Salted With Fire | Page 6

other things as binding as the promise which alone he regarded as
obligatory. He did not, for instance, mind raising expectations which he
had not the least intention of fulfilling.

Being a Scotch lad, it is not to be wondered at that he should turn to
Theology as a means of livelihood; neither is it surprising that he
should do so without any conscious love to God, seeing it is not in
Scotland alone that untrue men take refuge in the Church, and turn the
highest of professions into the meanest, laziest, poorest, and most
unworthy, by following it without any genuine call to the same. In any
profession, the man must be a poor common creature who follows it
without some real interest in it; but he who without a spark of
enthusiasm for it turns to the Church, is either a "blind mouth," as
Milton calls him--scornfullest of epithets, or an "old wife" ambitious of
telling her fables well; and James's ambition was of the same
contemptible sort--that, namely, of distinguishing himself in the pulpit.
This, if he had the natural gift of eloquence, he might well do by its
misuse to his own glory; or if he had it not, he might acquire a spurious
facility resembling it, and so be every way a mere windbag.
Mr. Petrie, whom it cost the soutar so much care and effort to love, and
who, although intellectually small, was yet a good man, and by no
means a coward where he judged people's souls in danger, thought to
save the world by preaching a God, eminently respectable to those who
could believe in such a God, but to those who could not, a God far from
lovely because far from righteous. His life, nevertheless, showed him in
many ways a believer in Him who revealed a very different God indeed
from the God he set forth. His faith, therefore, did not prevent him from
looking upon the soutar, who believed only in the God he saw in Jesus
Christ, as one in a state of rebellion against him whom Jesus claimed as
his father.
Young Blatherwick had already begun to turn his back upon several of
the special tenets of Calvinism, without, however, being either a better
or a worse man because of the change in his opinions. He had cast aside,
for instance, the doctrine of an everlasting hell for the unbeliever; but in
doing so he became aware that he was thus leaving fallow a great field
for the cultivation of eloquence; and not having yet discovered any
other equally productive of the precious crop, without which so little
was to be gained for the end he desired--namely, the praise of men, he
therefore kept on, "for the meantime," sowing and preparing to reap

that same field. Mr. Petrie, on the other hand, held the doctrine as
absolutely fundamental to Christianity, and preached it with power;
while the soutar, who had discarded it from his childhood, positively
refused, jealous of strife, to enter into any argument upon it with the
disputatious little man.
As yet, then, James was reading Scotch metaphysics, and reconciling
himself to the concealment of his freer opinions, upon which
concealment depended the success of his probation, and his license. But
the close of his studies in divinity was now near at hand.

CHAPTER III
Upon a certain stormy day in the great northern city, preparing for what
he regarded as his career, James sat in the same large, shabbily
furnished room where his mother had once visited him--half-way up
the hideously long spiral stair of an ancient house, whose entrance was
in a narrow close. The great clock of a church in the neighbouring
street had just begun to strike five of a wintry afternoon, dark with
snow, falling and yet to fall: how often in after years was he not to hear
the ghostly call of that clock, and see that falling snow!--when a gentle
tap came to his door, and the girl I have already mentioned came in
with a tray and the materials for his most welcomed meal, coffee with
bread and butter. She set it down in a silence which was plainly that of
deepest respect, gave him one glance of devotion, and was turning to
leave the room, when he looked up from the paper he was writing, and
said--
"Don't be in such a hurry, Isy. Haven't you time to pour out my coffee
for me?"
Isy was a small, dark, neat little thing, with finely formed features, and
a look of child-like simplicity, not altogether removed from
childishness. She answered him first with her very blue eyes full of
love and trust, then said--

"Plenty o' time, sir. What other have I to do than see that you be