St. Cuthberts | Page 9

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