The place of his ministry seemed fitted by nature, and largely endowed by history, for the reception and entertainment of all singular and personified beliefs. Part was maritime, and part mountainous, uniting the aërial creeds of the shepherds with the stern and more imposing beliefs of the husbandman, and the wild and characteristic superstitions of the sailors. It often happened, when he had marched against and vanquished a sin or a superstition of native growth, he was summoned to wage war with a new foe; to contend with a legion of errors, and a strange race of spirits from the haunted coasts of Norway or Sweden. All around him on every side were records of the mouldering influence of the enemies of faith and charity. On the hill where the heathen Odin had appeared to his worshippers in the circle of granite, the pillars of his Runic temple promised to be immortal; but the god was gone, and his worship was extinct. The sword, the spear, and the banner, had found sanctuary from fields of blood on several lofty promontories; but shattered towers and dismantled castles told that for a time hatred, oppression, and revenge had ceased to triumph over religion. Persecution was now past and gone, a demon exorcised by the sword had hallowed three wild hills and sanctified two little green valleys with the blood of martyrs. Their gravestones, bedded among heather or long grass, cried up to heaven against their oppressors in verses which could not surely fail to elude the punishment awarded by the Kirk against poesy. Storms, and quicksands, and unskilful mariners, or, as common belief said, the evil spirits of the deep, had given to the dangerous coast the wrecks of three stately vessels; and there they made their mansions, and raised whirlwinds, and spread quicksands, and made sandbanks, with a wicked diligence, which neither prayer nor preaching could abate. The forms under which these restless spirits performed their pranks have unfortunately been left undefined by a curious and poetical peasantry.
It happened one winter, during the fifteenth year of the ministry of Ezra Peden, and in the year of grace 1705, that he sat by his fire pondering deep among the treasures of the ancient Presbyterian worthies, and listening occasionally to the chafing of the coming tide against cliff and bank, and the fitful sweep of heavy gusts of wind over the roof of his manor. During the day he had seemed more thoughtful than usual; he had consulted Scripture with an anxious care, and fortified his own interpretation of the sacred text by the wisdom of some of the chiefs and masters of the calling. A Bible, too, bound in black oak, and clasped with silver, from the page of which sin had received many a rebuke, and the abominations of witchcraft and sorcery had been cleansed from the land, was brought from its velvet sanctuary and placed beside him. Thus armed and prepared, he sat like a watcher of old on the towers of Judah; like one who girds up his loins and makes bare his right arm for some fierce and dubious contest.
All this stir and preparation passed not unnoticed of an old man, his predecessor’s coeval, and prime minister of the household; a person thin, religious, and faithful, whose gifts in prayer were reckoned by some old people nearly equal to those of the anointed pastor. To such a distinction Josiah never thought of aspiring; he contented himself with swelling the psalm into something like melody on Sunday; visiting the sick as a forerunner of his master’s approach, and pouring forth prayers and graces at burials and banquetings, as long and dreary as a hill sermon. He looked on the minister as something superior to man; a being possessed by a divine spirit; and he shook his head with all its silver hairs, and uttered a gentle groan or two, during some of the more rapt and glowing passages of Ezra’s sermons.
This faithful personage stood at the door of his master’s chamber, unwilling to go in, and yet loath to depart. “Josiah, thou art called, Josiah,” said Ezra, in a grave tone, “so come hither; the soul of an evil man, a worker of iniquity, is about to depart; one who drank the blood of saints, and made himself fat with the inheritance of the righteous. It hath been revealed to me that his body is sorely troubled; but I say unto you, he will not go from the body without the strong compulsion of prayer, and therefore am I summoned to war with the enemy; so I shall arm me to the task.”
Josiah was tardy in speech, and before he could reply, the clatter of a horse’s hoofs was heard at the gate: the rider leapt down, and, splashed with mire and sprinkled with sleet, he stood in an instant before the minister.
“Ah, sir,” said the unceremonious messenger, “haste! snatch up the looms of redemption, and bide not the muttering of prayer, else auld Mahoun will have his friend Bonshaw to his cauldron, body and soul, if he hasna him half-way hame already. Godsake, sir, start and fly, for he cannot shoot over another hour! He talks of perdition, and speaks about a broad road and a great fire, and friends who have travelled the way before him. He’s no his lane, however,—that’s one comfort; for I left him conversing with an old cronie, whom no one saw but himself—one whose bones are ripe and rotten; and mickle they talked of a place called Tophet,—a hot enough region, if one can credit them; but I aye doubt the accounts of such travellers,—they are like the spies of the land of promise”——
“Silence thine irreverent tongue, and think of thy latter end with fear and trembling,” said Ezra, in a stern voice. “Mount thy horse, and follow me to the evil man, thy master; brief is the time, and black is the account, and stern and inexorable will the summoning angel be.”
And leaping on their horses, they passed from the manse, and sought out the bank of a little busy stream, which, augmented by a fall of sleet, lifted up a voice amid its rocky and desolate glen equal to the clamour of a mightier brook. The glen or dell was rough with sharp and projecting crags, which, hanging forward at times from opposite sides, seemed to shut out all further way; while from between their dark-gray masses the rivulet leapt out in many divided streams. The brook again gathered together its waters, and subsided into several clear deep pools, on which the moon, escaping for a moment from the edge of a cloud of snow, threw a cold and wavering gleam. Along the sweeps of the stream a rough way, shaped more by nature than by the hand of man, winded among the rocks; and along this path proceeded Ezra, pondering on the vicissitudes of human life.
At length he came where the glen expanded, and the sides became steep and woody; amid a grove of decaying trees, the mansion of Bonshaw rose, square and gray. Its walls of rough granite were high and massive; the roof, ascending steep and sharp, carried a covering of red sandstone flags; around the whole the rivulet poured its scanty waters in a deep moat, while a low-browed door, guarded by loopholes, gave it the character of a place of refuge and defence. Though decayed and war-worn now, it had, in former times, been a fair and courtly spot. A sylvan nook or arbour, scooped out of the everlasting rock, was wreathed about with honeysuckle; a little pool, with a margin studded with the earliest primroses, lay at its entrance; and a garden, redeemed by the labour of man from the sterile upland, had its summer roses and its beds of lilies, all bearing token of some gentle and departed inhabitant.
As he approached the house, a candle glimmered in a small square window, and threw a line or two of straggling light along the path. At the foot of the decayed porch he observed the figure of a man kneeling, and presently he heard a voice chanting what sounded like a psalm or a lyke-wake hymn. Ezra alighted and approached,—the form seemed insensible of his presence, but stretched his hands towards the tower; and while the feathery snow descended on his gray hair, he poured his song forth in a slow and melancholy manner.