d, fixed on him. And he
felt their force, though not in the way Thomas intended. Thomas never
meant to dart _personal_ reproaches across the house of God; but Alec's
conscience told him nevertheless, stung by that glance, that he had
behaved ill to his old friend. Nor did this lessen the general feeling
which the sermon had awakened in his mind, un-self-conscious as it was,
that something ought to be done; that something was wrong in him
somewhere; that it ought to be set right somehow--a feeling which every
one in the pew shared, except one. His heart was so moth-eaten and
rusty, with the moths and the rust which Mammon brings with him when he
comes in to abide with a man, that there was not enough of it left to
make the terrible discovery that the rest of it was gone. Its owner did
not know that there was anything amiss with it. What power can empty,
sweep, and garnish such a heart? Or what seven devils entering in, can
make the last state of that man worse than the first?

A special prayer-meeting having been appointed, to be held after the
sermon, Robert Bruce remained, to join in the intercession for the
wicked town and its wicked neighbourhood. He even "engaged in prayer,"
for the first time in public, and astonished some of the older members
by his gift in devotion. He had been received into the church only a
week or two before, upon profession of faith in the merits of Christ,
not in Christ himself--that would not have been definite enough for
them. But it would have been all the same to Robert Bruce, for he was
ready to believe that he believed anything advantageous.

There had been one or two murmurs against his reception, and he had
been several times visited and talked with, before the Church was
satisfied as to his conversion. But nothing was known against him
beyond the fact that "he luikit at baith sides o' a bawbee;" and having
learned many of their idioms, he had succeeded in persuading his
examiners, and had possibly persuaded himself at the same time, that he
had passed through all the phases of conversion, including conviction,
repentance, and final acceptance of offered mercy on the terms
proposed, and was now undergoing the slow and troublesome process of
sanctification; in corroboration of which he went on to produce talk,
and coppers at the chapel-door. Good people as many of those were who
thus admitted him to their communion, in the full belief that none but
conscious Christians should enjoy t