While he was ministering the promises in that cottage, and fighting a strong battle for an immortal soul, Carmichael had sent away his dogs, and was sitting alone in the low-roofed study of the Free Kirk manse, with the curtains drawn and the wood fire lighting up the room--for he had put out the lamp--but leaving shadows in the corners where there were no books, and where occasionally the red paper loomed forth like blood. As the rabbi preached that day, the buoyancy and self-confidence of youth had been severely chastened, and sitting in the manse pew, curtained off from the congregation, the conscience of the young minister had grown tender. It was a fearful charge to lay on any man, and he only four-and-twenty years of age, the care of human souls; and what manner of man must he be who should minister unto them after a spiritual sort the body and blood of Jesus Christ? How true must be his soul, and how clean his hands! For surely, if any man would be damned in this world, and in that which is to come, it would be the man who dispensed the sacrament unworthily. As he sat in the firelight the room seemed to turn into a place of judgment. Round the walls were the saints of the Church Catholic, and St. Augustine questioned him closely regarding the evil imagination of youthful days, and Thomas à Kempis reproached him because he had so often flinched in the way of the holy cross. Scottish worthies whose lives he had often read, and whose sayings had been often quoted from the pulpit, sat in judgment upon him as to his own personal faith and to his own ends in the ministry. Samuel Rutherford, with his passionate letters, reproached him for his coldness towards Christ; and MacCheyne's life, closed in early manhood, and filled with an unceasing hunger for the salvation of human souls, condemned him for his easy walk and conversation; and Leighton, the gentlest of all the Scotch saints, made him ashamed of bitter words and resentful feelings. And from the walls the face of his mother's minister regarded him with wistful regret, and seemed to plead with him to return to his first love and the simplicity of his mother's faith.