And so in faith, if not wholly in understanding, they listened to the sermon in which the Doctor, all unprepared for such an invasion, inculcated with much learning the doctrine of submission to the civil magistrate with the leading cases of Saint Paul and Saint Augustine illustrated by copious quotations from the original.
They sat with fixed attention, never flinching even when the Doctor, doing his duty, as he said, both as a magistrate and as a Christian man, gave the Free Traders many a word to make their ears sing. They were in his place, and every man had the right to speak as he chose in his own house. But when Israel led them back to the old Tabernacle, with its pleasant smell of tar obscuring the more ancient bilge, and had told them that they were all “a lot of hell-deserving sinners who, if they missed eternal damnation, it would be with their rags badly singed,” they sighed a blissful sigh and felt themselves once more at home, sitting under a man who understood them and their needs.
Nevertheless, when Israel gave out the closing hymn it was one which, as he explained, “prays for the Church of God visible upon the earth, as well in the Parish Kirk as in their own little Tabernacle.” “Now then, men,” he concluded, “let us have it with a will. Put all that you have got between your beards and your shoulder-blades into it. If I see a man hanging in stays, he shall sing it by himself!”
So the Ranters sang till the sound went from the little dissenting Bethel on the shore up to the stately Kirk of the parish cinctured with its double acre of ancient grave-stones—
“I love Thy Kingdom, Lord,
The house of Thine abode:
The Church our blest Redeemer saved
With His own precious blood.
For her my tears shall fall,
For her my prayers ascend:
To her my cares and toils be given
Till toils and cares shall end!“
“And three cheers for the Doctor!” shouted swearing Imrie, who had been worked up by the events of the day to such a pitch of excitement that only the sound of his own thunderous voice had power to calm him.
And douce Cameronians coming over Eden Valley hill stood still and wondered at the profanation of the holy day, not knowing. Even sober pillars of the Kirk Erastian going homeward smiled and shook their heads pityingly.
“It was doubtless a good thing,” said my father to a fellow elder, a certain McMinn of the Croft, “to see so many of the wild and regardless at the Kirk, but I’m sore mistaken if there’s not some of the old Adam left in the best of them yet, to judge by the noise they are making down yonder.”
“Except Israel himsel’!” said McMinn of the Croft, “man, dominie, since he converted Jock, my ploughman, he hasna been drunk yince, and I get twice the work oot o’ the craitur for the same wage.”