“When I see you setting off down the road on Monday morning,” the village schoolmaster once said to me, “I sometimes wonder if you are regarding human life as radically as you did when you were preaching in the kirk the day before. You seem, somehow, easier-minded about it. You come into the school. What, honestly, do you see there? A fine bunch of children, going on their pleasant way to become decent men and women—or are they really heading for a life which is rooted in the world's evil, a life out of which you'll tell them in a few years they must be saved by the grace of God?

“And then on the Tuesday morning,” he went on, “you're off to the Presbytery. Now, tell me honestly, don't you meet together pretty much as any other body of people would do—to transact your business, to express your opinions, and to come to the judgment which your own experience has led you to hold? And yet your distinctive characteristic is supposed to be that you believe that human experience and human judgment are shot through with a deadly evil. You say that you distrust yourselves, that ‘of yourselves you can do nothing aright”—but I can't say that you look or sound particularly like people who are distrusting themselves. You say in your opening prayer that you want to be over-ruled and corrected—but you'll forgive me for saying that you don't seem very often to go through the process during the meeting that follows.