第57章

"Yes. We got him ordained," replied the Convener, beginning to chuckle. A delighted, choking chuckle it was. Any missionary who had worked in his Presbytery would recognize the Convener in the dark by that chuckle. It began, if one were quick to observe, with a wrinkling about the corners of the sharp blue eyes, then became audible in a succession of small explosions that seemed to have their origin in the region of the esophagus and to threaten the larynx with disruption, until relief was found in a wide-throated peal that subsided in a second series of small explosions and gradually rumbled off into silence somewhere in the region of the diaphragm, leaving only the wrinkles about the corners of the blue eyes as a kind of warning that the whole process might be repeated upon sufficient provocation. "Yes, we got him ordained," he repeated when the chuckle had passed. "I was glad of your explanatory note about him. It guided us in our arrangements for examination."

"What happened?" inquired the Superintendent, leaning forward. He dearly loved a yarn, and he sorely hated to lose any of the more humorous incidents of missionary life, not only for the joy they brought him, but also because they furnished him with ammunition for his Eastern campaigns.

"Well, it was funny," said the Convener, his lips twitching and his eyes wrinkling, "though at one time it looked like an Assembly case with all seven of us up before the bar. You know McPherson, our latest importation in the way of ordained men? Somehow he had got wind of Boyle's trouble with the Presbytery in the East. McPherson is a fine fellow and doing good work."

"Yes," assented the Superintendent, "he's a fine fellow, but his conscience gives him a hard time now and then and works over time for other People."

"Well," continued the Convener, McPherson came to me about the matter in very considerable anxiety. I put him off, consulted with McTavish and Murray, and we decided that Boyle was too good a man to lose, and as to his heresy, it was not hurting Windermere as far as we could learn. So it happened"--here the Convener pulled himself up short to suppress the chuckle that threatened--"it happened that just as the examination was beginning McPherson was called out, and before he had returned the trials for license and ordination had been sustained. I think on the whole McPherson was relieved, but there were some funny moments after he came back into court."

"Heresy-hunting doesn't flourish in the West," said the Superintendent. "There's no time for it. Some of the Eastern Presbyteries have too many men with more time on their hands than sense in their heads."

"Certainly there was no time lost in this case," replied the Convener. "We knew Boyle's scholarship was right. We knew his heart was sound. We knew he was doing good work for us and we knew we wanted him. We were not anxious to know anything else."

"What we want for the West," said the Superintendent, his voice vibrating in a deeper tone, "is men who have the spirit of the Gospel with the power to preach it and the love of their fellowmen, with tact to bring it to bear upon them. A little heresy, more or less, won't hurt them. Orthodoxy is my doxy, heterodoxy the other fellow's."

"In Boyle's case, I believe he was helped by his touch of heresy.

It gave him a kind of brotherly feeling with all heretics. It was that more than anything else that broke up the Freethinkers' Club."

"Ah," said the Superintendent, bending eagerly forward, again on the scent, "I didn't hear that."