But these congregations assembled under conditions at once so formidable and romantic as made a zealot of the most cold.

They were the last of the faithful; God, who had averted His face from all other countries of the world, still leaned from heaven to observe, with swelling sympathy, the doings of His moorland remnant; Christ was by them with His eternal wounds, with dropping tears; the Holy Ghost (never perfectly realised nor firmly adopted by Protestant imaginations) was dimly supposed to be in the heart of each and on the lips of the minister.

And over against them was the army of the hierarchies, from the men Charles and James Stuart, on to King Lewie and the Emperor; and the scarlet Pope, and the muckle black devil himself, peering out the red mouth of hell in an ecstasy of hate and hope.

'One pull more!' he seemed to cry; 'one pull more, and it's done.

There's only Clydesdale and the Stewartry, and the three Bailiaries of Ayr, left for God.' And with such an august assistance of powers and principalities looking on at the last conflict of good and evil, it was scarce possible to spare a thought to those old, infirm, debile, _ab agendo_ devils whose holy place they were now violating.
There might have been three hundred to four hundred present.