"For thy servants take pleasure in thy stones, and favour the dust thereof". Psalm 102 : 14

These words refer, as you recall, to Mount Zion, and they speak of the psalmist's affection for this particular spot. Indeed, he speaks not only for himself but for all of God's people. The very dust of Zion is dear to them. They take pleasure in the very stones of Jerusalem.

Down through the years many have had the same feelings for the place where we meet this evening. It isn't in the strictest sense the temple of God. It is only bricks and mortar. Yet it is precious because within its walls we have heard God's glory proclaimed, God's word expounded and God's Christ honoured, magnified and exalted. It is precious because here we found the Lord Jesus Christ; here from week to week our souls have met Him; here we've experienced the eruptions of His grace into our own personal lives.

We look back with gratitude, then, to those who 100 years ago erected this building. They couldn't begin to understand our affluence or our financial security. Their's was a simple subsistence-economy. Yet out of their poverty they provided the funds and the labour that made this building possible.

C H Spurgeon once commented that the New Theology couldn't build a mousetrap.

By contrast, the faith of our fathers built, all over the Highlands, great edifices which stand today as an enduring tribute not only to their own faith but to the Christ in whom their faith was placed.

Tonight I want to look back with you: not over a mere hundred years, but back beyond that to the beginning of God's church in the Highlands and to its subsequent progress and development.

Outstanding personalities

I am struck, first of all, by the outstanding personalities God raised up to establish His cause in this part of the world. Let me mention, briefly, four of these men.

First, there was Donald Munro

Not our Free Church Donald Munro of the early part of this century, but a Munro who came in 1564 as the Assembly's Commissioner to Ross-shire. He was sent to establish and consolidate a work already begun.

Is it not remarkable that so soon after the Reformation, at a time when resources were so limited and when manpower in particular was so limited, the Reformed Church made such provision for this relatively remote part of the country?

This Donald Munro laboured for seven to ten years in this part of Scotland, and God blessed his labours abundantly. The Reformed Church was firmly established in Ross-shire and quickly became a centre of major influence.

I don't want to inflate the egos of those who live in Easter Ross, but it has played a monumentally important role in the history of Highland religion. Here, first of all, was the Reformation established, and from here it emanated to the rest of the North Country and the man who laid the foundation of all this was Donald Munro.

And then there was Robert Bruce.

Robert Bruce was one of John Knox's early successors as minister of St Giles. He was of aristocratic lineage, an outstanding theologian, author of a very important book on the Lord's Supper, a great preacher and a great statesman. In some ways a courtier, he was nevertheless a very firm Presbyterian and for his convictions was banished to Inverness by King James the Sixth in the year 1605.

Inverness may seem a very strange place to be banished to, but Bruce's exile was an important detail in God's overall providence.

He faced great personal hardship. He couldn't find a home because of local hostility. Frequently, his life was in danger. But he was able to preach with comparative freedom, and it appears that, even in these days, English (or at least Scots) was so widely spoken that Bruce's conventicles became great preaching occasions. In fact, people came from all over the north Inverness-shire, Ross-shire and even Sutherland - to hear this man proclaim the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Many believe that these gatherings were the pre-cursors of the later Communion Seasons of the North of Scotland. Through Bruce's preaching many souls came to know the Lord and many of those converts later became preachers themselves.

Some would even claim that Bruce was the single most important influence in establishing a real personal godliness in Easter Ross and Eastern Inverness-shire.

It seems a remarkable providence! On the face of things, Bruce was indispensable to the Church in Edinburgh, but God had His own purpose for him here in the north of Scotland and through his preaching there came great and sustained blessing.

The third name may sound a strange one:Gustavus Adolphus.

He was no Highlander, not even a Scot. He was a Scandinavian Lutheran monarch involved in the Thirty Years War, a bloody religious conflict which raged on the European mainland in the first half of the 17th century.

