If there ever came to any nation a call to seek the refuge which eye has not seen, that call soundeth persistently, compellingly in our ears. And that call soundeth not in vain. To-day[[1]] the two great Churches of Scotland met as one in St. Giles, the days of their misunderstanding ended, to pray for King and country—for all the things which make life beautiful. They have come through days of alienation and isolation, but to-day they are with one accord in one place. And in their hearts only one purpose—to seek the blessing of God for their nation.
[[1]] November 18, 1914.
As one sat there, under the tattered flags on which many bloody fights for freedom are emblazoned, and watched the stream of men flow into the church, what memories came crowding through the echoing corridors of time.
Four hundred years ago there came to Edinburgh the news of Flodden, and out of the closes the women rushed to St. Giles, until round all the altars there was no room to kneel because of the great crowd wailing for their dead. The moaning of their lamentation was as the sound of the surf wailing on the shore, and their sobbing as the cry of the grinding pebbles in the backwash of the tide. But the city fathers could stand upright even in that most cruel day when the cloud of destruction was creeping over the Pentlands; and there is the note of the heroic in that resolution which called all the able-bodied men to rally to the defence of the capital, and exhorted "the good women to pass to the kyrk, and pray whane tyme requires for our Soveraine Lord and his Army, and neichbouris being thereat."
That proclamation stirs the blood! They are dust, these fathers of ours, but their spirit is all alive, throbbing in the heart of us—their far-away children. Never did a race meet its Sedan in a sublimer spirit than that. The strong, at toll of bell and tuck of drum, manned the ramparts, and the women filled St. Giles' and sent heavenward their cries. The bodies of such a race may for a brief season be brought to subjection, but their souls are invincible—and it is the soul that always conquers.
And here to-day it is the same. From every part of Scotland men have come, and they passed "to the kirk to pray for our Sovereign Lord and his Army." True, there has been no Flodden and no Sedan; but it is by the good hand of God upon us that the enemy was frustrated in his eagerness for another Sedan. And it is in part the prayer of thanksgiving that is laid to-day upon His altar, and in part the petition that His mercies may be continued to the nation in the cruel days to come.
What a sanctuary for a nation's prayers, this church, where Kings have prayed and gone forth to die in battle; where Queens have wept as the voice of judgment, grim and stern, untouched by tenderness or love, sounded in the ear; where three thousand people dissolved in tears as the good Regent, foully slain, was borne to his grave. Over it passed wave after wave of fanaticism and barbarism; and at last it fell into the hands of the restorers—more ruthless far than Goths or Vandals! But, through it all, the house of God survived; and, apparelled once more in some of its pristine glory, it opens its doors to a nation that once more seek after its God.
And above us, as we sit there, hang the colours of our Scottish regiments stirring our patriotism, assuring us that the men who guarded these flags on many bloody fields were guarded by God, and that we are still in His keeping.