Page:Sketches of the History of the Church of Scotland.djvu/38

 although direct persecution by the State had ceased, still brooded over the elder Clergy. They shrank from observation. The Bishops never allowed, if they could help it, the mention of an Episcopal act to appear in the newspapers; afraid that outsiders should come to know that there were live Bishops in Scotland. Our Churches were all Chapels; which term was in current use both in town and country, Edinburgh not excepted, until within something less than fifty years since; nor is the term yet, although less frequently heard than it was, by any means out of use. But even Chapel was an advance on the Meeting House of a former generation. The truth is, that for a long period,—all through the first half of the last century, —the Clergy rather encouraged the use of the words Chapel and Meeting House as provisional names, because they expected the Parish Churches to be again restored to them. Culloden blasted the last remnant of that hope.

The Ritual, as I have already mentioned, was the baldest and meanest conceivable; and the people, long accustomed to it, were rather suspicious and intolerant of any thing better. The Clergy took all sorts of liberties with the arrangements and words of the Prayer Book; here and there improving them, as they fondly imagined. Of this, curious and grotesque instances might be mentioned. A surpliced Priest was never seen; except, perhaps, in one or two of the large towns, and then only in the cases of Clergy imported from England. All the Offices that could be performed in private were so performed, including that for the Burial of the Dead; which Office was said in a mysterious, hidden sort of way, at the "Chesting," the evening before the funeral, in the presence of a few women. This mysterious manner of saying the Burial Service was much suspected by the Presbyterian neighbours, especially when they happened to see a plate with some earth carried in, as something superstitious and unholy; and the more so, as at the period I am speaking of, they had not themselves begun to have any "services" at funerals, now so universal. I can distinctly remember their commencement in some of the large towns before the custom had extended to the country parishes. At first, it was in a very tentative sort of way. The ministers knew that their "Directory for Public Worship" distinctly prohibited any religious service at funerals; so they made the prayer a sort of prolonged grace before the compound called "Burial Wine" and cake were handed round;—a grace, with a few hortatory and comforting words to the family mourners, couched more or less in a precatory form. Gradually advances were made, to what is now called "a funeral service." Now the refreshments are offered to each guest on entering the house of mourning, without the formality of a grace; and, the company being all assembled, a bow is made to the minister, who forthwith proceeds to read a chapter proper to the occasion, often the Burial Lesson of our Office;—after which a long prayer is put up, largely partaking of the hortatory, the homeletic, and