been forced to celebrate the Holy Communion on the table of a farm kitchen, hastily scoured, and prepared for the occasion.
The persecutions had reduced the number of Clergy from about five hundred who refused to conform to the new order of things at the Revolution, and to accept the Prince of Orange as their king, and Presbyterianism as their religion, to about one-tenth of that number in the closing years of the century. Even down to the period of my own youth, the number was hardly over seventy; and even that small increase was chiefly made up of the ministers of the so-called "English Chapels," who had qualified by taking the oaths to the Hanoverian government, having previously received their orders at the hands of English or Irish Bishops. For it is to be kept in view that no submission on the part of those who had been ordained by Scottish Bishops was of any avail. Mr. Skinner of Longside, and others, whatever their leanings and sympathies may have been, were ready to take the oath to the reigning sovereign. They did so,and prayed for him publicly by name; but it did not save them from the clutches of the penal statute; they were imprisoned notwithstanding. They had received their orders from the politically tainted Bishops of Scotland; and the object of the statute was to uproot Scottish Episcopacy. Most of the ministers of the "English Chapels," on the submission of the Bishops and Clergy at the close of the century, and the consequent relaxation of the penal laws,—I say relaxation, for the whole of the penalties were not swept away until about seventy years later,—saw it to be their duty to abandon the schismatical position to which only a supposed necessity gave the colour of justification, and to submit to their native Bishops. Fresh missionary ground, to which the Church now owes so much of her expansion and increase year by year, was not dreamed of in those days; not, in fact, until within less than twenty years since. In the early days of "the Church Society," a standing bit of the annual speeches by laymen of position and influence was sure to be an elaborate apology for the existence of Episcopacy in Scotland. Our Church, said the speakers, amid much and hearty applause, was not a proselytizing Church, not aggressive; oh no! very far from it; she only desired to keep together the few congregations she happened to possess, and to make the Clergy a little more comfortable; our dear brethren of the Establishment and the "denominations" need have no fear of our encroaching on their domains. Happily such abject apologetic speeches are never heard now. The Church is awakening to her mission and her responsibilities. An influx of Home Missionary zeal, under the healthy and fostering influences of the Representative Church Council, and an absence of the unworthy fear of being stigmatised as proselytizers, have worked a marvellous change. May this fresh Home Missionary zeal suffer no coldness or abatement, and may our Divine Head prosper it, until Scotland is re-conquered to the obedience of the Faith.
In my early youth, the dark shadow of the persecuting times,
