ST. ANDREW’S DAY.

Evening Star, Issue 21582, 30 November 1933, Page 8

ST. ANDREW’S DAY.

St. Andrew's Day is one of the many institutions that are not what they were. In its prime it belongs to an age when religion held a much more constant place in men’s minds than it does to-daj - . That ago lasted long in Scotland, and in the early days of the Otago Settlement St. Andrew’s Day was observed as a close holiday. Now it is not even observed as a Government holiday. Of the three national days of the United Kingdom it gets distinctly less honour than St. Patrick’s Day, still cherished by the Irish, and shares the indifference that is meted by most Englishmen to St. George’s Day, though that day might be held to have a double claim to remembrance, being the anniversary both of the birth and death of Shakespeare. On this last ground, and because the English have been thought by some of themselves to suffer from too much meekness as a people, with too small a disposition to remember their own glories, attempts have been made at Homo to revive tho observance of it in recent years. No one has ever reproached the Scotch with over-meekness, and the neglect of St. Andrew’s Day, at least in this country, as well as that of St. George’s Day, as compared with the fervour that is still felt for St. Patrick, can be attributed to the difference between national churches in which saints play a major, or minor, or scarcely discernible part. An advantage may be found also for St. Patrick in the stronger imago Tie presents as a once living personage, and his unquestionable close association, holding tho highest benefits, with the people who revere him as their national saint. His reality has been challenged, but we are assured that the perversities of modern critical scholarship have always failed against the plain witness of history, and in celebrating St. Patrick wo are celebrating a real man who lived at the time and performed ihe work assigned to him, and not a phantom of ecclesiastical propaganda or another man of tho same name. That he seems to have been born in cither Wales or Scotland, and not in Ireland, is beside the point. Irishmen captured him, during a raiding expedition, when he was a youth, and they have had reason to hold on to him over since. St. Andrew was undoubtedly a real man, but his connection with Scotland, like that of St. George with England, began much later than his lifetime. And St. George was such an indefinite figure ihal a greal hislorian could confuse him with a rascally contractor, who,

“ from an obscure and servile origin, raised himself by the talents of a parasite.” The legend is that St. Andrew, after his story ends in the Scriptures, preached in Asia Minor and along the Black Sea as far as the Volga, where he was crucified on a diagonal cross. His relics were removed to Constantinople, whence some of them were taken in the eighth century to Saint Andrews, in Scotland, and his patron saintship began. But even in the land which thus adopted him St. Andrew would appear to have less reverence now than in a former day. At least, when Mild. V. Morton made his journey ‘in Search of Scotland 1 ho did not seek for him and he did not find him. There is no mention of St. Andrew in that popular volume.