Dr. Cumming invariably preached for over an hour, sometimes for an
hour and a half, and yet I never felt bored or wearied by his long
discourses, but really looked forward to them. This was because
his sermons, instead of consisting of a string of pious
platitudes, interspersed with trite ejaculations and irrelevant
quotations, were one long chain of closely-reasoned argument.
Granted his first premiss, his second point followed logically
from it, and so he led his hearers on point by point, all closely
argued, to an indisputable conclusion. I suppose that the
inexorable logic of it all appealed to the Scottish side of me.
His preaching had the same fascination for me that Euclid's
propositions exercised later, even on my hopelessly unmathematical
mind.
Whatever the weather, we invariably walked home from Drury Lane to
South Audley Street, a long trudge for young feet, as my mother
had scruples about using the carriages on Sundays.
Neither my father nor my mother ever dined out on a Sunday, nor
did they invite people to dinner on that day, for they wished as
far as possible to give those in their employment a day of rest.
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