Not inconsiderable, too, were the outward pledges of his victory. For, as we said, the sleek agitators had been dismissed, the mills and factories were running again, and the industrial tides of life in New Jedboro gradually subsided into their old channels.
And now those unseen forces that are ever silently working to upset old standards and to displace old ways, broke out in a new form, this time threatening the very centre of one of St. Cuthbert's most established customs.
XV
A BOLD PROPOSAL
The old precentor's box beneath the pulpit was still St. Cuthbert's only choir loft. Many years back, the iconoclasts among them had managed to gather a few of the most songful ones together in a front pew, demurely sitting as part of the congregation, but concentrated for purposes of leadership. This proved, however, more than St. Cuthbert's could abide, and its mal-odour of "High Church" alarmed the Scottish Presbyterians. Going down the aisle, Saunders M'Tavish voiced the general alarm in sententious tones—
"The thin end o' the wedge," he warningly exclaimed, "and it's no' a far cry noo to the candles an' the incense. They'll be bringin' ower the pope next," and the kirk session, convening the next night, soon stopped that leakage in their ancestral dyke.
Since then the precentor's box had preserved its lonely splendour. Within it, in the far-back thunderous days of their great Boanerges, the precentor stood to lead the swelling psalm as it rose from the seated multitude—for they stood to pray, but sat to sing. From the fast-gathering mists that now threaten those receding years, surviving ones still rescue images of the precentor's ruffled locks, swept by the pentecostal swirl—so seemed it to his worshippers—of Dr. Grant's Geneva gown. And in this same box Sabbath after Sabbath appeared the stalwart form of Archie M'Cormack, modern in nothing but his years.
His was a conservatism of the intense and passionate sort; not the choice of his judgment, but the deepest element of his life. He no more chose old ways, old paths, or the spirit of earlier times, than the trout chooses water or the Polar bear its native snows. He was born not among them, but of them, and remained till death their incarnate descendant. No mere Scotch kirkman was Archie, but a prehistoric Calvinist, a Presbyterian by the act of God and an elder from all eternity. Even his youthful thoughts and imaginations adjusted themselves to the scope of the Westminster Confession, abhorring any horizon unillumined by the gray light which flowed in mathematical exactitude from a hypothetical heart in the Shorter Catechism.