despite the difference in rank, had, during the brief year she lived and
reigned at Cairnforth, been almost like an equal friend and companion to
his own dead wife. Their two faces--Lady Cairnforth's as she looked
the last time he saw her in her coffin, and his wife's as she lay in
hers--mingled together, and affected him powerfully.

The good minister was not remarkable for the brilliance of his sermons,
which he wrote and "committed"--that is, learned by heart, to deliver
in pseudo-extempore fashion, as was the weary custom of most Scotch
ministers of his time. But this Sunday, all that he had committed
slipped clean out of his memory. He preached as he had never been known
to preach before, and never preached again--with originality, power,
eloquence; speaking from his deepest heart, as if the words thence
pouring out had been supernaturally put into it; which, with a
superstition that approached to sublimest faith, he afterward solemnly
believe they had been.

The text was that verse about "all things working together for good to
them that love God;" but, whatever the original discourse had been, it
wandered off into a subject which all who knew the minister recognized
as one perpetually close to his heart--submission to the will of God,
whatever that will might be, and however incomprehensible it seemed to
mortal eyes.

"Not, my friends," said he, after speaking for a long time on this head
--speaking rather than sermonizing, which, like many cultivated but
not very original minds, he was too prone to do--"not that I would
encourage or excuse that weak yielding to calamity which looks like
submission, but is, in fact, only cowardice; submitting to all things as
to a sort of fatality, without struggling against them, or trying to