these being loans from a neighbour. But once a week there was always
a newspaper to be read. It was often a week or a fortnight old, for,
as it cost sixpence halfpenny, it was only by six or eight neighbours
clubbing together that such a luxury could be brought within the reach
of a working-man's family; but it was never so old as to be
uninteresting to such eager listeners.

But the most powerful of all the influences which affected John Cairns
at this period of his life remains to be mentioned--that which came
to him from his religious training and surroundings. The Christian
religion has acted both directly and indirectly on the Scottish
peasantry, and it has done so the more powerfully because of the
democratic character of the Presbyterian form which that religion took
in Scotland. Directly, it has changed their lives and has given them
new motives and new immortal hopes. But it has also acted on them
indirectly, doing for them in this respect much of what education and
culture have done for others. It has supplied the element of idealism
in their lives. These lives, otherwise commonplace and unlovely, have
been lighted up by a perpetual vision of the unseen and the eternal;
and this has stimulated their intellectual powers and has so widened
their whole outlook upon life as to raise them high above those of
their own class who lived only for the present. All who have listened
to the prayers of a devout Scotch elder of the working-class must have
been struck by this combination of spiritual and intellectual power;
and one thing they must have specially noticed is that, unlike the
elder of contemporary fiction, he expressed himself, not in broad
Scotch but in correct and often stately Bible English.

But this intellectual activity is often carried beyond the man in whom
it has first manifested itself. It tends to reappear in his children,