Gustavus became involved in defence of the Protestant cause, which the Holy Roman Empire sought to suppress by military means. In his armies, there was a Scottish regiment raised by Lord Reay, Chief of the Clan MacKay, and in this regiment there were not only MacKays but also many Ross-shire and Invernesian soldiers.

In Gustavus' army, similar in many ways to that of Oliver Cromwell, these men came across a new type

of piety. Their fellow soldiers had a religious motivation and their lives had a spiritual foundation, and on their return home, these clansmen brought back to the Scottish Highlands much of what they had learned from Gustavus and his associates during these long campaigns.

This became yet another important factor in moulding Highland piety. It gave a new edge to their zeal and a new depth to their devotion.

It may also be, of course, that they brought back with them some Scandinavian militarism, which may account for the fact that Highland Christians have sometimes confused spiritual and carnal warfare!

Be that as it may, there is no doubt that in Gustavus's army these soldiers met a new level of spiritual commitment.

The fourth outstanding figure I want to mention is Thomas Hog of Kiltearn.

For some strange reason, Hog has been almost forgotten by the church in Scotland. That is a grave misjustice for in his life-time, Hog was a man of international stature. He was a great pastor. He had a sagacity that was close to the prophetic . He had great self discipline and great strength of character, and he was a man of great statesmanship. Indeed, during his exile in Holland he was the confidante of William of Orange, and much of the consultation that took place prior to William's coming to Britain in 1688 took place through Thomas Hog of Kiltearn. Indeed, William held him in such high regard that after his accession to the British throne he took steps to have him summoned to London to act as his chaplain: so strongly did he feel the need of Hog's guidance and influence (Hog died before the royal summons reached him).

It was Hog, above all others, who gave our Highland church its distinctive features. He was ordained to Kiltearn in 1654 but was deposed in 1661 by Episcopal clergy.

It was said that the deposition was accompanied with great embarrassment and that those who enacted it did so with an air of solemn veneration, as if they were ordaining Hog to some higher office.

During his exile, he suffered greatly, but his influence endured. To him we owe our Fellowship Meetings, the emergence of "the Men" and our attitude towards the Lord's Supper. To him, too, we owe our distinctive emphasis on experimental religion.

Hog obviously had immense influence on his own parish. It was said, indeed, that no other parish in Scotland stood as firm during the Covenanting struggle as the parish of Kiltearn. But Hog also exercised an enormous influence on other ministers and on those who came in after generations.

It's surely a great mystery how such a man - the equal in every respect of Rutherford, Henderson and other household names - could be so quickly forgotten. But there he was, in an inconspicuous situation in the North of Scotland, laying a foundation that was to last for centuries.

The contribution of lay-people

But beside the influence of these outstanding personalities other factors contributed towards establishing the Reformed religion in the Highlands, particularly in Easter Ross.

For example there was the effect of trade and commerce.

Cromarty was a very important trading center in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, and it was probably through this avenue that the Reformation first came into Easter Ross.

The sailors and the traders would come with rumours of a new religion, snippets of sermons, copies of books and bibles. Some, no doubt, returned as converts to the new faith and bore witness to their neighbours and the community.

The church advances, not only through the work of outstanding men like Hog of Kiltearn, but also through the labours of unnamed and forgotten men and women doing their own bit for the Kingdom.

Remember how the gospel came to Antioch? Because those who fled persecution gossiped the Christian message as they went their way! And that is how the gospel came to Scotland. It came along the trade routes, not through great and famous missionaries but through ordinary men and women who witnessed to Christ as they went along.

But God also used what I might call a whole army of itinerant preachers, teachers and catechists.

Just think of the situation in the Highlands 300 years ago. A sparse population was scattered over enormous parishes separated by lochs and rivers and mountains. In that kind of territory it wasn't possible to establish an ordinary parish ministry of the urban or lowland type.

Fortunately, the church was quick to recognise this and decided that there was an urgent need for men who would itinerate, covering large tracts of the country on a regular basis.

As it happened, there were funds available for this purpose, largely because of political considerations.

