IV

_OUR MUTUAL VERDICT_

The evening service was like unto that of the morning, the only

difference being that I saw this sturdy folk, mountain-like, in the

light of the setting, instead of the rising sun. But still no word or

hint revealed to me the favour or disfavour with which my efforts had

been received by the people of St. Cuthbert's, save only that one man

ventured to remark that I had brought him in mind of Thomas Chalmers.

I hurriedly exclaimed, "Is that so?" in a tone which all too plainly

implored him to go on.

"Yes," said he. "When ye blawed yir nose, if ma een had been shut, I cud

hae swore it was Chammers," whereupon the last state of me was worse

than the first.

But I was a little comforted in overhearing one Scot say to another as

they passed me on their homeward way, "He's no' to be expeckit to preach

like yon man frae Hawick," to which the other replied, and I caught his

closing words, "But there was a bit at the end that wasna bad."

This was but a thin gruel to satisfy one's wondering soul, but it was

shortly thickened by the beadle. He was waiting for us at Mr. Blake's,

wishing instruction about some task that fell within his duties, but he

managed to have a word with me--

"I canna tell what waits ye, but, gin ye'd like to see through the

manse, I'll tak' ye through the morn."

I thanked him, declining, but secretly blessed him and inwardly

rejoiced.

At worship that night my gentle host read the story of the prodigal, and

when we knelt to pray he repeated twice, "I will arise and go unto my

Father," and in the pause I felt that the wave of some besetting memory

was beating on the shore; more and more was it borne in upon me that

this man had a past, shared only by himself and God and some one else

unknown.

The morning witnessed my departure from New Jedboro, and from the window

of the train I watched its fast-retreating hills, so often trodden by me

since with the swinging stride of joy, or clambered with the heavy step

of care.

There is neither time nor space to set down in detail all that followed.

Let it suffice to say that while they were musing the fire burned, and

the good folk of St. Cuthbert's slowly and solemnly resolved to call me

to their ancient church.

They were scandalized by a report, which spread with pestilential ease,

that I had known my wife but three short weeks when I asked her to walk

the long walk with me. This and other rumours provoked them to despatch

a sage and ponderous officer to the distant scene of my labours, that he

might investigate them on the spot. He came, he saw, he was conquered.

My wife lassoed him at a throw. He went home in fetters, his eloquence

alone unloosed. Long before the night on which they should meet to call,

he had brandished his opinion as to the wisdom of my delirious haste.

"But did he mak' his choice so redeek'lus sudden?" he was asked.

"I dinna ken," he answered tropically, "and I dinna care. If he bided

three weeks, he bided ower lang. I kent that fine when ance I saw her.

Noo, I pit it till ye, gin ye were crossin' a desert place, an' ye saw

the Rose o' Sharon afore ye, wad ye no' pluck it gin ye micht, and pluck

it quick? I pit it till ye." And they answered him not a word, for there

is no debater like the heart.

I was told in after days that my historic friend the beadle canvassed

for me night and day, laying mighty stress upon the fact that he knew me

well, since he had travelled with me, assuring every ear that I was

"uncommon ceevil," and proudly laying bare the independent scorn with

which I had met his proposition to inspect the manse.

"But we micht get him yet," he concluded, "gin we gang richt aboot it."

These testimonials, together with his plaintive appeal to be relieved of

the responsibility which the absence of a fixed minister threw upon

himself, went far to confirm the wavering.

Nor shall I linger to trace the workings of that ponderous machinery

whereby I was at last installed as the minister of St. Cuthbert's

Church. Even the great assemblage which gathered to welcome us, with its

infinite introductions, its features social, devotional, and

deputational, its addresses civic and ecclesiastical, must be dismissed

with a word.

It reminded me of nothing so much as of the launching of a ship, and

beneath all its tumult of artillery there thrummed the deep undertone of

joy. For St. Cuthbert's, contrary to its historic way, had parted with

its last minister, a man of great ability, amid the smoke of battle, and

he had gone forth as Napoleon went, with a martial record which the

corroding years even yet have scarcely tarnished. Fierce had been the

fight, the factions grimly equal, and beclouded with a sublime confusion

as to which side had been led by heaven and which by Belial. On this

point, even now, they do not exactly see eye to eye.

