My youngest brother had a great taste for drawing, and was perpetually depicting terrific steeplechases.  From a confusion of ideas natural to a child, he always introduced a church steeple into the corner of his drawings.  One Sunday he had drawn a most spirited and hotly-contested “finish” to a steeplechase.  When remonstrated with on the ground that it was not a “Sunday” subject, he pointed to the church steeple and said, “You don’t understand.  This is Sunday, and those jockeys are all racing to see which of them can get to church first,” which strikes me as a peculiarly ready and ingenious explanation for a child of six.

In London we all went on Sundays to the Scottish Presbyterian Church in Crown Court, just opposite Drury Lane Theatre.  Dr. Cumming, the minister of the church at that time, enjoyed an immense reputation amongst his congregation.  He was a very eloquent man, but was principally known as always prophesying the imminent end of the world.  He had been a little unfortunate in some of the dates he had predicted for the final cataclysm, these dates having slipped by uneventfully without anything whatever happening, but finally definitely fixed on a date in 1867 as the exact date of the Great Catastrophe.  His influence with his flock rather diminished when it was found that Dr. Cumming had renewed the lease of his house for twenty-one years, only two months before the date he had fixed with absolute certainty as being the end of all things.  All the same, I am certain that he was thoroughly in earnest and perfectly genuine in his convictions.  As a child I thought the church—­since rebuilt—­absolutely beautiful, but it was in reality a great, gaunt, barn-like structure.  It was always crammed.  We were very old-fashioned, for we sat down to sing, and we stood to pray, and there was no instrument of any sort.  The pew in front of us belonged to Lord Aberdeen, and his brother Admiral Gordon, one of the Elders, always sat in it with his high hat on, conversing at the top of his voice until the minister entered, when he removed his hat and kept silence.  This was, I believe, intended as a protest against the idea of there being any special sanctity attached to the building itself qua building.  Dr. Cumming had recently introduced an anthem, a new departure rather dubiously welcomed by his flock.  It was the singular custom of his congregation to leave their pews during the singing of this anthem and to move about in the aisles; whether as a protest against a daring innovation, or merely to stretch their limbs, or to seek better places, I could never make out.

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.