taste, low state of Church feeling, and parsimony towards Church objects which mark that period (a period, however, let us bear in mind, when the great Napoleonic wars laid heavy burdens on the public purse), had at least the merit of leaving it possible for a subsequent generation to effect the scholarly and splendid restoration which has added Brechin to the lengthening list of great Scottish churches our age has been privileged to rescue from ruin or from degradation.

Our restored Cathedrals are a gain to the Church of Scotland, and not a loss. They are all the more a gain to her, that their renovated beauty has in every case been linked with memories of spiritual excellences, the enlightenment of Chambers, the pastoral fidelity of Robertson of Glasgow, the munificence, worthy of the thirteenth century, of that pious lady, the chief restorer of Dunblane, who only this month was taken from us. The restoration of Brechin has been no less honoured. This sacred house will long be fragrant with the recollections of the model minister who conceived the scheme -dear John Clark-of the model proprietor who encouraged and supported him (as all his life long he has been the encourager and supporter of every good work), of the liberal donor of its glorious glass, of the learned and venerable architect of whose studies and whose labours the Cathedral as we see it is the worthy crown.

Brechin is richer for her restored Cathedral. Scotland is richer for it. But let it never be forgotten that such enrichments carry with them corresponding obligations. Pre-eminence in dignity should be justified by preeminence in usefulness. Her restored Cathedrals will be a greater reproach to the Church of Scotland than their desolation was if she does not show that she is willing and able to make full and noble use of them. And this use must be twofold:

(1) The spacious stateliness of these renovated fanes must not be allowed to provoke reflections on either the poverty or the paucity of the services celebrated in them.

The worship must be rendered in a form befitting the majesty of Him to whom their majesty bears witness.

(2) And as they draw to them the hearts and have evoked the sacrifices, not alone of the members of the Church of Scotland, but also of many whom two and a half centuries of strife (as much political as ecclesiastical) have separated from her communion, so she ought to make them centres of an influence irenical and healing. Unity, not division, is the glory of all dominion. Above all should it be the aim and the achievement of those whose high calling is to be the priests of God and of Christ, whose reign is with Him Who is the Prince of Peace, and Whose prayer ascends in heaven, as it did from earth, that all His people may be one, that the world may believe

THE CHURCH AND THE POETS

As certain also of your own poets have said.—Acts xvii. 28.

I

THERE are some in the present day—some who speak from quarters whence a very different doctrine might have been expected-who seem to imagine that 'culture' is a fairly good substitute for faith, and that' literature may now be trusted to accomplish the saving work which Christian preachers have hitherto insisted can only be achieved by a genuine belief in the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

They derided culture, these people, not so long ago; and did their best to banish letters from the circles they could influence. Now they have rushed, it seems to me, to the opposite extreme; and are more taken up with

1 Preached in the Parish Church of Jedburgh, September 20, 1903, being the Centenary of the meeting in that town of the poets Wordsworth and Scott.

Tuesday, Sept. 20th, 1803.-Arrived at Jedburgh half-an-hour before the Judges were expected out of Court to dinner. We gave in our passport-the name of Mr. Scott, the Sheriff-and were very civilly treated, but there was no vacant room in the house (Spread Eagle Hotel) except the Judges' sitting-room, and we wanted to have a fire, being exceedingly wet and cold. I was conducted into that room, on condition that I would give it up the moment the Judge came from Court. After I had put off my wet clothes, I went up into a bedroom and sate shivering there till the people of the inn had procured lodgings for us in a private house. We were received with hearty welcome by a good woman (Mrs. Nelly Mitchell), who, though above seventy years old, moved about as briskly as if she was only seventeen. Those parts of the house which we were to occupy were neat and clean; she showed me every corner, and what a stock of linen she had. She was a most remarkable person; the alacrity with which she ran upstairs when we rung the bell, and guessed at, and strove to prevent, our wants was surprising; she had a quick

the teachings of general literature than with the truths of Divine revelation. Carlyle was sarcastic when he spoke of the 'Gospel according to Jean Jacques' Rousseau the writers I refer to talk in apparent earnest of the Gospel of Carlyle ' himself,' the Gospel of Ruskin,' 'the Gospel of Burns.' They seem hardly conscious of profanity in doing so. For it is profane. There is but one Gospel: one 'Good news' of God-which He sent us in His Son. There is not another. There is nothing for a moment to be named along with it.

It can hardly be alleged that to such silly cant the great Apostle, whose words I have taken for my text, lends any countenance. It is not S. Paul indeed, it is S. Peter who declares concerning Jesus: Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.1 It is the Lord of both who tells Nicodemus: God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. He that believeth on Him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is coneye, keen, strong features, and a joyousness in her motions. I found afterwards that she had been subject to fits of dejection and illhealth. Her husband was deaf and infirm, and sate in a chair with scarcely the power to move a limb-an affecting contrast! The old woman said they had been a very hard-working pair; they had wrought like slaves at their trade-her husband had been a currier,

and she told me how they had portioned off their daughters with money, and that in their old age they had laid out the little they could spare in building and furnishing that house. Mr. Scott sate with us an hour or two, and repeated a part of the Lay of the Last Minstrel. We were so much interested in her that William, long afterwards, thought it worth while to express in verse the sensations which she had excited, and which then remained as vividly in his mind as at the moment when we lost sight of Jedburgh. The town of Jedburgh, in returning along the road, as it is seen through the gently winding narrow valley, looks exceedingly beautiful on its low eminence, surmounted by the conventual tower, which is arched over, at the summit, by light stonework resembling a coronet; the effect at a distance is very graceful. We had our dinner sent

from the inn, and a bottle of wine, that we might not disgrace the Sheriff, who supped with us in the evening,-stayed late, and repeated some of his poems.-Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, by Miss Dorothy Wordsworth.

1 Acts iv. 12.

demned already, because he hath not believed in the Name of the Only-Begotten Son of God.1 But the teaching of S. Paul on this all-important matter is equally decisive. He sets it ever in the forefront of his Epistles. To the Romans: I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation, to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.2 To the Corinthians: The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. To the Galatians God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by Whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. And in this same sermon, in the midst of Areopagus, to the Athenians, if, as here, he cites their poets, it is still Jesus that he preaches: The times of this ignorance God winked at; but now He commandeth all men everywhere to repent: because He hath appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man Whom He hath ordained, whereof He hath given assurance unto all men in that He hath raised Him from the dead.5

But while the Church, like her Lord and His Apostles, has ever put Religion before Culture, and taught the Faith of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the sole specific for that sin which is the root-evil of humanity, the sovereign power to produce instead those fruits of righteousness which are by Christ unto the glory and praise of God; yet she has never, on the other hand, in her approved teachers, fallen into their fanaticism who have, in the words of Milton:

'Hated learning worse than toad or asp,'

and proscribed as profane, if not ungodly, the creations of the poets.

1 S. John iii. 17, 18. 4 Gal. vi. 14.

2 Romans i. 16.

5 Acts xvii. 30, 31.

3

I Cor. i. 22-24. • Philip. i. II.