Caricatures appeared in shop windows. His clerical brethren passed him without recognition, one of them with hisses. ‘I felt at first,’ he wrote, ‘so utterly cut off from every Christian brother, that, had a chimney-sweep given me his sooty hand, and smiled on me with his black face, I would have welcomed his salute and blessed him.’ With the common folk it was probably the word _Decalogue_ that did all the mischief. What it was they did not exactly know, but it was an awful thing, the Decalogue, like the Equator; and ‘Norman Macleod was for daein’ awa’ wi’t,’ as, with scared faces and bated breath, they told one another in the streets. Sending his speech to the printer--his old friend Mr. Erskine, who was now settled in Glasgow--he wrote-- MY DEAR ERSKINE,--Are you mad? If you are too mad to know it, let one of your devils tell it to me, and I actually will believe the demon. I am mad, and I would like to be in the same cell with you. Cell! It is all a _sell_ together! We are sold to Donkeys, and for _them_ we write, and so must consider every word, as if it was a thistle for Donkeys to eat! Do work off as fast as you can, or the people will believe there is no Decalogue, or that I am a devil--like yourself. Principal Tulloch pronounced the speech ‘noble and remarkable,’ but Lee (one of whose foibles it was to suppose himself extremely politic) called it ‘an escapade,’ and regretted the ‘injudicious language, the unnecessary shock to the pious feelings of many good people.’ This is how he would do it: ‘The observance of the Lord’s day rests on _no authority of Scripture at all_, but the said observance, when it can be shown to contribute to the general good of the community in soul and body, has been sufficiently vindicated.’ Lee delivered four long sermons on the Sabbath question, apparently without effect. With Macleod it was one big burst and done with it; an escapade, if you will, but settling the business, so that the first day of the week has never been the same since. For some time it was considered probable that the valiant Norman would be deposed, but, after all, the presbytery contented itself with an admonition (which he told them he would show to his son as ‘an ecclesiastical fossil’); and in the General Assembly, contrary to all expectation, his name was never mentioned! ‘Most wonderful!’ he says, ‘most unaccountable!’ And so it was; he had not retracted a syllable, nay more, he had distinctly stated in the presbytery that he departed from the Confession of Faith. The Sabbath affair was a skirmish; the battle was to be fought on the relation of the creed to the Church.