those who
chose to walk a mile and a half to hear him, the luxury of more locally
consecrated services should be at the charge of the locality. He himself
was willing to spend and be spent in the spiritual interests of East
Elgin; that was abundantly proven; what he could not comfortably
tolerate was the deviation of congregational funds, the very blood of
the body of belief, into other than legitimate channels. He fought
for his view with all his tactician's resources, putting up one
office-bearer after another to endorse it but the matter was decided at
the general yearly meeting of the congregation; and the occasion showed
Knox Church in singular sympathy with its struggling offspring. Dr
Drummond for the first time in his ministry, was defeated by his people.
It was less a defeat than a defence, an unexpected rally round the
corporate right to direct corporate activities; and the congregation was
so anxious to wound the minister's feelings as little as possible that
the grant in aid of the East Elgin Mission was embodied in a motion to
increase Dr Drummond's salary by two hundred and fifty dollars a year.
The Doctor with a wry joke, swallowed his gilded pill, but no coating
could dissimulate its bitterness, and his chagrin was plain for long.
The issue with which we are immediately concerned is that three months
later Knox Church Mission called to minister to it the Reverend Hugh
Finlay, a young man from Dumfriesshire and not long out. Dr Drummond had
known beforehand what their choice would be. He had brought Mr Finlay to
occupy Knox Church pulpit during his last July and August vacation,
and Mrs Forsyth had reported that such midsummer congregations she
had simply never worshipped with. Mrs Forsyth was an excellent hand at
pressed tongue and a wonder at knitted counterpanes, but she had not
acquired tact and never would.

CHAPTER VIII

The suggestion that the Reverend Hugh Finlay preached from the pulpit
of Knox Church "better sermons" than its permanent occupant, would have
been justly considered absurd, and nobody pronounced it. The church was
full, as Mrs Forsyth observed, on these occasions; but there were many
other ways of accounting for that. The Murchisons, as a family, would
have been the last to make such an admission. The regular attendance
might have been, as much as anything, out of deference to the wishes
of the Doctor himself, who invariably and sternly hoped, in his last
sermon, that no str