Last summer I had the pleasure of taking a Toronto friend, Mr. A. J. Mitchell, a manager of Old St. Andrew’s, to the Original Seceders’ Church at Pollokshaws. We deemed it inadvisable to bring the taxi to the church door. As far as possible, we conformed ourselves to the prevailing spirit of the congregation and the service. To each of us the associations of the worship were different, indeed.
The interior, with its uncushioned pews, the precentor’s box and the pulpit, was what it had been fifty years ago. When the precentor pitched high the opening note of psalm or paraphrase, I was thinking of my father, long since gone. While the preacher was discoursing with all the old certainty, on the wrath to come, to me it was a voice remote, but oh, so near. Outside one met warm-hearted people who knew one’s name, and the family’s connection with the church, but were personal strangers. One could only establish contact with the living by recalling the dead. There is a sadness about returning to an old home after decades of absence that in some ways is more poignant than the feeling with which a youth leaves the roof that has sheltered him all his days, for a land across the sea.
But for a pillar of a Toronto Presbyterian church to find himself for the first time in the rarefied atmosphere of the Original Seceders; to join in praise that is entirely vocal; to see the solemn devotion that pervades a service singularly void of what to him hitherto has been appealing in worship, is something new; and, if one is not mistaken, something awful.
My friend comes of a family where the rigid practices of a fading Puritanism were rigidly honoured—no such desecrations, for instance, as cleaning shoes, or reading newspapers on the Sabbath day. He adorns a church where the music is fine, and the congregational singing notably hearty, where, indeed, the organist, Mr. Tattersall, is the son of a Thornliebank girl. He is of those who invited a Congregationalist to Presbyterian Old St. Andrew’s. He has delighted in the magnificence of the cathedral and the grandeur of the ritual at St. Giles’. He would not choose the severe and unornamented concentration of the old Seceders before the catholicity that he sees in the pending union. But—and this is what one would fain impress upon the kindly mind—my friend came from Pollokshaws with a deepened reverence for the wealth of character with which the old Puritanism has endowed the world. A sorry day, indeed, will it be, whereon we forget from whom and whence we came, even when we are most conscious of the liberalizing changes which time and fortune have wrought.
CHAPTER II.
Sketching early years of service at country and city stations near the Clyde.
The proportion of our immigrated people who visit their native lands is growing, despite the rise in steamer rates. There are multitudes to whom the Old Land still appears as it did when it was the only country they knew. For what it is worth, then, one who has several times trodden the old familiar ground, may say that you have to go back to the Old Land really to see it; and to appreciate what Canada has done for you.
I am sure that is unanimously so with all who have had the experience. The fields you think of as big; the village street you remember as wide; the kirk you recall as imposing—they are all there; but they have diminished in extent, or you have grown in stature. The people, noble as they are, abide where they always abode. Somehow, in the old segment of the world, they have not imbibed the air of the newer, more optimistic world that is on this side the sea. And distances have been transformed, and the way you look at distances.