The Rabbi had often yielded to Carmichael and his other boys in the ordinary affairs of life--in meat and drink and clothing, even unto the continuance of his snuffing. He had been most manageable and pliable--as a child in their hands--and so Carmichael was quite confident that he could make matters right with the old man about a question of doctrine as easily as about the duty of a midday meal. Certain bright and superficial people will only learn by some solitary experience that faith is reserved in friendship, and that the most heroic souls are those which count all things loss--even the smile of those they love--for the eternal. For a moment Carmichael was shaken as if a new Rabbi were before him; then he remembered the study of Kilbogie, and all things that had happened therein, and his spirits rose. "How dare you suggest such wickedness, Rabbi, that any of us should ever criticise or complain of anything you say? Whatever you give us will be right, and do us good, and in the evening you will tell me all I said wrong." Saunderson looked at Carmichael for ten seconds as one who has not been understood, and sighed. Then he went down the kirk after the beadle, and the people marked how he walked like a man who was afraid he might fall, and, turning a corner, he supported himself on the end of a pew. As he crept up the pulpit stairs Elspeth gave her husband a look, and, although well accustomed to the slowness of his understanding, was amazed that he did not catch the point. Even a man might have seen that this was not the same minister that came in to the Sacrament with hope in his very step. "A'm no here tae say 'that a' kent what wes comin''"--Elspeth, like all experts, was strictly truthful--"for the like o' that wes never heard in Drumtochty, and noo that Doctor Saunderson is awa', will never be heard again in Scotland. A' jaloused that vials wud be opened an' a' wesna wrang, but ma certes"--and that remarkable woman left you to understand that no words in human speech could even hint at the contents of the vials. When the Rabbi gave out his text, "Vessels of wrath," in a low, awestruck voice, Carmichael began to be afraid, but after a little he chid himself for foolishness. During half an hour the Rabbi traced the doctrine of the Divine Sovereignty through Holy Scripture with a characteristic wealth of allusion to Fathers ancient and reforming, and once or twice he paused, as if he would have taken up certain matters at greater length, but restrained himself, simply asserting the Pauline character of St. Augustine's thinking, and exposing the looseness of Clement of Alexandria with a wave of the hand, as one hurrying on to his destination.