A SUPRA-LAPSARIAN

Jeremiah Saunderson had remained in the low estate of a "probationer" for
twelve years after he left the Divinity Hall, where he was reported so
great a scholar that the Professor of Apologetics spoke to him
deprecatingly, and the Professor of Dogmatics openly consulted him on
obscure writers. He had wooed twenty-three congregations in vain, from
churches in the black country, where the colliers rose in squares of
twenty, and went out without ceremony, to suburban places of worship,
where the beadle, after due consideration of the sermon, would take up
the afternoon notices and ask that they be read at once for purposes of
utility, which that unflinching functionary stated to the minister with
accuracy and much faithfulness. Vacant congregations desiring a list of
candidates, made one exception, and prayed that Jeremiah should not be
let loose upon them, till at last it came home to the unfortunate scholar
himself that he was an offence and a by-word. He began to dread the
ordeal of giving his name, and, as is still told, declared to a
household, living in the fat wheatlands and without any imagination, that
he was called Magor Missabib. When a stranger makes a statement of this
kind to his host with a sad seriousness, no one judges it expedient to
offer any remark; but it was skilfully arranged that Missabib's door
should be locked from the outside, and one member of the household sat up
all night. The sermon next day did not tend to confidence--having seven
quotations in unknown tongues--and the attitude of the congregation was
one of alert vigilance; but no one gave any outward sign of uneasiness,
and six able-bodied men, collected in a pew below the pulpit, knew their
duty in an emergency.

Saunderson's election to the Free Church of Kilbogie was therefore an