The Highland population was to a large extent Roman Catholic and therefore Jacobite, and the powers that be had a vested interest in replacing that faith with one more sympathetic to the government. It therefore made funds available through the Royal Bounty Committee to provide preachers, catechists and so on for the Highlands.

The SPCK (the Society for Propagating Christian Knowledge) and the Gaelic Schools movement operated on the same itinerant principle, recognising that the only way to meet the need was to have men prepared to go from hamlet to hamlet and from village to village.

These men, their names long since forgotten, did a magnificent job. Some were experienced ministers seconded for a while to this kind of work; some were probationers; some were students; some were humble, unschooled catechists. All of them faced incredible hardship: the rigours of the climate, the rigours of the territory, poor salaries and, all too often, great local hostility.

They have one outstanding achievement to their credit: they stemmed the flow of the Counter Reformation in the Highlands.

Just remember how assiduous the Roman Catholic Church had been in trying to reclaim the Highlands.

For a long time that attempt had been singularly successful. It was successful because the Roman emissaries went precisely to those out-of-the way places that weren't covered by settled ministers. The answer to that was to mobilise an army of obscure but dedicated men prepared to go to these hamlets and counter the Roman influence.

In the recent past we in the North have not been prepared to acknowledge as we ought our debt to the laymen and the catechists to whom the Highlands owe so much. I bear my own share of guilt, because I did feel for a time that there was no place in the church for lay-preaching. I have revised my view of that and regret ever having said what I said. Indeed, I am more and more convinced that we cannot claim the Highlands for the Gospel unless we return to the same strategy.

I am reluctant to close missions or discontinue services anywhere, because I fear that into that vacuum some other faith will move.

But we cannot keep them open on the traditional parish system. We need, as much as ever before, the assistance of the laity.

In the meantime, let me just repeat that the debt of the Highlands to these old-world catechists is immense.

A third factor which told powerfully on the development of evangelicalism in the Highlands was fellowship. This was always of paramount importance, and, like so much else, it went back to Thomas Hog of Kiltearn.

I don't know when last there was a Fellowship Meeting in the Free church in Knockbain. Some of you will know: it probably wasn't all that long ago. These Fellowship Meetings began in Kiltearn, probably in the 1650's.

Thomas Hog was blessed with a revival in his parish in the early years of his ministry, and he gathered into a specific fellowship meeting all the communicants and all the newly awakened converts. Under his own chairmanship they discussed freely and frankly a wide range of practical and experiential topics.

Where Hog got the idea isn't exactly clear. We do know that in Aberdeen in his student days there was something similar to these fellowship meetings. In other words, they are not part of our distinctively Gaelic heritage.

For a while they were simply congregational. They were also closed and exclusive, open to none but communicants and invited enquirers .

In my own native island, Lewis, there are still such private fellowship meetings, known in Gaelic as the coinneimh uaigneach or private meeting, to which only communicant members are admitted.

In Wales, too, under Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland there was something very similar, called Experience Meetings. The idea spread from Kiltearn to other congregations.

Eventually these meetings developed an inter-congregational character, particularly when the practice arose of having Men's Meetings on the Friday mornings of Communion Seasons. These were public occasions, open to all who wanted to come. We don't know when these meetings began, but we do know that in 1737 they were already an established part of the life of the church in Sutherland.

The reason we know is that at that time the local Synod tried to suppress the practice (the clergy resented the prominent role they gave to the Men).

It seems to me a great pity that we have lost this dimension to our religious life and the mere demise of the Gaelic language is not enough to account for the loss. After all, Hog conducted these meetings in English, not in Gaelic, and there is no reason why they shouldn't survive in English today. But I believe, too, that it was a great loss that the Fellowship Meeting became obsessed with one question, the marks of grace. That was not Hog's intention originally. Why should the practice not be revived in terms of allowing us to discuss the practical and experiential problems that still perplex us?

