1(J4 



THE ELDEK b JOURNEY. 



IN the town of Dodrum, in the west of Scotland, there dwelt a man of 

 singular sanctity -and great temporal respectability, whose name was 

 Ebenezer Dick. He was by trade a clothier, or cloth merchant, as his 

 sign-board designated him, a business which, in a small Scottish town, 

 is usually found in the hands of a person of some substance, the staple 

 commodity in which he deals being of more sterling and substantial 

 value than the usual gear which forms the traffic of an inconsiderable 

 community. In such a place too, the money being scarce, or coming in 

 only in uncertain and unwilling dribbles, like the first out-pourings of a 

 bottle of strong ale, magnifies, in a surprising manner, the personal im- 

 portance of the trader who can afford to give a few months' credit ; and, 

 at last, by a seeming contradiction in the nature of things, makes the 

 stream of riches play gluck, gluck, into his own till, more like the hinder 

 end of the said decanting. The natural consequence of the " golden 

 opinion," bought by this liberal mode of transacting business, is the 

 elevation of the individual to such offices of trust and dignity as are in 

 the giving, or under the influence of, his fellow- to wnmen ; and many 

 years before the occurrence took place, which I have undertaken to 

 relate, Eben Dick was called up to go out and in before this small 

 people as an elder of the national kirk. This honour could hardly be 

 said to be unexpected, and yet its effect on Eben was like that of elec- 

 tricity. If ever the doctrine of a regenerating grace, which moves the 

 heart of man, not as Archimedes would have moved the world if he 

 had something to stand upon but by its own innate and incompre- 

 hensible potency, without aid or footing, were exemplified in the human 

 life and conversation, it was those of Ebenezer Dick. From the moment 

 he became an elder, he ceased to be a cloth-merchant, delivering over to 

 his better, or rather now, indeed, his worser half, the whole charge of 

 the business, and applying himself to no pursuit more worldly than the 

 management of such temporalities of the kirk as it was his duty to watch 

 over and administer. But it was not to things temporal alone that he 

 directed his attention, for although Dr. Chalmers had not yet begun to 

 thunder on the " drum ecclesiastic," and in his hands it was truly a 

 base drum, in the awful majesty of its tone the servants of the remoter 

 tabernacles understood their duty as labourers in the vineyard almost as 

 well as it was afterwards inculcated by that eminent minister. The 

 elder, in such places, was not merely a kind of out- door flunky of the 

 sanctuary, to stand at the plate and throw a " greedy glowr" at the 

 passer by ; he was the assistant of the minister, even in the spiritual 

 duties of his function, and except just in the out-pourings from the 

 pulpit, and in the worldly matter of stipend, he might be looked upon 

 as fully the equal of the appointed children of Aaron. To visit the poor, 

 to comforted the afflicted, to pray by the sick, to re-assure the dying, to 

 sanctify the occasion at a burial, to bless the meat at good men's feasts, 

 and to wrestle in argument with the enemies of the true cause where- 

 ever he should meet with them, were the daily occupations of Eben 

 Dick. 



Sore were his travailings at the outset of the labour, for the evil-one 

 thrusts himself even within the pale of the altar, in a thousand terrible 

 shapes to harass and waylay. In pride, self-conceit, anger, envy, 

 malice, and all uncharitableness, Eben recognised the emissaries of 



