Roderick Brown was pursuing his theological studies in Edinburgh, during the years of theological excitement which preceded the catastrophe. Youth is sympathetic, and the leaders of the movement had holy names and historic memories to conjure with. It is not wonderful, therefore, that he caught the enthusiasm of the men about him, and thirsted to bear his part in contending for the truth. At each succeeding vacation he returned to his father's manse with a heightened ardour for ecclesiastical combat; and many and long were their discussions on the Church question and its new lights. To the young man's surprise, he found his arguments fall rather flat and pointless in presence of his father's calm and dispassionate statements of the case; but the elder found the wisdom and understanding gathered in sixty years' intercourse with the Church and the world equally powerless to cool down the heat and ardour of the enthusiastic youth. Therefore, as must ever be the case where affection and respect are combined with common sense, they finally agreed to differ, each forbearing to insist on his own preferences, and confident that the other sought only the right according to his lights.
The disappointment to Doctor Brown was not slight. He felt himself rapidly failing, and he had hoped to find in his son an assistant and successor in whose hands he might contentedly leave the care of his beloved flock, and pass on to an uninterrupted fulfilment the many good works he had commenced in his parish. Besides his parish, the future of his daughter may also have weighed much on the old man's mind. She had been born and bred in the manse, and was as well known to every one of the parishioners, as the minister himself. To the poor she had been the recognised messenger of mercy. Ever since her mother's death (when she was thirteen), had devolved on her with the assistance of the old housekeeper, the many and onerous duties that fall to the country minister's wife; and in fulfilling these she had won the love of rich and poor alike.
Roderick too had been bred in the manse, and was known to every living soul in the parish. He had fished the burns with the sons of the farmers and crofters, when a lad, and as he grew older shot on the moors with the lairds. Gentle and simple alike had only kind words to say of the minister's son, and to these was added sincere respect when he entered on his theological studies, and afforded such assistance to his father in his sacred duties as the laws of the Church permit to the unordained. There would have been but one voice in the parish from Patron, Heritors, and People, as to who should succeed Doctor Brown in his charge, and it was very bitter to the old man to find that for an enthusiastic scruple all his hopes were to be laid low.
In the year of the Disruption, Dr. Brown died, and in the same year his son Roderick was licensed to preach by the Free Church. On many therefore fell a double bereavement; his father was taken away, and forthwith it became necessary to gather up his household gods, the relics of his past, steeped in all the memories of childhood and of those who had made it glad, and to move forth into a new and an untried life.
General Drysdale, the patron and chief heritor of the parish, a staunch Conservative in Church and State, was greatly disappointed at the step taken by the son of his old friend, in quitting the church of his father. He would gladly have presented him to the living, and felt personally aggrieved that he had deliberately incapacitated himself from accepting it. The late minister had been his frequent guest at Inchbracken, and the intercourse between the families of the great house and the manse had been constant and cordial, and had formed a most useful bond of connection between the laird and his poorer tenants; but now, owing to the wrongheadedness of an inexperienced youth, all this must cease, and who could tell how the new incumbent would answer? The breeding of himself and his family might make their presence unacceptable at the castle, and in that case intercourse would necessarily cease, and the laird and his people, in consequence, would drift apart from want of the old link; or even should the new comer answer, it would be long before a stranger could establish ties between himself and the different orders of his flock, and longer still before he could become a bond between one order and another.
But even this did not make up the whole sum of Roderick's offences. His personal merits themselves added another count to the General's indictment against him. Beloved by rich and poor, his religious ministrations were greatly valued in his native parish, and many who might in other circumstances have stood staunch by the Kirk and the laird, were seduced into dissent by his insidious exhortations. Not only had he refused to accept the legitimate cure of souls, but he had raised the standard of rebellion within the bounds, thereby tending to subvert the wisely-appointed order of things, and contributing to the inletting of that free tide of revolutionary democracy which the General espied afar as doomed eventually to sweep away lairds and all other salutary potentates, and lead on to levelling ideas, the abomination of desolation, and the end of the world. Clearly, then, it was the duty of every well-regulated mind to discountenance such doings; and in the interest of public order, and for the sake of his misguided tenantry, General Drysdale's duty to refuse ground for the erection of a schismatic meetinghouse--a temple of discord, upon any portion of his and; or to rent a dwelling to the missionary of rebellion and error.
Roderick therefore being unable to find shelter for himself and his sister within five miles of the church and manse of Kilrundle, betook himself to the neighbouring hamlet of Glen Effick, which was beyond the territory of this well-meaning persecutor, but still hovered on the edge of Kilrundle Parish, over which he could raid at will, and hold meetings on the hillside for the faithful of the flock, who gathered in ever increasing crowds to hear him, emulous of the 'Hill Folk' of old, who, as they were often reminded, 'held not their lives dear, but went forth to serve the Lord in the wilderness.'
Almost all the cottars in Glen Effick would have been proud to receive the minister and his sister, but their means were less than their desires. The cottages were but small, and a few vacant rooms, scattered here and there throughout the village, were all that could be offered to shelter them and their effects. Hence in one cottage he had his books and made his study, and in this also they both slept. In another, across the road, they took their meals, and had bestowed such of their goods as were in use for that purpose. In a third was Mary's piano and many of her belongings, and there they would probably have spent their evenings, but that an old body, with more zeal than space at her disposal, had insisted on bestowing their tea equipage in her corner cupboard, where it was visible through the glass door, and proved her a mother in Israel. Thither they felt bound to follow it occasionally, that so Luckie Howden might have the glory of making tea for the minister.
All this was very tiresome to Mary, and sometimes she thought her patience would break down entirely. During her peaceful and happy life with her father she had imbibed all his ideas. She still clung to the Established Church as her head, and disapproving of the Disruption, she had neither zeal for the cause, nor a pleasing sense of martyrdom to mitigate the worries, discomforts, and privations of her daily life. The one only solace of her lot was her great love for her brother, from whom she had resolved never to part, and with whom she was prepared to endure even greater hardships. An uncle had pressed her strongly to make her home with him, but she could not tear herself from Roderick, and so stayed on.