A GAELIC SERMON.

Otago Witness, Issue 2927, 20 April 1910, Page 38

A GAELIC SERMON.

The simple announcement of a Gaelic sermon was sufficient to rally Highlanders together. The Celtic heart warms to the languages of the north, even, as it does to the tartan, and little wonder. Is it • not directly connected with all a Highlander holds -dear in the matter of homo and history? This being so, the Mission Hall behind First Church was comfortably filled long before the appointed time. The meeting was a typical one—typical of the old order that changes not. The company comprised a plentitude of grey heads and bowed shoulders, representing veteran colonists —men and women to whom duty was as pleasant an exeircise as divine worship, and who would as soon think of leaving beaten paths as of desecrating' the Sabbath. Highlanders are conservative by nature, whatever they may be by circumstance, and their chief boast is to worship' as their forefathers worshipped —on moor and in gle.i. Entiling the hall •of First Church and looking round, we recall the old .Sabbath school days, but see little change in the hall where they were spent. A morsel "of plaster fallen off here and there, a life-size portrait of pastor Gibb added to the walls; for the rest we might have been going on to lessons, so familiar did the old place seem The days I allude to were those of the Rev. George Sutherland;. There was no organ then, and the hymnal was a short divide from the oldfashioned Psalms and Paraphrases. Since then a massive organ has been installed in the churjh, and the hymnal brought up to the date of Kipling. The walls, once snowy Oamaru stone, have put on a gown of reverend green, and it comes natural to folk to count their grey hairs by the years of their church. Our eyes wander from the congregation to the old highbacked seats, relies of a church building that, gone row like the lave, was once in the forefront of colonial architecture. While we were gazing on the time-polished', highbacked seats, wondering if they were not relics of a still earlier church—a wooden edifice, that only the greyest beards in the assemblage could remember, —the door of the anteroom opened, and the minister, the Rev. D. Maclennan, M.A., of Edendale, walked reverently to the pulpit stand. Tall, fresh of countenance, youthful ; n bearing, to a stranger be might seem an unlikely pastor for so venerable a gathering. A critical look into his eye, however, sets doubt at rest. They are deep with earnestness and power—factors dear to the Highland breast. In clear, subdued tones that gave weig - ht to his every word, the service is opened. The order was thCt of the ancient, church, the congregation sitting throughout Psalm, prayer, and sermon, reverently rising only at last to receive the benediction. The metric Psalme were sung.. The first- lines were intoned by the minister, the congregation following up with the grand old tunes that need neither harmony nor accompaniment to give them effect. The text was from Isaiah xxxv, 8-10 —" And 'an highway shall be given them, and it shall be called the way of holiness," and so On, a fitting text for the masterly sermon that followed. The way of life., the wayfarers, the happy ending of the journey—these were the heads; and every head was treated to scholarly and devout thought. All this in Gaelic, remember, a language adapted for reverential worship and eloquence, if ever language w?e. There is an indescribable something in its manner of expressing truth, inspiring in its exhortation and comforting and consoling in its benedictions, exclusively its own. How earnestly the congregation listened, and how reverently. Here and there a grey head would nod when some truth nearer than another touched the heart. Here and there a tear glistened beneath shaggy eyebrows as the pastor recorded the fact that here there is no abiding city, turning the momentary tide of regret, however, by pointing them to the city whose inhabitants neither weairied nor wept. The Highlander is a critic by nature. His minister must be a man of parts, a man whose earnestness of soul is such that his lips falter not. lan Maclaren pictures both minister and p&ra&b3&jtfs in "In 'tb? £«v> T 's -3>l Auld Lang Syne/'' and he might have attended this sermon in the far south, sketching them both. Reverently even as they gathered, the company dispers&d, waiting outside the old church in subdued groups to shake hands and exchange greetings with friends whom they had not met since the last gathering, and whom they would probably not meet again till the next Gaelic sermon summoned them in from the country. Celt.