St. Cuthberts | Page 9

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.