I have, of course, met the argument that such things as Fellowship Meetings and Youth Fellowships are extra-Biblical: even that they are novelties and gimmicks. Well, they have a long pedigree! Indeed, in the Highlands of past centuries there were not only the "official" Fellowship Meetings but also what were called Family Fellowships which met on a Sunday evening.

What happened was simply that friends gathered in a particular house under the informal guidance of an elder to discuss the sermon and to pray together. That was an established part of the life of the church over a hundred years ago.

In fact, there is an amazing statement in John Noble's Religious Life in Ross, (written in the early years of this century) to the effect that he knew of a house in Easter Ross where people have met for prayer every Sunday evening for 200 years. Similarly, Robert Haldane reported that when he traveled the North of Scotland in 1797 he had met a large number of what he called "Praying Societies".

You can see the pattern. There were private congregational fellowship meetings, there were public fellowship meetings, there were family fellowship meetings and there were praying societies.

Haldane even suggests that it was these societies that kept the Christian faith alive during the dark years of Moderatism. People didn't get the Gospel from the pulpit, but they had their own places of prayer, fellowship and discussion; and through these the Gospel survived and was perpetuated.

The dismantling of this whole apparatus on the pretext of a spurious Puritanism was an act of spiritual vandalism. We need to remind ourselves that the Christian life is a social life. We need to interact, we need to meet, we need to argue, and we need to share and discuss. This was a large part of the strength of our churches in the North.

There's a great risk involved in building a congregation around a preacher. He comes, he goes and if the Church is built around him, then when he goes its foundation goes. That seems to me to be a complete misunderstanding of what a church is. I don't want to minimize the importance of ministers by any means, but the great thing is that the people have each other. Fellowship is our strength and I greatly fear that the excessive individualism that has come into religion is going to leave us defenseless.

These Christians in the North survived Moderatism because they had each other. Even when there was no preaching, there was fellowship.

Uneven spread

As I look back on this story, what thoughts arise in my own heart? Let me share with you one or two of them.

It's remarkable, first of all, how uneven the spread of the gospel was.

In Easter Ross there was a Reformed church in the 1560s. A century afterwards the people of Wester Ross were still sacrificing bulls to pagan gods.

In the Western Isles they were still doing something similar a hundred years later. In Skye in the late eighteenth century Communion was little more than the occasion for a Fair. The gospel had no power. The society of the western Highlands was pagan, with only the thinnest Christian veneer.

In 1824 when Alexander MacLeod went to the parish of Uig in Lewis he found the island virtually pagan. The story is told that at his first prayer meeting, so-called, the men were praying that God would guide a ship on to the rocks to provide them with booty.

It's quite remarkable that the gospel was established in Easter Ross 300 years before it was secured on the western seaboard.

As a west-coaster myself I freely confess my indebtedness to the east, and particularly to those men that God raised up to minister here: not only to Hog himself but to others such as Fraser of Brea, Balfour of Nigg and Stewart of Cromarty. These men were fully the equals of the great preachers and theologians of the South. Indeed, they had few superiors in any church, in any age. Yet we remain largely unconscious of what we owe to them.

My second thought is this: even in those far-off days the Gospel didn't prosper without difficulty. These giants I've mentioned didn't have it easy. There were many setbacks and disappointments. Think of the days of Hog himself.

When the crunch came after the Restoration of Charles II, only four of the twenty-four ministers in Rosshire stood firm for the Covenant. All the rest yielded to government pressure and became Episcopalians What the ousted clergy suffered in the Bass Rock and elsewhere is a matter of history. But even with the Revolution Settlement in 1688 their troubles were not over. When they returned to their parishes, many of them experienced great difficulty.

You will not, I hope, take it ill if I tell you that when a certain John Grant, for example, was presented to this venerable perish of Knockbain, he was literally ambushed by the congregation and set upon by a mob including, so we are told, a large number of women armed with batons.

He was beaten, stripped, well-nigh murdered and driven out.

His offence ? He was a Presbyterian.

Clearly, the years of Episcopalian supremacy took their toll even in Easter Ross. All over the north of Scotland Evangelicals had to face similar hostility from Episcopalian congregations.

