The religious forces of the time were those of that Evangelicalism which has been the base of so many powerful characters, even among those who have afterwards rejected it, like Cardinal Newman and George Eliot. These were reinforced by the influences of the Disruption, then at their strongest. It was something to be born at such a time, a time when, to use the words of Lacordaire, there was a noble union of heroic character and memorable achievement. The pecuniary poverty and spiritual opulence of Scotland, on which Carlyle has said so much, were then seen at their best. If a cautious, reticent race, impatient of extravagant action and unmeasured speech, is to be found anywhere, it is among the peasants of Aberdeenshire; but when possessed and stirred by religious feeling they are capable of unyielding firmness and unstinted devotion. These qualities were remarkably brought out at the Disruption. The religious life of New England, pictured by Harriet Beecher Stowe, must have been similar in many things, and Dr. George Macdonald, who was born in Huntly, a few miles from Insch, has rendered some aspects with incomparable beauty and tenderness in his first works. The preaching was intensely theological. The great highways of truth were trodden and retrodden. Texts were largely taken from the Epistles, and the doctrines of grace were accurately and thoroughly expounded. Freshness, style, and the other qualities now held essential to popular sermons were unknown. But the preaching did its work, nevertheless, as Dr. Macdonald says, because it _was_ preaching—the rare speech of a man to his fellows, whereby they know that he is in his inmost heart a believer. As the result, every conscience hung out the pale or the red flag. Dr. Macdonald complains of the inharmonious singing, but others will testify with Mrs. Stowe that the slow, rude, and primitive rendering of the metrical Psalms excited them painfully. "It brought over one, like a presence, the sense of the infinite and the eternal, the yearning, and the fear, and the desire of the poor finite being, so ignorant and so helpless." Not less impressive was the piety to be found among the peasants. There were David Elginbrods in their ranks, men among whom you felt in the presence of the higher natures of the world—and women delivered from lonely, craving solitude by the Eternal Love that had broken through and ended the dark and melancholy years. These were to be found not only among the prominent Church members, but among others willing to be unknown, to be stones sunk in the foundation of the spiritual building. Under such influences the boy became a Christian almost unconsciously. There was no crisis in his life, that I can trace. When a mere boy he writes to his parents, during their absence from Insch, that he had conducted family worship according to their desire. "It required a great deal of previous thought and prayer, too, for I