St. Cuthberts | Page 6

sea of expectant faces, vast beyond my utmost dream. They were
steeped in silence, a silence so intense that it left the impress on my
mind of an ocean, majestic in its heaving grandeur; for the stiller you
find the sea of human faces the more reasonably may you dread the
trough of human waves.
The wonder of the reverent and the sneer of the scornful have alike
been prompted by the preaching of a candidate. Something strange and
incongruous seems to pertain to the performance of a man whose
acknowledged purpose is the dual one of winning alike the souls and
the smiles of men. He seeks, as all preachers are supposed to do, the
uplift of his hearers' souls, while his very appearance is a pledge of his
desire to so commend himself as to be their favourite and their choice.

Much hath been written, and more hath been said, of the humiliation to
which he must submit who occupies a vacant pulpit as the applicant for
a vacant kirk.
But, whatever ground there be for these reflections, I felt the force of
none of them that radiant Sabbath morning in St. Cuthbert's. My
Calvinism, which is regarded by those who know it not as dragonlike
and altogether drastic, proved now my comfort and my stay, and within
its vast pavilion I seemed to hide as in the covert of the Eternal. For
there surged through heart and brain the stately thought that such
experimental dealings between a minister and a people might be
sublimated before reverent eyes, hallowed as a holy venture, and
destined to play its part in the economy of God.
His claim seemed loftier far than any obligation between my heart and
man, and so uplifted was I by the sense of a commission which even
candidature could neither invalidate nor deform, that all sense of
servility, all cringing thought of livelihood, all fear of faltering and all
faltering of fear, seemed to flee away even as the blasphemy of
darkness retreats before the sanctities of the morn. In very truth I forgot
that I was a candidate of St. Cuthbert's and seemed but to remember
that I was a minister of God.
Whether my sermon was good or ill I could not then have told; but I
could well have told that a victorious secret is to him who strives after
earnestness of heart, unvexed by the clamour of his own rebellious and
ambitious soul.
The congregation was vast and reverent as befitted the purpose of the
hour; the most careless eye could mark the strong and reflective cast of
those Scottish faces, whose native adamant was but little softened by
their sojourn beneath Canadian skies. Reverence seemed to clothe these
worshippers like a garment. They were as men who believed in God,
whereby are men most fearsome and yet most glorious to look upon. It
was the fearsomeness of such a face, garrisoned in God, which had beat
back the haughty gaze of Mary when she met the eye of Knox, burning
with a fire which no torch of time had kindled.

And when they sang their opening hymn, they seemed to stride
upwards as mountaineers, for they lifted up their eyes as men who
would cast them down again only before God Himself. From word to
word they climbed, and from line to line, as though each word or line
were some abutting crag of the very hill of God. Besides, the psalm
they sung was this--
"I to the hills will lift mine eyes From whence doth come mine aid."
Their intensity steadied my very soul. They seemed to look at me as if
to say, "We are in earnest if you are; our kirk is vacant but our hearts
are full," and the pulpit in which I stood, and in which many a hapless
man had stood before, was hallowed by its solemn garrison of waiting
souls, and redeemed of all taint of treason towards its sacred trust.
When I called them unto prayer, they answered as the forest answers
when the wind brings it word from heaven, save some venerable few
who rose erect (as was their fathers' way), standing like sentinel oaks
amid lesser trees, they also bending with an obeisance prompted from
within. It seemed not hard to lead these earnest hearts in prayer--they
seemed the rather to lead my soul as by a more familiar path; or, to
state the truth more utterly, their devoutness seemed to bear me on, as
the deep ocean bears itself and its every burden towards the shore.
This intensity of worship pervaded its every act. They joined in the
reading of the Word as those who must both hear and see it for
themselves, their books opening and closing in unison