A HIGHLAND COMMUNION.
To the Highland imagination the communion stands out as the great feast day at Jerusalem did to the ancient Jew. The Celt is highly imaginative and is especially fervid. Few of us can estimate how much religion owes in the old world and the new to Celtic fervor. The communion is looked forward to as an especially close approach to God himself. At times we have to deplore a false view that keeps some in Highland communities from coming forward until late in life to the Lord's table. How much it must have meant to the exiles on Red River, forty years after some of them had partaken of the communion in the Kildonan in Sutherlandshire to now take part in Kildonan on Red River.
Due preparation was made for the first celebration of the New Testament feast by the newly constituted session. On December 13th, 1851, the people met together for a preparatory service—not now with perhaps thousands gathered from parishes far and near, but with the few hundreds dwelling side by side. Tokens of admission to the Lord's table were cautiously distributed, and we learn that the position of the tables was carefully determined, as well as the number of table services and the part each elder should take in the administration. The method seen by the writer twenty years after this date was then introduced. It was to have the table covered with linen and to have it successively occupied by different relays of communicants. The number of communicants, at this first communion after the Presbyterian form on Red River, was 45. The services following the communion were carried out as rigidly as those preceding it. Rev. John Black wrote in his description of this same service: "It was to all of us a solemn day, being the first time in which, according to our simple and scriptural form, that blessed ordinance was ever dispensed here. It was also the first time for the pastor who administered; the first time for the elders who served; and the first time for not a few who sat at the table—among others, two old men—the one 87 and the other 99 years of age; and all this in addition to its own intrinsic solemnity."