They were a dour and uncomfortable lot, these fathers in Israel, "orthodox, orthodox sons of auld John Knox," pitiless in their logic theologic, hard as granite and unbending as the oak, but just, terribly just. And argue! Oh, Lord! the times I've heard them after service, as they smoked their pipes by the fire in the schoolroom in the winter or under the glad sun in the summer, descant upon predestination and effectual calling; capping text with text. They were the "elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ"; elect "to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled... reserved in heaven" for them. They were of those "ordained to eternal life," feeding on the sincere milk of the Word. They hugged to their souls that hard saying of St. Paul: "Whom he did predestinate them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified" They had very vivid conceptions, too, of the lot of the unregenerate. Hell was very real to them, and about the tortures of the damned they had no doubt. And there were so very few that weren't damned, damned from everlasting to everlasting. In my early youth, whilst still under the influence of this very literal interpretation of the Scriptures. I came to the conclusion that I could reckon on my fingers the elect of the Lord, pruning the elect of Pole Moor, making election of the very elect. Now will it be credited that my father, who shepherded this ungentle flock, was of all men that ever I have known the meekest and the gentlest--to be sure there were those of his congregation who in their process of winnowing the chaff from the grain had winnowed out my father himself, perchance he, even he, was not of the truly chosen. But elect or non-elect, better man never trod shoe leather, none juster, none truer in speech and deed, none more charitable. We lived miles from the abodes of many of his church--yet in season and out of season, rain or shine, he made his visitations, trudging at dead of night, by the light of moon or lanthorn, across the wild, bleak, oft sodden moors, through hail, and sleet, and snow, and mire, to some distant homestead to pray by the bedside of the sick and dying; "in perils of waters, in perils by his own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness,… in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness." No man ever had a greater heart in so small a body--for truth to tell, he was but small of stature and lean withal as lean he might very well be considering how little he ate of the bread that perisheth and how ill he used his spare frame. He simply did not know fear, and, whilst all the countryside trembled and cringed before those godless Burnplatters, he bearded them