But when the first notes of the preacher's voice fell on their astonished ears, it is recorded that some of the more impulsive stood up on their feet.
That was never their despised minister, Hughie Peebles. The strong yet restrained diction, the firmness of speech, the resonance of voice in the deeper notes—all were strange, yet somehow curiously familiar. They had heard them all before, but never without that terrible alloy of weakness, and the addition of a falsetto something that made the preacher's words empty and valueless.
And the sermon—well, there never had been anything like it heard in the Ten Parishes before. There was, first of all, that great passage where the preacher pictured the Wise King sending out his builders and carpenters, his architects and cunning workmen—those very men who had caused the Temple to rise on Moriah and set up the mysterious twin pillars thereof—to build in that great and terrible wilderness a city like to none the world had ever seen. There was his gradual opening up of the text, and applying it to the sending of the Word of God to the heathen who dwelt afar off—without God and without hope in the world.
Then came the searching personal appeal, which showed to each clearly that in his own heart there were wilderness tracts—as barren, as deadly, as apparently hopeless as the ground whereon Solomon set up his wonder-city—Tadmor, Palmyra, the city of temples and palaces and palm-trees.
And above all, the preacher's application was long remembered, his gradual uprising from the picture of the earthly king, "golden-robed in that abyss of blue," to the Great King of all the worlds—"He who can make the wilderness, whether that of the heathen in distant lands and far isles of the sea, or that other more difficult, the wilderness in our own breasts, to blossom as the rose!" These things will never be forgotten by any in that congregation.
Once only Hugh Peebles faltered. It was but for a moment. He gasped and glanced down to the first seat in the front of the church. Then in another moment he had gripped himself and resumed his argument. Some there were who said that he did this for effect, to show emotion, but there were two men in that congregation who knew better—the preacher and Mr. Erskine.
All Machermore went home treading on the viewless air. They hardly talked to each other for sheer joy and astonishment. "Dinna look as if we were surprised, lads! Let on that we get the like o' that every day in oor kirk!"
That was John McWhan's word, which passed from lip to lip. And Machermore and the Marrow Kirk thereof became almost insufferably puffed up.
"I'll no say a word mair," said the ruling elder, "gin he never preaches anither decent word till the day o' his death."
This was, indeed, the general sense of the congregation. But Hugh Peebles, though perhaps he never reached the same pinnacle of fame, certainly preached much better than of old. With his wonderful success, too, he had gained a certain confidence in himself; added to which he was almost as often at Barlochan as before the missionary sermon.