They were face to face with the tremendous Pauline Doctrine of Sovereignty.

It was significant that by Macdonald Dubh, his brother, and the other older and more experienced members of the class, the doctrine was regarded as absolutely inevitable and was accepted without question, while by Yankee and Ranald and all the younger members of the class, it was rejected with fierce resentment.
The older men had been taught by the experience of long and bitter years, that above all their strength, however mighty, a power, resistless and often inscrutable, determined their lives.

The younger men, their hearts beating with conscious power and freedom, resented this control, or accepting it, refused to assume the responsibility for the outcome of their lives.

It was the old, old strife, the insoluble mystery; and the minister's wife, far from making light of it, allowed its full weight to press in upon the members of her class, and wisely left the question as the apostle leaves it, with a statement of the two great truths of Sovereignty and Free Will without attempting the impossible task of harmonizing these into a perfect system.

After a half-hour of discussion, she brought the lesson to a close with a very short and very simple presentation of the practical bearing of the great doctrine.