And this deep joy, whose untiring hum (joy's native voice) had entwined

itself with every exercise of our exultant gathering was born of the

assurance of returning harmony and the welcome calm which follows the

departing storm. The gentle vines of peace were beginning to clothe

their scarred and disfigured Zion.

St. Cuthbert's hailed that night as the hour of its convalescence. In

consequence, every speech, even those from dry and desiccated lips, was

coloured with the melody of hope. Even hoary jokes and ancestral

stories, kept for tea-meetings as hard tack is kept for the army and

navy, were disinfected by the kindly flavour which brooded like an April

cloud.

And now it is my purpose to set down as best I may some of the features

of my life, and a few of my most vivid observations among these

remarkable folk.

The greater number of them had been born in bonnie Scotland, and all of

them, even those who had never seen their ancestral home, spoke and

lived and thought as though they had just come from the heathery hills.

They were sprung from the loins of heroes, the stalwart pioneers from

Roxburghshire and Ayrshire and Dumfries, and many another noble spot

whose noblest sons had gone forth to earth's remotest bound, flaming

with love of liberty and God. Seventy years before they had settled

about New Jedboro, thinking of the well-loved Scottish town whose name

it bore.

Soon the echoing forest bowed before their gleaming axes, and they made

the wilderness to blossom like the rose. Comfort, and even wealth, came

to them at the imperious beck of industry. Stern and earnest, reckoning

frivolity a sin, finding their pleasure in a growing capacity for

self-denial and a growing scorn of needless luxury, they cherished in

their blood the iron which had been bequeathed by noble sires.

Hand in hand with God like sons of Knox, they built the school and the

church with the first-fruits of their toil, disporting themselves again

in their unforgotten psalms, worshipping after the dear-bought manner of

their fathers, not a few of whom had paid the price of blood, nor deemed

it sacrifice.

Like draws to like, they say. With St. Cuthbert's this had certainly

been the case; for every minister who had served them heretofore had

been both born and educated in their motherland.

Three had they had. The first was the Reverend John Grant, Doctor of

Divinity, from Greenock; the second, the Reverend James Kay, from

Aberdeen; the third, my immediate predecessor, the Reverend Henry

Alexander from Glasgow.

Like a mountain peak towered the memory of their first minister, a man

of gigantic power, scholarly and profound, grimly genial, carrying with

him everywhere the air of the Eternal. He was as eloquent almost as

human lips can be, magnetic to the point of tyranny, and grandly

independent of everything and every one but God. His fame covered Canada

like a flood. American colleges sought the honour of their laurel on his

brow, and from one of the best he accepted his Doctor's hood. City

congregations coveted him with pious envy, but he hearkened to few and

coquetted with none. He had assumed the cure of St. Cuthbert's when it

was almost entirely (as it was still considerably) a country

congregation, revelling in solitude and souls, both of which were nearer

here to Nature's heart than amid the sweltering throng. Here he

cherished his mighty heart and gave eternal bent to hearts only less

mighty than his own.

"Remote from towns he ran his godly race,

Nor e'er had changed nor wished to change his place."

Throughout my ministry in St. Cuthbert's the mention of his name was the

signal for a cloud of witnesses. Forty years had elapsed since the

countryside followed him to his grave, shrouded in gown and bands, a

regalia more than royal to their loving eyes. But they had guarded his

memory with the vigilance which belongs only to the broken heart, and

the traditions of his greatness were fresh among them still.

"I likit the ither twa fine," said a shrewd sermon taster to me soon

after my arrival, "but their sermons didna plough the soul like the

Doctor's; we hae na had the fallow grun' turned up sin' he dee'd."

And so said, or thought, they all.

