There was always, however, a religious section not just very sure about Norman Macleod, he was so unlike a consecrated vessel,--his face never long enough, the whites of his eyes unseen, the whole show of him dashed with secularity. He was no saint in the sailor’s definition, ‘a melancholy chap who is all day long singing of psalms.’[5] ‘As for sadness and gloom,’ he says somewhere, ‘in accepting _all_ things from our Father, I will pay no such compliment to the devil.’ How he shocked the Pharisees! and among his chance hosts during lecturing tours there were simple souls whom his unclerical mirth bewildered. One such, a country provost, at whose house he had sat talking and telling stories till two o’clock in the morning, remarked, with a shake of the head, ‘He’s no’ the man I thocht he was at a’.’ Of his professional brethren the only type he could not bear was the prim priest. Once, on the way to a railway station, accompanied by several of the local presbytery, he had told a Highland story, not omitting the ‘tamns.’ They had all laughed but one, a celebrated prig, who had kept his mouth pursed and his eyes on the ground. Macleod whispered to a neighbour, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be fine to see---- drunk?’ At the Burns centenary celebration in Glasgow he was the only minister who appeared, though many had been invited. He did so at the risk of his reputation, for religious opinion was up against the movement; and, on the other hand, resolved to mark the evil in the poet’s influence, he anticipated the howls of the Burns maniacs. He spoke of the noble protest for the independence and dignity of humanity expressed in the heroic song, ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ and showed what the poet’s intense sentiment of nationality had done for the Scottish race; but of the immoral verses, ‘Would God,’ he exclaimed, ‘they were never written, never printed, and never read!’ Macleod was a man of simple purity of soul. Challenged once at Stockholm to go to the theatre, he consented to be one of the party, but no sooner had the ballet begun than he was observed to be hanging his head, with a pained expression on his face. Soon he rose and went out. When his friends rejoined him in the hotel, and one of them chaffed him for leaving the performance, ‘Sir,’ he thundered, ‘are you a father? How would you like to see your own daughters----?’ Yet if ministers are now amongst the foremost in proposing the immortal memory, it is largely due to Norman Macleod; and was it not all in the spirit of Burns, his after activity in hacking at the links of our Puritan fetters?