"Forget that you are a candidate of St. Cuthbert's, and remember that
you are a minister of God."
The beadle recognized me with a confidential nod, inspected the pulpit
robe which I had donned, and taking up the "Books," he led the way to
the pulpit steps with an air which might have provoked the envy of the
most solemn mace-bearer who ever served his king.
He opened the door, and then there appeared to my wondering view a 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 with the larger
one which decked their pulpit like a crown.
Even when the collection was taken up they maintained their loftiness of
poise. It had been often told me that Scotch folk contribute to an
offering with the same heroism wherewith their ancestors opened their
unshrinking veins, doling forth their money, like their blood, with a
martyr's air. But although I remarked that some Scottish eyes followed
their departing coins with glances of parental tenderness, there was yet
a solemn stateliness about the operation which greatly won me, even
those who dedicated the homeliest copper doing it unabashedly, as if to
the Lord, and not unto men.
We closed with the penitential psalm which Mr. Blake had asked, and its
great words seemed charged with the strong reality of men who believed
in sin with the same old-fashioned earnestness as marked their faith in
God, the two answering the one to the other as deep calleth unto deep,
eternally harmonious as they are.
The congregation swayed slowly down the aisle, Scottishly cold and
still, like the processional of the ice in the spring-time. They
reminded me of noble bergs drifting through the Straits of Belle Isle.
It was a Presbyterian flood, and every man a floe. But I suspected
mightily that they were nevertheless the product of the spring, and
somehow felt that they dwelt near the confines of the summer. The fire
which warmed their hearts had touched my own, and in that very moment
wherein they turned their backs upon me, I pursued them with
surrendering tenderness, and coveted for my own the rugged faithfulness
which hath now enriched these many golden years.
One or two turned to glance at me, but when their gaze met mine they
despatched their eyes on some impartial quest, as if caressing their
noble church or looking for some lingering friend.
The precentor, whose place was in a kind of songster's pulpit just below
me, was wreathed in the complacent air of a man who has discharged a
lofty duty and has done it well. He had borne himself throughout as the
real master of the entire service, and as one who had ruled from an
untitled throne. He cast me one or two swift glances, such as would
become an engineer who had brought his train or a pilot who had brought
his ship to the desired haven. I returned his overture with a look of
humble gratitude, and he thereupon relaxed as one well content with what
was his hard-earned due, but nothing more. I have well learned since
then that by so much as one values one's peace, by that much must one
reverence the precentor.
When I regained the vestry I found it peopled with six or seven elders
(a great and sweltering population), but no word of favour or approval
escaped a single Scottish lip. Their hour had not yet come; but I knew
it not, and was proportionately cast down by what seemed to me a silent
rhetoric of scorn. But it was the will of heaven to somewhat set aside
what I unknowingly estimated to be the verdict of indifference. The
beadle, as one with whom I had had a past, beckoned me without,
whispering that a "wumman body," a stranger, desired to speak with me in
an adjoining room.
Her story was short and sad; her request, the sobbing entreaty of a
broken heart that I would pray for her darling and her prodigal, her
first-born, wandering in that farthest of all countries which lies
beyond the confines of a mother's ken. I answered her with a glance
which owned the kinship of her tears, and pledged it with a hand which,
thank God, has ever found its warmest welcome in the hand of woe. Then I
went back to the vestry unafraid. "For what," thought I, "can these
elders do either for me or against me, if I am really a priest unto God
for one mother's son? This woman has evidently forgotten that I am a
candidate of St. Cuthbert's, and has remembered only that I am a
minister of God."