V

_My KIRK SESSION_

He would need a brave and facile pen who would venture to portray the

kirk session of St. Cuthbert's Church. For any kirk session is far from

commonplace, let alone the session of such a church as mine. Kirk

sessions are the bloom of Scottish character in particular and the crown

and glory of mankind in general. Piety, sobriety, severity, these are

the three outstanding graces which they illustrate supremely; but

interlocked with these are many other gifts and virtues in varying

degrees of culture.

In St. Cuthbert's, the pride of eldership was chiefly vested in their

wives and daughters.

"Ye mauna be ower uplifted aboot yir faither's office," was the

oft-repeated admonition of the elder's wife to the elder's children, and

the children were not slow to remark that her words were one part rebuke

and ten parts pride. For to mothers and bairns alike he appeared as one

of God's kings and priests when he walked down the aisle with the

vessels of the Lord.

Many of these men were poor, grandly and pathetically poor, but none

was poor enough to appear at the sacramental board without his "blacks,"

radiant with the lustre of open love and sacred sacrifice. This I

afterwards learned was their wives' doing, and marvellous in my eyes. Ah

me! How many a decently apparelled husband, how many a white-robed

child, has come forth out of great tribulation not their own. Indeed,

uncounted multitudes there are who shall walk in white before the throne

of God, whose robes the secret sacrifice of loving hearts hath whitened

as no fuller of earth can whiten them.

My first meeting with the kirk session of St. Cuthbert's was an

epoch-marking incident. Twenty-eight there were who sat about the

session-room, every man but one an importation from Caledonia's rugged

hills. Roxburgh's covenanting heroes, Wigtonshire's triumphant martyrs,

Dumfriesshire and her Cameronians, with their great namesake's lion

heart; Ayrshire, with her bloody memories of moor and moss-hags, of

quarry and conventicle, of Laud and liberty--all these had filtered

through and reappeared in these silent and stalwart men.

Of these eight-and-twenty faces at least one score had the cast of

marble and the stamp of eternity upon them. I felt like a hillock

nestling at the feet of lofty peaks, for I do make my oath that when you

are begirt by men in whose veins there flows the blood of martyrs, who

have been slowly nurtured upon such stately doctrines as are their daily

food, who actually believe in God as a living participator in the

affairs of time, whose mental pabulum has been Thomas Boston and Samuel

Rutherford and Philip Doddridge, and who have used these worthies but as

helps to climb that unpinnacled hill of the Eternal Word--when you get

such men as these, multiplied a hundredfold by the stern consciousness

of a religious trust, if you are not then among the Rockies of flesh and

blood, I am as one who sees men like walking trees, ignorant of the true

altitudes of human life.

But I was yet to learn, and to learn by heart (the great medium of all

real character), that many a fragrant flower may bloom in secret clefts

of rock-bound hills, frowning and forbidding though they be. For God

loves to surprise us, especially in happy ways; and His is a sanguine

sun.

It should now be stated that I began my ministry in St. Cuthbert's with

the handicap of an Irish ancestry. How then was I to wear the hodden

gray? Or how was I to commingle myself with that historic tide which I

well knew the Scottish heart regarded as fed more than any other from

the river that makes glad the city of God?

My every vein was already full to overflowing with Irish blood. My

father was from Ballymena and my mother was from Cork, a solution which

no chemistry could cure. I was inclined by nature and confirmed by

practice towards a reasonable pride in my ancestral land. But odds were

against me. Even the mistress of my manse, whose judgment was wont to

take counsel of her kindly heart, even she remonstrated when she first

discovered my nativity, and has never since been altogether thankful,

though she strives hard to be resigned.

"Why do you always flaunt your Irish origin?" she reasoned once. "If it

is good stock, be modest about it; and if it is not, the less said the

better."

Then she remarked that she was no doubt prejudiced, for she had once

witnessed the noble procession in New York on St. Patrick's Day; and she

added that they all seemed to have mouths like the Mammoth Cave of

Kentucky and complexions like an asphalt pavement under repairs. My

wife's power of detecting analogies was uncommonly acute.

