“Perhaps I may be able to remove some of your difficulties,” he said, and he called to himself a professor, one of those who had the young man’s training in hand. Thus Rob became a hero once more among all belonging to him. Had the minister spoken? What had the minister said? Had he come to his right mind? the good people asked. And, indeed, the minister did speak, and so did the professor, both of whom thought Rob’s a most interesting case. They were most anxious to remove his difficulties; nay, for that matter, to remove everything--doctrines and all--to free the young man from his scruples. They spoke, but they spoke with bated breath, scarcely able to express the full amount of the “respect and sympathy” with which they regarded these difficulties of his. “We too--” they said, in mysterious broken sentences, with imperfect utterance of things too profound for the common ear. And they did their best to show him how he might gulp down a great many things without hurting his conscience, which the robust digestion of the past had been able to assimilate, but which were not adapted for the modern mind. “There is more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds,” these gentlemen said. But Rob held out. He would have been foolish, indeed, as well as rarely disinterested and unsusceptible to the most delicate of flatteries, had he not held out. He had never been of so much importance in the course of his life. It may be doubtful, however, if it was his conscience alone which stopped him short in his career. Rob had learned in his tutorships, and among the acquaintances acquired at college, to know that a Scotch minister did not possess so elevated a position as in rural Fife he was thought to do. The young man had a large share of ambition in him, and he had read of society and of the great world, that abstraction which captivates inexperienced youth. A minister could no more reach this than, indeed, could the country laird who was the highest representative of greatness known to Rob; but literature could (he thought), art could: and he could write (he flattered himself), and he could draw. Why, then, should he bind himself to the restraints necessary for that profession, when other means of success more easy and glorious were in his power?