But he found his way through his course somehow. It was of him that Kelland, kindliest and most liberal of professors, said when the co-examiner hinted darkly of "spinning": "Poor fellow! We'll let him through. He's done his best." Then, after a pause, and in the most dulcet accents of a valetudinarian cherub, "It's true, his best is not very good!"
But Ebenezer escaped from the logic class-room as a roof escapes from a summer shower, and gladly found himself on the more proper soil of the philosophy of morals. Here he did indeed learn something, for the professor's system was exactly suited to such as he. In consequence, his notebooks were a marvel. But he did not shine so brightly in the oral examinations, for he feared, with reason, the laughter of his fellows. In English literature he took down all the dates. But he did not attend the class on Fridays for fear he should be asked to read, so he never heard Masson declaim,
"Ah, freedom is a noble thing!"
which some of his contemporaries consider the most valuable part of their university training.
After Ebenezer Skinner went to the Divinity Hall, he brought the same excellent qualities of perseverance to bear upon the work there. When the memorable census was taken of a certain exegetical class, requesting that each student should truthfully, and upon his solemn oath, make record of his occupation at the moment when the paper reached him, he alone, an academic Abdiel,
"Among the faithless, faithful only he,"
was able truthfully to report—Name, "Ebenezer Skinner"; Occupation at this Moment, "Trying to attend to the lecture." His wicked companions—who had returned themselves variously as "Reading the Scotsman," "Writing a love-letter," "Watching a fight between a spider and a bluebottle, spider weakening"—saw at once that the future of a man who did not know any better than to listen to a discourse on Hermeneutics was entirely hopeless. So henceforth they spoke of him openly and currently as "Poor Skinner!"
Yet when the long-looked-for end of the divinity course came, and the graduating class burst asunder, scattering seed over the land like an over-ripe carpel in the September sun, Ebenezer Skinner was one of the first to take root. He preached in a "vacancy" by chance, supplying for a man who had been taken suddenly ill. He read a discourse which he had written on the strictest academical lines for his college professor, and in the composition of which he had been considerably assisted by a volume of Mr. Spurgeon's sermons which he had brought home from Thin's wondrous shop on the Bridges, where many theological works await the crack of doom. The congregation to which he preached was in the stage of recoil from the roaring demagogy of a late minister, and all too promptly elected this modest young man.
But when the young man moved from Simon Square into the Townend manse, and began to preach twice a Sunday to the clear-headed business men and the sore-hearted women of many cares who filled the kirk, his ignorance of all but these theological books, as well as an innocence of the motives and difficulties of men and women (which would have been childlike had it not been childish), predoomed him to failure. His ignorance of modern literature was so appalling that the youngest member of his Bible-class smiled when he mentioned Tennyson. These and other qualities went far to make the Reverend Ebenezer Skinner the ministerial "inefficient" that he undoubtedly was.
But in time he became vaguely conscious that there was something wrong, yet for the life of him he could not think what it was. He knew that he had done every task that was ever set him. He had trodden faithfully the appointed path. He was not without some ability. And yet, though he did his best, he was sadly aware that he was not successful. Being a modest fellow, he hoped to improve, and went the right way about it. He knew that somehow it must be his own fault. He did not count himself a "Product," and he never blamed the Mill.