Rabbi Saunderson

Rabbi Saunderson

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Rabbi Saunderson, by Ian Maclaren,
Illustrated by A. S. Boyd
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Title: Rabbi Saunderson
Author: Ian Maclaren

Release Date: March 28, 2006 [eBook #18063]
Language: English
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RABBI SAUNDERSON
by
IAN MACLAREN
With Twelve Illustrations by A. S. Boyd

London: Hodder and Stoughton 27 Paternoster Row 1898

To
Mrs. Williamson
OF GLENOGIL
WHO HAS INHERITED
THE GIFT OF WITTY SPEECH
AND HAS LAID IT OUT AT USURY
TO THE JOY OF HER FRIENDS
AND THE
GLADDENING OF LIFE

Contents
A SUPRA-LAPSARIAN KILBOGIE MANSE THE RABBI AS
CONFESSOR THE FEAR OF GOD THE WOUNDS OF A FRIEND

LIGHT AT EVENTIDE

Illustrations
He put Jamie's ecclesiastical history into a state of thorough repair
The farmers carted the new minister's furniture from the nearest railway
station
Searching for a lost note
The suddenness of his fall
"Some suitable sum for our brother here who is passing through
adversity"
"We shall not meet again in this world"
When Carmichael gave him the cup in the sacrament
"Shall . . . not . . . the . . . Judge . . . of all the earth . . . do . . . right?"
"You have spoken to me like a father: surely that is enough"
Then arose a self-made man
He watched the dispersion of his potatoes with dismay
He signed for her hand, which he kept to the end

A SUPRA-LAPSARIAN
Jeremiah Saunderson had remained in the low estate of a "probationer"
for twelve years after he left the Divinity Hall, where he was reported
so great a scholar that the Professor of Apologetics spoke to him
deprecatingly, and the Professor of Dogmatics openly consulted him on

obscure writers. He had wooed twenty-three congregations in vain,
from churches in the black country, where the colliers rose in squares
of twenty, and went out without ceremony, to suburban places of
worship, where the beadle, after due consideration of the sermon,
would take up the afternoon notices and ask that they be read at once
for purposes of utility, which that unflinching functionary stated to the
minister with accuracy and much faithfulness. Vacant congregations
desiring a list of candidates, made one exception, and prayed that
Jeremiah should not be let loose upon them, till at last it came home to
the unfortunate scholar himself that he was an offence and a by-word.
He began to dread the ordeal of giving his name, and, as is still told,
declared to a household, living in the fat wheatlands and without any
imagination, that he was called Magor Missabib. When a stranger
makes a statement of this kind to his host with a sad seriousness, no
one judges it expedient to offer any remark; but it was skilfully
arranged that Missabib's door should be locked from the outside, and
one member of the household sat up all night. The sermon next day did
not tend to confidence--having seven quotations in unknown
tongues--and the attitude of the congregation was one of alert vigilance;
but no one gave any outward sign of uneasiness, and six able-bodied
men, collected in a pew below the pulpit, knew their duty in an
emergency.
Saunderson's election to the Free Church of Kilbogie was therefore an
event in the ecclesiastical world, and a consistent tradition in the parish
explained its inwardness on certain grounds, complimentary both to the
judgment of Kilbogie and the gifts of Mr. Saunderson. On Saturday
evening he was removed from the train by the merest accident, and left
the railway station in such a maze of meditation that he ignored the
road to Kilbogie altogether, although its sign-post was staring him in
the face, and continued his way to Drumtochty. It was half-past nine
when Jamie Soutar met him on the high road through our glen, still
travelling steadily west, and being arrested by his appearance, beguiled
him into conversation, till he elicited that Saunderson was minded to
reach Kilbogie. For an hour did the wanderer rest in Jamie's kitchen,
during which he put Jamie's ecclesiastical history into a state of
thorough repair--making seven distinct parallels between the errors that

had afflicted the Scottish Church and the early heretical sects,--and then
Jamie gave him in charge of a ploughman who was courting in
Kilbogie, and was