The religious interest had also the strongest domestic character in quite another sense from that of the family prayers which Dr Drummond was always enjoying.  “Set your own house in order and then your own church” was a wordless working precept in Elgin.  Threadbare carpet in the aisles was almost as personal a reproach as a hole under the dining-room table; and self-respect was barely possible to a congregation that sat in faded pews.  The minister’s gown even was the subject of scrutiny as the years went on.  It was an expensive thing to buy, but an oyster supper would do it and leave something over for the organ.  Which brings us to the very core and centre of these activities, their pivot, their focus and, in a human sense, their inspiration—­the minister himself.

The minister was curiously special among a people so general; he was in a manner raised in life on weekdays as he was in the pulpit on Sundays.  He had what one might call prestige; some form of authority still survived in his person, to which the spiritual democracy he presided over gave a humorous, voluntary assent.  He was supposed to be a person of undetermined leisure—­what was writing two sermons a week to earn your living by?—­and he was probably the more reverend, or the more revered, from the fact that he was in the house all day.  A particular importance attached to everything he said and did; he was a person whose life answered different springs, and was sustained on quite another principle than that of supply and demand.  The province of public criticism was his; but his people made up for the meekness with which they sat under it by a generous use of the corresponding privilege in private.  Comments upon the minister partook of hardiness; it was as if the members were determined to live up to the fact that the office-bearers could reduce his salary if they liked.  Needless to say, they never did like.  Congregations stood loyally by their pastors, and discussion was strictly intramural.  If the Methodists handed theirs on at the end of three years with a breath of relief, they exhaled it among themselves; after all, for them it was a matter of luck.  The Presbyterians, as in the case of old Mr Jamesion of St Andrew’s, held on till death, pulling a long upper lip:  election was not a thing to be trifled with in heaven or upon earth.

It will be imagined whether Dr Drummond did not see in these conditions his natural and wholesome element, whether he did not fit exactly in.  The God he loved to worship as Jehovah had made him a beneficent despot and given him, as it were, a commission.  If the temporal power had charged him to rule an eastern province, he would have brought much the same qualities to the task.  Knox Church, Elgin, was his dominion, its moral and material affairs his jealous interest, and its legitimate expansion his chief pride.  In “anniversary” sermons, which he always announced the Sunday before, he seldom refrained from contrasting the number on the roll of church membership,