XIII. A Man That is an Heretic Reject

The college year had come to an end. The results of the examinations had been published. The Juniors were preparing to depart for their summer work in the mission field. Of the graduating class, some were waiting with calm confidence the indications of the will of Providence as to their spheres of labour, a confidence undoubtedly strengthened by certain letters in their possession from leading members of influential congregations. Others were preparing with painful shrinking of heart to tread the weary and humiliating "trail of the black bag," while others again, to whom had come visions of high deeds and sounds of distant battle, were making ready outfits supposed to be suitable for life and work in the great West, or in the far lands across the sea.

Two high functions of college life yet remained, one, the Presbytery examination, the other, Professor Macdougall's student party. The annual examination before Presbytery was ever an event of nerve-racking uncertainty. It might prove to be an entirely perfunctory performance of the most innocuous kind. On the other hand, it might develop features of a most sensational and perilous nature. The college barometer this year was unusually depressed, for rumour had gone abroad that the Presbytery examination was to be of the more serious type. It was a time of searchings of heart for those who had been giving, throughout the session, undue attention to the social opportunities afforded by college life, and more especially if they had allowed their contempt for the archaic and oriental to become unnecessarily pronounced. To these latter gentlemen the day brought gloomy forebodings. Even their morning devotions, which were marked by unusual sincerity and earnestness, failed to bring them that calmness of mind which these exercises are supposed to afford. For their slender ray of hope that their memory of the English text might not fail them in the hour of trial was very materially clouded by the dread that in their embarrassment they might assign a perfectly correct English version to the wrong Hebrew text. The result of such mischance they would not allow themselves to contemplate. On the other hand, however, there was the welcome possibility that they might be so able to dispose themselves among the orientalists in their class that a word dropped at a critical moment might save them from this mischance. And there was the further, and not altogether unreal, ground of confidence, that the examiner himself might be uneasily conscious of the ever-present possibility that some hidden Hebrew snag might rudely jag a hole in his own vessel while sailing the mare ignotum of oriental literature. Of course, the examination would also include other departments of sacred learning, for it was the province and duty of Presbytery to satisfy itself as to the soundness in the faith of the candidates before them. On this score, however, few indulged serious anxiety. Once the Hebraic shoals and snags