'No, thank you. I'll just lie quiet till you come back—if I can.'
Robert instructed Shargar to watch for the slightest sound from the sick-room, and went to church.
As he approached the granite cathedral, the only one in the world, I presume, its stern solidity, so like the country and its men, laid hold of his imagination for the first time. No doubt the necessity imposed by the unyielding material had its share, and that a large one, in the character of the building: whence else that simplest of west windows, seven lofty, narrow slits of light, parted by granite shafts of equal width, filling the space between the corner buttresses of the nave, and reaching from door to roof? whence else the absence of tracery in the windows—except the severely gracious curves into which the mullions divide?—But this cause could not have determined those towers, so strong that they might have borne their granite weight soaring aloft, yet content with the depth of their foundation, and aspiring not. The whole aspect of the building is an outcome, an absolute blossom of the northern nature.
There is but the nave of the church remaining. About 1680, more than a century after the Reformation, the great tower fell, destroying the choir, chancel, and transept, which have never been rebuilt. May the reviving faith of the nation in its own history, and God at the heart of it, lead to the restoration of this grand old monument of the belief of their fathers. Deformed as the interior then was with galleries, and with Gavin Dunbar's flat ceiling, an awe fell upon Robert as he entered it. When in after years he looked down from between the pillars of the gallery, that creeps round the church through the thickness of the wall, like an artery, and recalled the service of this Sunday morning, he felt more strongly than ever that such a faith had not reared that cathedral. The service was like the church only as a dead body is like a man. There was no fervour in it, no aspiration. The great central tower was gone.
That morning prayers and sermon were philosophically dull, and respectable as any after-dinner speech. Nor could it well be otherwise: one of the favourite sayings of its minister was, that a clergyman is nothing but a moral policeman. As such, however, he more resembled one of Dogberry's watch. He could not even preach hell with any vigour; for as a gentleman he recoiled from the vulgarity of the doctrine, yielding only a few feeble words on the subject as a sop to the Cerberus that watches over the dues of the Bible—quite unaware that his notion of the doctrine had been drawn from the Æneid, and not from the Bible.
'Well, have you got anything, Robert?' asked Ericson, as he entered his room.
'Nothing,' answered Robert.
'What was the sermon about?'
'It was all to prove that God is a benevolent being.'
'Not a devil, that is,' answered Ericson. 'Small consolation that.'