* * * * *

When the session had been duly constituted, the minutes of the last

meeting were read by the session clerk. It is probably quite within the

mark to say that all ecclesiastical officialdom can produce no other

dignitary with the same stern grandeur as pertains to the clerk of a

Scottish session. I have witnessed archbishops in their robes and with

their mitres, and have marvelled at the gravity with which they clothed

the most ponderous frivolities, at their stately genuflections, at the

swift shedding and donning of their bewildering millineries. I have seen

General Booth resplendent in his flaming clericals. I have even looked

on the bespangled Dowie, dazzling and bedazzled--but none of these has

the majesty of poise, the aroma of responsibility, or the inexorable air

of authority which mark the true-bred session clerk.

The minutes having been read and hermetically sealed, I addressed the

elders briefly, referring to my great duties and my poor abilities,

after which I invited them to a general deliberation, and begged them to

acquaint me with the mind and temper of the congregation, asking such

advice as might be useful in entering upon my labours.

"We bid ye welcome, moderator," began the senior elder, by name Sandy

Grant, "an' we'll do what in us lies to haud up yir hands; ye're no' oor

servant, but oor minister, and we're a' ready to do yir biddin', gin

it's the will o' God. Ye're sittin' in a michty seat, moderator. It was

frae that chair that oor first minister spak' till us in far ither

days."

At this reference to the golden age, I saw a wave of tenderness break

over the faces of the older men.

"Ay, I mind weel the nicht Doctor Grant sat amang us for the first time,

as ye're sittin' noo."

This time it was Ronald M'Gregor who had spoken, the love-light on whose

face even sixty winters could not disguise.

"We'll never look upon his like again. Ye've mebbe watched the storm,

sir, when it beat upon the shore. His style o' delivery was like the

ragin' o' the waves. Ye see that buik, moderator, yir haun's restin' on

the tap o't. Weel, he dune for sax o' them the while he was oor

minister. We bocht the strongest bound o' them, but he banged them to

tatters amazin' fast. A page at a skite. Times it was like the driftin'

o' the leaves in the fall. He was graun' on the terrors o' the law. We

haena been what's to say clean uplifted wi' the michty truth o' the

punishment o' the lost sin' his mooth was closed in death," and Ronald

sighed the sigh of the hungry heart.

"Div ye no' mind the Doctor on the decrees, the simmer o' the

cholera--div ye no' mind yon, Ronald?" said Thomas Laidlaw, swept into

the seething tide of reminiscence; but here the session clerk rose to a

point of order.

"The members o' this court will address the moderator," he said sternly.

"Moreover, we are here for business, not for history. We might well

think shame of ourselves, glorifying the old when we should be

welcoming the new. We're no' to be aye dwellin' amang the tombs" (this

with a rise in feeling and a drop in language). "Besides, Doctor Grant

was no' a common man, and it's no becomin' to be comparin' common men

along wi' the likes o' him."

So this, thought I, is the Scottish mode of paying compliments. I had

always heard that their little tributes were more medicinal than

confectionery.

Then followed a painful calm, for Scottish calms are stormy things.

It was Michael Blake who first resumed.

"Let us forget the things which are behind," he said, "if we only can,"

and there was a wealth of agony in his words, "and let us press forth

unto those things which are before. We greet you, moderator, as the

messenger of peace, for we are all but sinful men and unworthy of the

trust we hold. I hope you will preach to us the grace of God, for we

have learned ourselves the terrors of the law."

"I move that we adjourn," interjected Ronald M'Gregor, alarmed for the

retirement of Sinai, and fearful of a too early spring.

"I second that," said a rugged patriarch, hitherto silent.

"But I hope the moderator 'll permit me to express the hope that he'll

no' shorten up the services, and that he'll gie the young fowk mair o'

the catechism than we hae been gettin', and mak' the sacraments mair

searchin' to the soul," said Saunders M'Tavish.

"Ye're oot o' order," interrupted the clerk; "there's a motion to

adjourn afore the Chair."

"But I maun tak' ma staun," exclaimed Saunders.

"Ye mauna," retorted the clerk, "ye maun tak' yir seat," and Saunders

dropped where he stood, while his fellow-elders looked into each other's

faces as if to say that this thing might have befallen any one of them.