through the opposite window.  The ground sloped upwards from the kirk to a pine-wood that fringed the great moor, and it was covered with snow, on which the moon was beginning to shed her faint, weird light.  Within, the light from the upright lamps was falling on the ruddy, contented faces of men and women and little children, but without it was one cold, merciless whiteness, like unto the justice of God, with black shadows of judgment.

“This is the message which I have to deliver unto you in the name of the Lord, and even as Jonah was sent to Nineveh after a strange discipline with a word of mercy, so am I constrained against my will to carry a word of searching and trembling.

“First”—­and between the heads the Rabbi paused as one whose breath had failed him—­“every man belongs absolutely to God by his creation.

“Second.  The purpose of God about each man precedes his creation.

“Third.  Some are destined to Salvation, and some to Damnation.

“Fourth”—­here the hard breathing became a sob—­“each man’s lot is unto the glory of God.”

It was not only skilled theologians like Lachlan Campbell and Burnbrae, but even mere amateurs who understood that they were that night to be conducted to the farthest limit of Calvinism, and that, whoever fell behind through the hardness of the way, their guide would not flinch.  As the Rabbi gave the people a brief space wherein to grasp his heads in their significance, Carmichael remembered a vivid incident in the Presbytery of Muirtown, when an English evangelist had addressed that reverend and austere court with exhilarating confidence—­explaining the extreme simplicity of the Christian faith, and showing how a minister ought to preach.  Various good men were delighted, and asked many questions of the evangelist—­who had kept a baby-linen shop for twenty years, and was unspoiled by the slightest trace of theology—­but the Rabbi arose and demolished his “teaching,” convicting him of heresy at every turn, till there was not left one stone upon another.

“But surely fear belongs to the Old Testament dispensation and is now done away with,” said the unabashed little man to the Rabbi afterwards.  “‘Rejoice,’ you know, my friend, ’and again I say, Rejoice’—­that is the New Testament note.”

“If it be the will of God that such a man as I should ever stand on the sea of glass mingled with fire, then this tongue will be lifted with the best, but so long as my feet are still in the fearful pit it becometh me to bow my head.”

“Then you don’t believe in assurance?” But already the evangelist was quailing before the Rabbi.

“Verily there is no man that hath not heard of that precious gift, and none who does not covet it greatly, but there be two degrees of assurance”—­here the Rabbi looked sternly at the happy, rotund little figure—­“and it is with the first you must begin, and what you need to get is assurance of your damnation.”