THE GRANITE CHURCH.
The next day was Sunday.Robert sat, after breakfast, by his friend's bed.
'You haven't been to church for a long time, Robert: wouldn't you like to go to-day?' said Ericson.
'I dinna want to lea' you, Mr.Ericson; I can bide wi' ye a' day the day, an' that's better nor goin' to a' the kirks in Aberdeen.'
'I should like you to go to-day, though; and see if, after all, there may not be a message for us.If the church be the house of God, as they call it, there should be, now and then at least, some sign of a pillar of fire about it, some indication of the presence of God whose house it is.I wish you would go and see.I haven't been to church for a long time, except to the college-chapel, and Inever saw anything more than a fog there.'
'Michtna the fog be the torn-edge like, o' the cloody pillar?'
suggested Robert.
'Very likely,' assented Ericson; 'for, whatever truth there may be in Christianity, I'm pretty sure the mass of our clergy have never got beyond Judaism.They hang on about the skirts of that cloud for ever.'
'Ye see, they think as lang 's they see the fog, they hae a grup o'
something.But they canna get a grup o' the glory that excelleth, for it's not to luik at, but to lat ye see a' thing.'
Ericson regarded him with some surprise.Robert hastened to be honest.
'It's no that I ken onything aboot it, Mr.Ericson.I was only bletherin' (talking nonsense)--rizzonin' frae the twa symbols o' the cloud an' the fire--kennin' nothing aboot the thing itsel'.I'll awa' to the kirk, an' see what it's like.Will I gie ye a buik afore I gang?'
'No, thank you.I'll just lie quiet till you come back--if I can.'
Robert instructed Shargar to watch for the slightest sound from the sick-room, and went to church.
As he approached the granite cathedral, the only one in the world, Ipresume, its stern solidity, so like the country and its men, laid hold of his imagination for the first time.No doubt the necessity imposed by the unyielding material had its share, and that a large one, in the character of the building: whence else that ******st of west windows, seven lofty, narrow slits of light, parted by granite shafts of equal width, filling the space between the corner buttresses of the nave, and reaching from door to roof? whence else the absence of tracery in the windows--except the severely gracious curves into which the mullions divide?--But this cause could not have determined those towers, so strong that they might have borne their granite weight soaring aloft, yet content with the depth of their foundation, and aspiring not.The whole aspect of the building is an outcome, an absolute blossom of the northern nature.
There is but the nave of the church remaining.About 1680, more than a century after the Reformation, the great tower fell, destroying the choir, chancel, and transept, which have never been rebuilt.May the reviving faith of the nation in its own history, and God at the heart of it, lead to the restoration of this grand old monument of the belief of their fathers.Deformed as the interior then was with galleries, and with Gavin Dunbar's flat ceiling, an awe fell upon Robert as he entered it.When in after years he looked down from between the pillars of the gallery, that creeps round the church through the thickness of the wall, like an artery, and recalled the service of this Sunday morning, he felt more strongly than ever that such a faith had not reared that cathedral.The service was like the church only as a dead body is like a man.There was no fervour in it, no aspiration.The great central tower was gone.
That morning prayers and sermon were philosophically dull, and respectable as any after-dinner speech.Nor could it well be otherwise: one of the favourite sayings of its minister was, that a clergyman is nothing but a moral policeman.As such, however, he more resembled one of Dogberry's watch.He could not even preach hell with any vigour; for as a gentleman he recoiled from the vulgarity of the doctrine, yielding only a few feeble words on the subject as a sop to the Cerberus that watches over the dues of the Bible--quite unaware that his notion of the doctrine had been drawn from the ?neid, and not from the Bible.
'Well, have you got anything, Robert?' asked Ericson, as he entered his room.
'Nothing,' answered Robert.
'What was the sermon about?'
'It was all to prove that God is a benevolent being.'
'Not a devil, that is,' answered Ericson.'Small consolation that.'
'Sma' eneuch,' responded Robert.'I cudna help thinkin' I kent mony a tyke (dog) that God had made wi' mair o' what I wad ca' the divine natur' in him nor a' that Dr.Soulis made oot to be in God himsel'.
He had no ill intentions wi' us--it amuntit to that.He wasna ill-willy, as the bairns say.But the doctor had some sair wark, Ithoucht, to mak that oot, seein' we war a' the children o' wrath, accordin' to him, born in sin, and inheritin' the guilt o' Adam's first trespass.I dinna think Dr.Soulis cud say that God had dune the best he cud for 's.But he never tried to say onything like that.He jist made oot that he was a verra respectable kin' o' a God, though maybe no a'thing we micht wuss.We oucht to be thankfu'
that he gae's a wee blink o' a chance o' no bein' brunt to a'
eternity, wi' nae chance ava.I dinna say that he said that, but that's what it a' seemed to me to come till.He said a hantle aboot the care o' Providence, but a' the gude that he did seemed to me to be but a haudin' aff o' something ill that he had made as weel.Ye wad hae thocht the deevil had made the warl', and syne God had pitten us intil 't, and jist gied a bit wag o' 's han' whiles to haud the deevil aff o' 's whan he was like to destroy the breed a'thegither.For the grace that he spak aboot, that was less nor the nature an' the providence.I cud see unco little o' grace intil 't.'
Here Ericson broke in--fearful, apparently, lest his boyfriend should be actually about to deny the God in whom he did not himself believe.