The first attempt of the SPCK to set up a school in the North was a complete and utter failure. They chose Abertarff on the interesting principle that it was the worst district in Scotland. It proved to be exactly that, and the school was a total flop.

I mention these things because, so often, people have an idea, they try it, they meet instant discouragement and they give up. And there are always those prepared to say, "I told you so!"

When the SPCK met with such discouragement in Abertarff they must have been sorely tempted to conclude, "This whole idea is misconceived! Let's abandon it!" But they didn't.

Every good idea is going to be tested by Providence and by Satan in its initial stages. If the idea is worthwhile, let's not abandon it simply because of initial difficulties.

And then I have a perplexity (a perplexity which I find more and more intriguing): there was never any effective synthesis between the religion of the North and the literature of the North. I'm thinking particularly of our Gaelic heritage.

It's a remarkable fact that no great Gaelic poet ever wrote a hymn. It's an equally remarkable fact that no great Gaelic hymn-writer ever wrote a poem. The two things were kept entirely separate. Today that

situation still exists. I'm no expert on contemporary Gaelic literature, but I know enough to be aware that its outstanding poets (such as Sorley Maclean) are among the foremost in Europe. All this creativity ultimately derived from the Christian gospel. Yet it is consciously hostile to it. Our literature and our religion live in overt tension. No living Gaelic writer espouses Highland Evangelicalism and most have no patience with it.

This cleavage between the hymn and the song, between the novel and the sermon, is just one further reflection of the distinction between the secular and the sacred which has so often bedeviled Christianity.

In Ireland, for example, the situation has been very different. Their great literary figures, such as James Joyce and Graham Green, have retained their faith, and they reflect it in their literature. But in the Highlands our literature, our songs and our music have been almost totally divorced from our faith.

We even have the remarkable phenomenon of a group of writers using our native language to subvert the native culture. The words are Gaelic: the ideas, often, are those of Sartre and Marx. Let me lay down a challenge to those young people who may one day find themselves working in this field. What about fusing your creative imaginations with the metaphysic of Scripture? What about integrating your religion and your literature? There is a vision for you!

And I find myself looking back with sadness: sadness because as one goes through the records of those days, one sees strange names, the names of thriving churches in areas where today we barely survive.

You read of revivals in Perthshire (places like Glenlyon and Aberfeldy and Killin) away back in 1817.

You read of great revivals in Arran between 1804 and 1816.

I think of Rannoch, and the greatest of all our Gaelic hymn-writers, Dugald Buchanan; of Speyside and another great hymn-writer, Peter Grant.

I think of areas even in Easter Ross, where once there were huge congregations and great movements of the Spirit and where today there is spiritual apathy.

What impact does it all have on me?

To remind me that we have no guarantees!

In some parts of the church I hear people so confident for the future; and I tremble.

What right have we to be confident?

We have to take stock, we have to consolidate, we have to be on guard, because it's not all that long since the churches in Arran and Glenlyon and Speyside were full. And tonight? Ichabod! The glory has gone!

Yes! We can reclaim the Highlands for the Gospel. We can survive. We can flourish. We can reclaim. But only be the dint of dedicated application.

What do we need?

What do we need? We need men!

That is still our scarcest resource. Money is important, but the men are more important. We need a new generation of apostles of the North: men with vision, and men with the physical strength and the physical and moral courage to do what men like John Macdonald and Finlay Macrae did those many years ago.

We need, too, to recover what was the most important distinction of the church of God in the Highlands: fellowship. I don't think I can overstress the importance of this.

Prayer itself is an activity of fellowship: "Our Father which art in Heaven":

Do we not need to get back to this whole emphasis on sharing, on togetherness, on simply being the collective people of God?

That's where the stimulus to prayer and the stimulus to evangelistic activity are going to come from.

May God grant it to us!

 

Principal Donald Macleod is Principal of the Free Church College and Professor of Systematic Theology.

 

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