Mr. Petrie, whom it cost the soutar so much care and effort to love, and
who, although intellectually small, was yet a good man, and by no means a
coward where he judged people's souls in danger, thought to save the world
by preaching a God, eminently respectable to those who could believe in
such a God, but to those who could not, a God far from lovely because far
from righteous. His life, nevertheless, showed him in many ways a believer
in Him who revealed a very different God indeed from the God he set forth.
His faith, therefore, did not prevent him from looking upon the soutar, who
believed only in the God he saw in Jesus Christ, as one in a state of
rebellion against him whom Jesus claimed as his father.

Young Blatherwick had already begun to turn his back upon several of the
special tenets of Calvinism, without, however, being either a better or a
worse man because of the change in his opinions. He had cast aside, for
instance, the doctrine of an everlasting hell for the unbeliever; but in
doing so he became aware that he was thus leaving fallow a great field for
the cultivation of eloquence; and not having yet discovered any other
equally productive of the precious crop, without which so little was to be
gained for the end he desired--namely, the praise of men, he therefore
kept on, "for the meantime," sowing and preparing to reap that same field.
Mr. Petrie, on the other hand, held the doctrine as absolutely fundamental
to Christianity, and preached it with power; while the soutar, who had
discarded it from his childhood, positively refused, jealous of strife, to
enter into any argument upon it with the disputatious little man.

As yet, then, James was reading Scotch metaphysics, and reconciling himself
to the concealment of his freer opinions, upon which concealment depended
the success of his probation, and his license. But the close of his studies
in divinity was now near at hand.