Till three o’clock that morning, Gideon Baxter, Minister of Cotho, had sat up revising his sermon. The house was full of the silence of snow. The least sound was portentous. The wall clock ticked as though the fate of mankind hung on its leaden weights. When he put down his pen it fell on the desk like a hammer blow. Jael took a hammer and drove a nail into the head of Sisera. In eight hours’ time, under God’s will, he must hammer his sermon into the heads of his congregation. It was the last sermon in Advent, the last chance to hammer in the reality of a Day of Judgment, the wrath of an offended God, the untiring pains of Hell. For on the heels of Advent came Christmas, that backsliding season of riot and drunkenness, of going from house to house singing and shouting like revellers, of kissing under the heathen mistletoe, of neighbour toppling neighbour into damnation in the name of mirth and good fellowship. And on the heels of Christmas came Hogmanay, puffing Christmas embers into a flaring godless defiance of the cold and scarcity the New Year would bring. How many would remember his words then, how fast would his nails hold?

‘And finally…’ ‘Finally’ was the warning, the nail driven in at the close of every last sermon in Advent, to be knocked out by merry Christmas. It was the warning against relying on the efficacy of a deathbed repentance. The Christmas before, he reminded them, two of their number while going from one merrymaking to another had lost their way in the dark and fallen into the river. They had been heard shouting for help before the strength of the river had thrust them under and drowned them. They had shouted for help, and found none. If they had cried for mercy, would they have found it? Leaning over the pulpit’s edge as though he would have embraced his hearers, he adjured, he implored them to bear in mind the words of Master Thomas Boston, Minister of Ettrick. ‘Let not the profligate think he can leap from the harlot’s lap to Abraham’s bosom.’