A PILGRIMAGE TO FALSTONE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22392, 13 October 1934, Page 2

A PILGRIMAGE TO FALSTONE

MEMORIES OF DR D. M. STUART By the Rev. Tulmch Yuiixe, B.D. (late of Knox Church, Dunedin, and now of Queen Street Church, Edinburgh). Ever since I came Home from Ne.v Zealand five years ago I have cherished the desire to make a pilgrimage to Falstone, in Northumberland, to see cha church and the manse where Dr D. ftl: Stuart worked and lived and from which he went out to be the minister of Knox Church, Dunedin. So one day in the third week of August I set out with my two boys and motored from North Berwick across the Lammermoors, through Lauder and Jedburgh, right over the Cheviot Hills, in a blinding gale of wind and rain. What a lonely road it was across the Cheviots—unfonced, narrow, with steep gradients! - I thought I was back in New Zealand again—but for the bonriie purple heather everywhere. After about 100 miles' driving we struck the source of the River Tyne and came down

the river until we saw at last a little cluster of houses—not more than 20— clustering round two churches, on a lonely hillside and that is Falstone, where Donald Macnaughton Stuart was first ordained as a minister in 1849 and whore he lived till 1859, when he was called to be the first minister of Knox Church, Dunedin. With generous and kindly courtesy the young minister now in charge, the Rev. G. W. Cleough, B.A, and his wife welcomed us inlj the old manse—the same old manse where Donald Stuart and Jessie, his wife, lived and wheie their three children were born. " Jessie "* I call her, for that is the name that is so familiar to me from reading it again and again on that marble slab in Knox Church. And I have looked m> often on her photograph in the vestry yonder that I seem to know her and to understand some of the heartache that tormented her frail body during those two brief years of exile that she lived in New Zealand. As I looked round that old walled garden with its old trees —oaks and rowans and apples and pear—l wondered, "How many of you were plantci by D. M. Stuart?" Dear indeed must that lovely garden have been to hlni

and to his young wife with their threa boys. I thought I saw them having one last look at it as they left it to sail for that distant unknown land in 1859 to make that journey that so few in those days ever made back agaia. " Never to be seen asain—never again " —that must have been the haunting thought in the mind of that frail \o\ms mother as she passed out through that low, arched gate in the garden waW. The ground floor of the manse is much as it was during -the 10 years 1849-59 when the Stuarts lived there; the stoneflagged kitchen with its thick, roughhewn walls, the two rooms right and left as you enter the front door; to the right the study, to the left the dining room. As I entered the study I stopped and looked at the doorways—a bare six feet high and I asked myself, " Now, how in all the world did Dr Stuart get through these doors without getting a bump?" Mr Cleough, the young minister, had the deed box of the church waiting for me, and for over an hour I revelled in these old documents that made my grand old predecessor live again beside me. As I sat at that table and read these documents minutes, congregational rolls —all in that old familiar hand-

writing, I felt as if I was back across the seas again 14,000 miles away in Knox Church vestry, reading the old records there. As long as I live, I think I could pick out Dr Stuart's handwriting anywhere. Everywhere I could see the marks of a man who was meant to be a leader of men. It was he who first began to introduce some orderliness into the business affairs of Falstone congregation, for he wrote the minutes of the Managers' meetings himself and added as a foreword that up to that time there had been no proper minutes, but only a few disjointed notes that were utterly unintelligible! I wonder what these faithful blunderers thought of their young forceful minister, and his scathing condemnation of their efforts to transact the business of the Church. I expect the good old Doctor just swept them aside with an affectionate sweep of his big arm and carried on. With growing eagerness I read what must have been the last official document Dr Stuart ever signed in England —a kind of title deed relating to one of the many schools he instituted in the parish—signed and sealed in April, 185!), just a few months before he sailed for New Zealand. In the same year he rewrote the Communion Roll of the con-

gregation in his own handwriting, and there was his own name and then the name of "Jessie Stuart, the Manse," and below that " Margaret Hedley, the Manse," and after these names, in a different handwriting, the word "Removed." Margaret Hedley! Was this the Margaret we all had heard of in Knox Church ?—the Margaret, the housekeeper, left in charge of the three boys as a sacred trust by that brave young wife as she lay a-dying two years after she arrived in New Zealand? And then I came across an old photograph of the Doctor, taken before he left England. It Was the same rugged face I knew so well —a good deal younger, but so familiar! Surely it was in the providence of God that Knox Church called this man from little Falstone to do that tremendous work in Otago that became such a precious heritage to those of us who were called to follow in hia footsteps as ministers of Knox Church. It was thoughts like these that rose up in my mind as I stood in the pulpit of that little old grey church, with its one central aisle and its hanging oillamps and its mighty plastered walls. What a difference this from vast* cathedral-like Knox Church! And yet for ten years. D. M. Stuart preached

faithfully in this place! I stood in the little churchyard, with its fow scattered tombs and, as I scanned the hills for miles around, I picked out little farmhouses everywhere and shepherds' cottages nestling in the heather—an immense parislj—and I thought, "Yes, it was on these spacious hills that the spacious heart of Donald Stuart grew and grew; this was the proper setting for that tall, strong figure with his

shepherd's plaid and shepherd's work: this was the man for Otago in I 860." No wonder he made ajl Otago his parish. He was trained to serve in a land of far distances. Why, even to this day, the young minister there told me that on the previous week he and his wife-had done a little (!) visiting one day, and they walked 20 miles across hill and moor to do it. Yes, Knox Church and Dunedin and Otago and New Zealand owe a big debt to these farsweeping hills and to quiet little Falstone, nestling in their bosom. It was good to be there and to commune a while with the souls of just men made perfect. I shall never repay the debt I owe to Donald Macnaughton Stuart, but I have at least offered deep, honest obeisance to his memory at a shrine birilded of God at Falstone.