1828.] The Elder s Journey. 105 



Satan. There were those who looked at once with rage and fear on his 

 advancement, and on the forward part he took in the business of the 

 kirk, for Eben was not a man, when the good fight was to be fought, to 

 lie sleeping among the baggage and the harridans in the rear ; and there 

 were those also who twitted him with the back-slidings of his youth, 

 and would fain have shamed him from the van, crying, " Is Saul also 

 among the prophets ?" But he kept steadily on in the path of spiritual 

 ambition, praying and praising, like the sweet singer of Israel, foundering 

 one enemy with an argument, in which his extraordinary acuteness was 

 allowed far and near, and drowning the voice of another in a psalm, the 

 sound of which was, in dreadful sweetness, like the sound of the rams'- 

 horns of Joshua, which threw down the walls of Jericho at a blast. 



And thus he went on, conquering and to conquer, till his supremacy 

 was acknowledged by the whole parish. There was, at last, not a sick 

 soul within a dozen miles that could depart in peace without some 

 spiritual communing with the ruling elder, nor a burial to which he 

 was not invited as regularly as the doctor ; and, although in the latter 

 case, it behoved that the minister, through Christian courtesy, should 

 be asked to sanctify to the hearts of the mourners, by public prayer, not 

 merely the wine, and the almonds, and raisins, and almond-biscuits, placed 

 before them, but the calamitous occurrence which had assembled them 

 together ; yet it was generally contrived, that in a second room, whether 

 needed on account of numbers or not, Ebenezer Dick should perform 

 that requisite solemnity. On more joyous occasions, too, at the dinner- 

 meetings of friends, it was thought that nothing went right unless Eben 

 was there to say " twa words,"* either the sheep's head was over-singed, 

 or the hotch-potch over-thin, or something either over or under the mark ; 

 and at evening parties, patronized chiefly by elderly matrons and unmar- 

 riageable spinsters, at which a dish of tea and a hand at prayers were the 

 fashionable amusements, there was not his equal in the county. At the 

 setting of a star in Israel, more particularly, of extraordinary brightness 

 namely, the mortal extinction of Baillie Modiewart his light shone 

 forth in a manner that could not be hidden : his prayer at the thanks- 

 giving for the wine and sweetmeats was a very model of piety and pathos ; 

 and, indeed, even Davie Moffat, the deistical wight, allowed that he was 

 " bonnie on the corp." 



It seemed as if, in this progressive gratification of his spiritual ambi- 

 tion, that the outer man sympathized, in a fleshly manner, with the 

 inner ; for as the latter grew in grace, so did the former in grease if, on 

 such a subject, we may be allowed this profane approximation to a pun. 

 He increased, in fact, in corporal rotundity and bulk almost as fast as he 

 did in righteousness and fame ; and at last the physical magnitude of 

 his figure inspired nearly as much awe as the moral and religious great- 

 ness of his mind. But there are still some foibles in our mortal natures, 

 even when most purified as gold, even when seven times tried, will 

 still yield a portion of dross. The besetting foible of Ebenezer Dick 

 was that very ambition which had led on to his advancement, and which 

 now caused him to sit down on the summit, like a second Alexander, and 

 weep for new worlds to conquer. There was no one now among his 

 brethren in office who dared open his lips to him in argument no one, 

 indeed, whom he had not beaten over and over again to " immortal 



* To say grace. 



