APPRENTICESHIP TO THE LAW.

21

was at home, as the father was brighter then and more accessible.

He decided that John should be bred to the law, and found an opening for him in a friend's office in Aberdeen, and in 1824 he began his apprenticeship. It lasted only a few months, and of this short experience we have little record. In a letter to his sister Christina, who was now at an Edinburgh school and spent her holidays with the Tweedside cousins, he says: “I am now made a lawyer totally. I like the occupation pretty well, and might like it very well, if I could be sure of getting off at two o'clock." But lawyers' work presents no complaisant pliability to young apprentices whose minds teem with other interests. To please his father, John would have gone steadily through his probation, had not a change of the most engrossing character come over his whole attitude towards life. This was effected by two events, which struck forcibly at his sensitive apprehension and roused the most vivid and serious realisation. The first was the death of his little brother Alexander, who had been ailing for some time. Four little brothers and sisters had been taken before this, but his reflective powers had not till now reached the stage when the full significance of death could excite and occupy them.

His kindness to the little ones was a household word; he was never known to be cross in the nursery or irritable with one of the children. Sandy was seven years old, and had been a favourite of the big brother of fifteen, and now the large place filled by the household pet was vacant, and it chilled his astonished heart, worsted in death's onslaught. In this loss his affections realised the terrific power of death; another event roused his mind to face the fact and ascertain his own relation towards it.

His father had several friends, wont to spend an evening hour or two in his study, to which John was now admitted on equal terms. Amongst these was a young advocate, a tall and energetic man, full of vitality, brimming over with good spirits and laughter. He went into the country on some business connected with his profession, slept at a little inn in damp sheets, took a chill, and died of rapid consumption, disappearing from his accustomed place with a suddenness which startled John as if a miracle had taken place before his eyes. The man had been the very embodiment of overflowing health. There had been no natural mounting up to full maturity and gradual decadence to death. In the bloom and vigour of early manhood death smote him and laid him low. That old men should die

A SOLEMN PERIOD.

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seemed plain enough; that weakly children should fade from life was grievous, but not mysterious; but that, after all the preparation which youth must undergo to fit the man for life-that, so fitted and equipped, on the very threshold of usefulness and experience, death might leap from an ambuscade and lay him low-that pulled him up from all easy-going acceptance of what today and to-morrow had to offer, since the third day might find him face to face with the same dread experience.

His training hitherto had provided him with no foundation of actual creed on which he might have built some jerry philosophy wherein to hide his consciousness of " the terror that walketh by day." His father was not what is called a religious man; his mother, about whose memory there lingers some sweet perfume of piety, was gone; his aunt was very doctrinal, but a Moderate. The boy had to do the work himself, and had to discover for himself what death was and what life, and in what degree the life that now is stands towards the life that is to come. He became absorbed in his task. There could be no knowledge so important as this, none indeed of any importance except this, and so every other interest fell away. Some religious books adorned the circular table in the parlour of state. They

were such as respectability deemed suitable for the parlour-table, and, except the hand which dusted them, nothing interfered with their recognised functions. Boston's Fourfold State,' the Pilgrim's Progress,' Blair's 'Sermons,' were part of this parlour furniture, and John seized the staid volumes, and pored over them at every leisure moment. Shakespeare, Scott, and Burns were set aside, and grew to his anxious young eyes mere fascinating fiends bent on luring him from the one thing needful his soul's salvation. The things of this world became literally mere shadows to him, if not sins. He had begun to take dancing lessons, that he might bear his part at the little social gatherings to which he was invited. He left them off, declined all invitations, refused to go to the theatre, abjured all lighter reading, questioned seriously the need of graver reading, and came to the conclusion that since this world and the things thereof must pass away, it was folly to be occupied with any of its concerns. So even Rollin's 'Ancient History' was discarded as profane study. No Bernard nor Bruno could have set the respective claims of this life and the other in sterner antithesis. For through and through the Calvinistic teaching runs the bitter strain of ingratitude for this wonderful

DECISION FOR THE MINISTRY.

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and blessed life on earth, for its wealth of good and perfect gifts which come to us from the eternal Father. And this bitterness and blindness are a direct inheritance from the monks of the middle ages, when the times were often evil and hid the working of God's providence.

Had he lived before John Knox, he would have settled the problem for himself, as did Bernard and Bruno; but at a time when there was no shuffling off the mundane coil, he could only hope to get himself saved with fear and trembling by bending every faculty towards the contemplation of eternity and its claims. The lawyer's office became intolerable. Sordid motives and dull handling of money were the sum of its inspiration and activity, and he entreated his father to remove him from an atmosphere so noxious to a soul in travail.

We can imagine the surprise with which the clever, kindly father would contemplate a son of his so abnormally affected, and it speaks volumes for his affection that he made no demur, but consented at once that he should study for the ministry, and enter himself as a student at the Edinburgh University, there to complete his course in Arts before beginning his Divinity. No doubt that, with his sanguine temperament, Mr Blackie foresaw a fine career for his gifted son: