THE ELDERS OF THE PEOPLE.
In any other than a Highland community it would have been a dangerous experiment to choose elders so soon in the history of the congregation. But the Highlander has the natural tendency to follow leaders. His chief is everything to him. Every Highland community, by a process of natural selection—character of a lofty kind being a chief element—chooses its ideal men.
Precisely seven weeks after the first Presbyterian service was held in Red River six elders were chosen by ballot by the people who had been admitted by Mr. Black. Alexander Ross, of whom it was said that his work for the people for twenty-five years laid the people under a debt that they could never discharge, was chosen as leading elder. He died four years afterward. A second, James Fraser, a man of high spiritual power, filled the office for eleven years, till his death. George Munro, Donald Matheson, and John Sutherland made up the five who accepted office. One chosen, Robert McBeth, did not see his way to enter upon the office. The ordination of this first kirk session took place on the 7th of December. The young minister was always a wholesome upholder of the principle of doing everything "decently and in order." He did not even perform a baptism till the session was formed. A most interesting entry is made at this time in the session record: "On the same day as the ordination of the elders took place, the ordinance of baptism was dispensed for the first time in the congregation, the recipient being the child of Mr. Richard Salter, the only Englishman in the community. It was also the first baptism dispensed by the minister." At this time, too, came the recognition of the new minister by the governor and council of Assiniboia. A resolution was passed authorizing any legally ordained Presbyterian minister belonging to the settlement to solemnize marriages. This was regarded as a very considerable concession at the time.
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."
ARISE AND BUILD!
To the settlers on Red River the only true ideal was that of the parish church—and it was the parish church of the beginning of this century when in the Highlands dissent was unknown. New settlers elsewhere have been willing to erect such temporary structures as their circumstances permit and to wait for better days. In new countries this plan has some advantages. But to the Highland hearts on Red River old Kildonan parish church must be reproduced in the Kildonan of the New World. But stone and mortar were needed, and there were few stone buildings in the settlement. The site on which the church was to be built had been given by the Hudson's Bay Company along with £150 toward the new church, as an equivalent to the people for their rights in St. John's Church which they relinquished to the Church of England, although they retained an interest in the burying ground in which their dead were lying. The new site at Frog Plain was really more centrally situated than that at St. John's for the Scottish settlers, and it contained glebe land amounting to some three hundred acres. Already their manse and school had been erected upon it. It had formerly been a camping place for the Indians, and of it Mr. Black remarked in one of his letters: "The church is to be erected on a piece of land long desecrated by the idolatrous revels of the Indians, and the Sabbath evening sports of some who bore a better name, but whose works were not so much better than theirs." Ten miles away from Red River on the open plain is an old Silurian outlier of limestone rock, which still furnishes building stone for Winnipeg. Even by the end of December the people had quarried at Stony Mountain nearly all the stone required, and with Red River cart or ox-sled had brought the most of the material to the new site on Frog Plain. The limestone of Stony Mountain produces excellent lime, and a sufficient quantity had already been burnt and placed on the ground ready for work in the spring. It was a time of earnest enthusiasm in Kildonan, and the most real parallel to it which comes to the mind of the writer is where in the days of Ezra after the captivity "the people gathered themselves together as one man to Jerusalem" and "when the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the Lord."
THE FLOODS OPPOSE.
The people but awaited the opening of spring in 1852 to erect the building for which they had the material on the ground. The winter had been one of great blessing to the newly-founded church. There had, however, been a great fall of snow and the swamps and streams had been filled with water in the autumn. The Red and Assiniboine rivers run through flat prairie lands, and an overflow in time of high water is very possible. In 1826 the valley of the Red River had been flooded, the water reaching in a great lake for miles across the country. The fathers of Kildonan remembered that former date when in 130 tents they had dwelt on Stony Mountain and the higher lands back from the river. Now to the people ardent to go on with their church building—which was all in all to their Highland hearts—it came as a great disappointment to see another flood, which, while not so great as the former, yet was very serious. We are fortunate in having a letter of Mr. Black's which gives us a vivid description of the