Although, strangely enough, Archie could never master the catechism. A random question was his doom. Catechise him straight through, and his response was swift and accurate. No thrust availed against him, a knight invincible in his well-pieced coat of mail, a very dragon of orthodoxy from whose lips there issued clouds of Calvinism, till the minister himself was often well-nigh obscured thereby. But once dip Archie into the middle of its mighty bosom to search an answer there, and he would never reappear, or, if he haply might, it would be with sorry fragments of divers answers in his hands, incongruous to absurdity. Is not the same true of babbling guides in old cathedrals?
"What is sin?" the minister once suddenly asked Archie in the course of catechetical visitation, the district being assembled at one central house. Archie's answer, being a mosaic, is still quoted by those who heard it, terror-stricken where they sat.
"Sin," replied the wide-gleaning man, "is an act of God's free grace, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in its full purpose of and endeavour after new obedience."
This terrible and miscellaneous eruption was the more lamentable from the fact that his poor wife heard this blare of discordant dogmas with unbelieving ears, while even little Kirsty gasped, exclaiming above her breath, "Ye're sair muddled, faither."
Archie looked vacantly from wife to daughter, like one who has let something drop. Then gazing despondently at the minister's struggling face, he said, "I'm feart that's no' jist richt in a' its parteeklars." The epilogue was worse than the tragedy. A grim Presbyterian smile went round, more vocal than the echoing laughter of less silent sects, and it smote on Archie's ears like the scorners' bray. Forward went the catechism, a penitential gloom succeeding the sinful indulgence. The Scottish sun dips suddenly.
Sober enough now are the faces from which all merriment has fled, forgetting the precentor's discomfiture, and looking only to their own deliverance from the guns now turned against themselves. But Archie did not forget—into a secret Scottish place he had retreated, his hot, burning heart forging some weapon of revenge. It was ready in due time. An hour after, just before the armistice which the benediction alone made sure, he turned upon the honest rustics with a look of belated triumph in his face, and slew them with the retort which long travail had brought forth.
"A'm no' sae gleg on the subject o' sin as some fowk I ken."
The minister, by aid of special grace, said nothing. Archie, although he held solemnly on his way through the benediction, as became a precentor, yet chuckled exultantly all the homeward road. At evening worship he selected the Twenty-seventh Psalm and sang the second verse with rejoicing unction—
"Whereas mine enemies and foes,
Most wicked persons all,
To eat my flesh against me rose,
They stumbled and did fall,"
and the honest rustics, as they sought the cover of their homes with emancipated feet, pronounced one to the other that most Scotch of all Scottish verdicts, half of eulogy and half of condemnation: "He's a lad, is Airchie. Ay, Airchie's a lad to be sure."