions extending over the whole range of the
"fundamentals," and Boyle had the misfortune to rouse the wrath and
awaken the concern of Finlay Finlayson, the champion of orthodoxy.
Finlay was a huge, gaunt, broad-shouldered son of Uist, a theologian
by birth, a dialectician by training, and a man of war by the gift of
Heaven. Cheerfully would Finlay, for conscience' sake, have given his
body to the flames, as, for conscience' sake, he had shaken off the
heretical dust of New College, Edinburgh, from his shoes, unhesitatingly
surrendering at the same time, Scot though he was, a scholarship of
fifty pounds. The hope that he had cherished of being able to find, in
a colonial institution of sacred learning, a safe haven where he might
devote himself to the perfecting of the defences of his faith within the
citadel of orthodoxy was rudely shattered by the discovery that the
same heresies which had driven him from New College had found their
way across the sea and were being championed by a man of such winning
personality and undoubted scholarship as Richard Boyle. The effect upon
Finlayson's mind of these discussions carried on throughout the term was
such that, after much and prayerful deliberation, and after due notice
to the person immediately affected, he discovered it to be his duty
to inform the professor in whose department these subjects lay of
the heresies that were threatening the very life of the college, and,
indeed, of the Canadian Church.

The report of his interview with the professor came back to colleg