4. Give some characteristics of the people.
5. What contributed much to their prominence in history?
6. What moral inheritance did the Covenanted fathers leave their children?
7. What obligation comes with the inheritance?
8. How should the obligation be met in our day?
II.
THE BATTLEFIELD OF PRESBYTERIANISM.—A.D. 200.
The beginning of Scotland's evangelization is pre-historic. The records fail to give any satisfaction concerning the entrance of the Gospel into that lovely land. The ruins of numerous altars of stone bear grim testimony to the idolatrous worship practiced by the early inhabitants. These are known in history as the Druids. They held their religious meetings in groves, and evidently offered human sacrifices to their gods. The oak was accounted by them a sacred tree, and the mistletoe, when growing upon it, was worshiped. Thus the land of our forefathers, in the far off ages, was without a ray of Gospel light. The people sat in darkness, in the region and shadow of death.
In the first three centuries of the Christian era, the successive persecutions at Rome drove many Christians out from that Gospel center, to wander in all directions over the world. They suffered banishment for Christ's sake. In their wanderings they became great missionaries. They loved Jesus more than their lives, and their religion more than their homes. By them the Gospel was carried to the ends of the earth. It seems that some of them drifted into Scotland and brought to that land the bright morning of a day that carried storms in its bosom, and after the storms, peace, quietness, prosperity, Christian civilization—an inheritance of light and liberty unparalleled in history.