before him, why, then, all this talk of faith and hope and love will be thrown away; for to him it will not mean anything at all.

But if the man can rationally and honestly look up and say, 'The Power that made me cannot have made me in vain ; I will accept my life as a great opportunity; I will take all my experiences as a part of my education; I will try to fit myself to every situation I am called to fill; I will keep stepping toward the light; I will do what I can to make this world and this day good for everybody '-then that man takes his place with Jesus Christ; and in his heart there will grow the feeling: 'I am a child in the Father's house; he has given me being; he has made a place for me; he has prepared for me an inheritance; he has undertaken to bring me up, and he will perfect that which concerns me; he will carry on his own work to completion. From him is my origin, with him is my destiny. His will shall be my law his purpose shall be my purpose.'

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

AND

HENRY DRUMMOND

AMONG the revolters from the articles of Scots Calvinism, there are those who felt their atmosphere stifling, were rebels through the lungs and limbs, and sought another air for the sake of a wholesome and joyous manhood. That kind of rebellion was exemplified by Stevenson and Drummond.

Not against restriction of thought did they revolt so much as against constriction of breath. They desired conditions of chest expansion, capacity for more vital breathing, room for a larger heart.

While others, with intellectual uneasiness, rose up against Calvinistic dogmatism, they, with nervous unrest, were in opposition to Calvinistic deformation. To them the air of the dogmatic region was stuffy:

there was not enough mental ozone in it : they needed to be out into the open, with the bracing mountain elixir or the saline sea-ether, and the sense of deep draughts of spiritual vigour.

Their rebellion was not polemic but psychic. They had a dislike to the kind of manhood produced by Calvinism: it was too lank and grim for their taste. They had an ideal of a fuller and lovelier manliness and for its realization desired fresh air, evolving emotion, and dignifying spirituality.

Stevenson and Drummond were, indeed, both heretics mentally-unbelievers, wanderers from the orthodox fold; but they were such as men of feeling, rather than as rationalists. They did not attack dogmas in controversial fashion, nor dispute points of faith on logical lines; but they were none the less opposers of the dogmatic temper. They had imagination and the poetic spirit, and looked out on life from another point of view and with other eyes than the dogmatist did.

They are striking illustrations of the

radical wrongness of the orthodox conception of uniformity of thought, and of the serviceable operation of the law of variation. Each had an originality for which there was no allowance in the creed bound circle of Calvinistic life, and which inevitably took them out into regions which conventionality had not sanctified.

Both were poets and philosophers; each a preacher-Drummond more specifically theological-and both influential in directing thought and inspiring feeling. There is a notable resemblance in their mental make the same kind of light shines from their books and they arrive on the same eminence.

Stevenson was most prolific as a story teller Drummond told tales incidentally; both were radiant centres of amusement and education for children and had something to say to students. Stevenson by temperament was a revolter from the confinement and monotony of orthodoxy. Bred in it, and pressed to conform, he early rebelled and went his own way. He could not take to the ultra-Calvinism

of his conscientious father. The old man was a critic of the Church, but of a reactionary sort, being in favour of a more rigorous belief and practice than it sanctioned.

Stevenson's nurse was a Calvinist also, and through her his mind was filled with the materials of orthodoxy. As has been said, Scotch Calvinism, its metaphysic and questionings of Fate, " free will, foreknowledge absolute," what it invariably awakens, was much with him, in the sense of reprobation and the gloom born of it, as well as the abounding joy in the sense of the elect; the Covenanters in their wild resolution, the moss troopers and their dare devilrie, Pentland risings and fights of Rullion Green: he not only never forgot them, but they mixed themselves in his very breath of life and made him a great questioner.'

O, Į wad like to ken, to the beggar wife says I— The reason o' the cause an' the wherefore o'

the why,

Wi' mony anither riddle brings the tear into my e'e, It's gey an' easy spierin', says the beggar wife to me.