"'You will show your face here every Sabbath,' answered Angus Bain, 'for the Lord said unto me, "Wait for the man that trembles at the Word, and iss not able to speak, and it will be a sign unto you,"' and a fery goot minister he wass, and made the hypocrites in Zion to be afraid."
Lachlan dealt tenderly with our young Free Kirk minister, for the sake of his first day, and passed over some very shallow experience without remark, but an autumn sermon roused him to a sense of duty. For some days a storm of wind and rain had been stripping the leaves from the trees and gathering them in sodden heaps upon the ground. The minister looked out on the garden where many holy thoughts had visited him, and his heart sank like lead, for it was desolate, and of all its beauty there remained but one rose clinging to its stalk, drenched and faded. It seemed as if youth, with its flower of promise and hope, had been beaten down, and a sense of loneliness fell on his soul. He had no heart for work, and crept to bed broken and dispirited. During the night the rain ceased, and the north wind began to blow, which cleanses nature in every pore, and braces each true man for his battle. The morrow was one of those glorious days which herald winter, and as the minister tramped along the road, where the dry leaves crackled beneath his feet, and climbed to the moor with head on high, the despair of yesterday vanished. The wind had ceased, and the glen lay at his feet, distinct in the cold, clear air, from the dark mass of pines that closed its upper end to the swelling woods of oak and beech that cut it off from the great Strath. He had received a warm welcome from all kinds of people, and now he marked with human sympathy each little homestead with its belt of firs against the winter's storms, and its stackyard where the corn had been gathered safe; the ploughman and his horses cutting brown ribbons in the bare stubble; dark squares where the potato stalks have withered to the ground, and women are raising the roots, and here and there a few cattle still out in the fields. His eye fell on the great wood through which he had rambled in August, now one blaze of colour, rich green and light yellow, with patches of fiery red and dark purple. God seemed to have given him a sermon, and he wrote that evening, like one inspired, on the same parable of nature Jesus loved, with its subtle interpretation of our sorrows, joys, trust, and hope. People told me that it was a "rael bonnie sermon," and that Netherton had forgotten his after-sermon snuff, although it was his turn to pass the box to Burnbrae.
The minister returned to his study in a fine glow of body and soul, to find a severe figure standing motionless in the middle of the room.
"Wass that what you call a sermon?" said Lachlan Campbell, without other greeting.
John Carmichael was still so full of joy that he did not catch the tone, and explained with college pedantry that it was hardly a sermon, nor yet a lecture.
"You may call it a meditation."
"I will be calling it an essay without one bite of grass for starving sheep."
Then the minister awoke from a pleasant dream, as if one had flung cold water on his naked body.
"What was wrong?" with an anxious look at the stern little man who of a sudden had become his judge.
"There wass nothing right, for I am not thinking that trees and leaves and stubble fields will save our souls, and I did not hear about sin and repentance and the work of Christ. It iss sound doctrine that we need, and a great peety you are not giving it."