OLD CHURCH LIFE IN SCOTLAND.

Otago Witness, Issue 1764, 12 September 1885, Page 26

OLD CHURCH LIFE IN SCOTLAND.

Church-hearers in these days not infrequently become restless in their comfortably-cushioned pews, if a sermon is prolonged beyond twenty minutes ; but their seventeenth century predecessors, in Scotland at all events, could endure two or three turns of the half-hour sand-glass during the delivery of a discourse. John Livingstone, giving an account of a sermon preached by him in 1630, said : " I had about ane hour and a-half on the points I had meditated on Ezekiel xxxvi. 15-16, and in the end, offering to close with some words of exhortation, I was led on about ane hour's time in ane strain of exhortation and ■warning with such liberty and melting of hearts as I never had the like in public all tny life." .Even this latitude did not exhaust the possibilities of dissertation on one passage of Scripture, which was frequently made to furnish topics for a long series of discourses. This practice seems to have been acceptable, for a complaint made to the Presbytery of Ayr by the parishioners of Craigie was that their minister " doth often change his text, and doth not raise many heads, and doth not prosecute such as he names, but scruffs them." In Episcopal times men had been allowed at their pleasure to wear their hats or remove them while the sermon was being preached, and this practice was continued under the Presbyterian ret/ime. Opinions, however, seem to have differed as to the propriety of such latitude. The minister of Crossmichael, about the middle of the eighteenth century, is said to have thus delivered himself :' " I see a man aneath that laft wi' his hat on. I'm sure ye're clear o' the soogh o ! the door. Keep aff yer bannet, Tammns, aud if yer bare pow be caulcl, ye maun get a grey worsit wig like myselV The women, on the other hand, seem to have rendered themselves liable to rebuke from the pulpit for " keiping their playdis about their heids"— the Kirk Session of Dundonald suggesting that this was done as " a cleuck to their sleiping in tyme of sermons." The threats of fine and imprisonment not proving efficacious, the Kirk Session of Monifietb. in Ki4H, is recorded to have given the " beda-ll 5s to buy ane pynt of tar to put upon the women that held the plaid above their head in the church."' Before the era of gas the candles required during service do not seem to have been provided ou 4 " of any common fund ; each worshipper was expected to bring his own candle. The wine used at the Communion Service in the sixteenth century was not port, but claret or burgundy. " The quantity of it consumed at a sacrament,"'says the author, " was enormous/" An attempt in the time of Edward VI. to introduce the mixed chalice so highly favoured by Ritualists was resented by the mass of the people in Scotland, the mixture of water with the wine being denounced as " an intake, an imposture, and a shameless^ adulteration," tJji; supposed motive being " clerical parsimony," fcr the duty devolved upon the minister of supplying the wine. As to the other element, in some parts of Scotland shortbread was till quite recently chosen as the most appropriate bread for the Christian Passover.

Communion Services were held half-yearly, and a throng of. visitors from neighbouring districts rendered it often necessary to provide for a larger number of communicants than the entire population of the place. There was preaching in a tent outside" the church. One of the old stories of the MauchKne communions is that on one occasion the beadle called to the preacher in Xhe tent to " fire away, for th? seventeenth table was filling, and there was no end to the work." As each table accommodated eighty, there were on that occasion nearly 1400 communicants. — The Literary World, in a Review of the Rev. Andrew Edgar's " Old Church Lite in Scotland."