But the most powerful of all the influences which affected John Cairns at this period of his life remains to be mentioned—­that which came to him from his religious training and surroundings.  The Christian religion has acted both directly and indirectly on the Scottish peasantry, and it has done so the more powerfully because of the democratic character of the Presbyterian form which that religion took in Scotland.  Directly, it has changed their lives and has given them new motives and new immortal hopes.  But it has also acted on them indirectly, doing for them in this respect much of what education and culture have done for others.  It has supplied the element of idealism in their lives.  These lives, otherwise commonplace and unlovely, have been lighted up by a perpetual vision of the unseen and the eternal; and this has stimulated their intellectual powers and has so widened their whole outlook upon life as to raise them high above those of their own class who lived only for the present.  All who have listened to the prayers of a devout Scotch elder of the working-class must have been struck by this combination of spiritual and intellectual power; and one thing they must have specially noticed is that, unlike the elder of contemporary fiction, he expressed himself, not in broad Scotch but in correct and often stately Bible English.

But this intellectual activity is often carried beyond the man in whom it has first manifested itself.  It tends to reappear in his children, who either inherit it or have their own intellectual powers stimulated in the bracing atmosphere it has created.  The instances of Robert Burns and Thomas Carlyle, who both came out of homes in which religion—­and religion of the old Scottish type—­was the deepest interest, will occur to everyone.  Not the least striking illustration of this principle is shown in the case of John Cairns.  In the life of his soul he owed much to the godly upbringing and Christian example shown to him by his parents; but the home at Dunglass, where religion was always the chief concern, was the nursery of a strong mind as well as of a strong soul, and both were fed from the same spring.  In this case, as in so many others, spiritual strength became intellectual strength in the second generation.

The Cairns family attended church at Stockbridge, a mile beyond Cockburnspath and two miles from Dunglass, and the father was an elder there from 1831 till his death.  The United Secession—­formerly the Burgher—­Church at Stockbridge occupied a site conveniently central for the wide district which it served, but very solitary.  It stood amid cornfields, on the banks of a little stream, and looked across to the fern-clad slopes of Ewieside, an outlying spur of the Lammermoors.  Except the manse, and the beadle’s cottage which adjoined it, there was no house within sight, nor any out of sight less than half a mile away.