The best way there to preach
the Resurrection, he thought, would be to contrast the sepulchral
gloom of the church, its dreary psalms and drearier sermons, with
the sunlight on the graves, the lark filled sky, and the wind blowing
where it listed. But although the minister was a young man of the
commonest order, educated to the church that he might eat bread,
hence a mere willing slave to the beck of his lord and master, the
patron, and but a parrot in the pulpit, the schoolmaster not only
endeavoured to pour his feelings and desires into the mould of his
prayers, but listened to the sermon with a countenance that revealed
no distaste for the weak and unsavoury broth ladled out him to
nourish his soul withal. When however the service--though whose
purposes the affair could be supposed to serve except those of Mr
Cairns himself, would have been a curious question--was over,
he did breathe a sigh of relief; and when he stepped out into the
sun and wind which had been shining and blowing all the time of
the dreary ceremony, he wondered whether the larks might not have
had the best of it in the God praising that had been going on for
two slow paced hours. Yet, having been so long used to the sort of
thing, he did not mind it half so much as his friend Malcolm, who
found the Sunday observances an unspeakable weariness to both flesh
and spirit.
On the present occasion, however, Malcolm did not find the said
observances dreary, for he observed nothing but the vision which
radiated from the dusk of the small gallery forming Lossie pew,
directly opposite the Norman canopy and stone crusader.
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