Page:Sketches of the History of the Church of Scotland.djvu/39

 the sympathetic. Of late, another step in advance has been taken, and the "service" is occasionally performed at the open grave, in defiance of the "Directory," by the minister arrayed in gown, hood, and bands; and very recently another venture has been made, and the minister so vested, has actually been seen, Prayer Book in hand, boldly reading the Church's Burial Office at the interment. The change, whatever it may lead to, is most marked, and very marvellous. The last small attempt at persecution that I know about happened to myself, shortly after I became a clergyman. Greatly daring, I made up my mind to brave public opinion and possible danger, and resolved to bury a deceased member of my flock in conformity with the Rubric, by saying the prescribed portion of the Office at the grave. The thing was hitherto unheard of. The grave-digger, and the Presbyterian element of the company glowered at me. The Episcopalian portion hung down its head, and looked uneasy and sore distressed at the temerity of their young ritualistic parson; and I was afterwards told that the irate grave-digger and the village heads had met in solemn and indignant conclave to consider whether I ought not to be informed upon, and the sheriff of the county be invited to take notice of me. But happily, the effervesence subsided, and nothing came of it.

The venerable Alexander Jolly, Bishop of Moray, is the typical Scottish Churchman of the latter half of the last century, and eight and thirty years of the present. In the early years of his Episcopate, the Church began to emerge from the thick gloom in which she had for a century lain. Charles Edward Stuart was dead;—Charles the Third, he was, by the Grace of God, but not by the will of the people, in the eyes of the Loyal Remnant;—and his brother Henry Benedict, the Cardinal of York, became Henry the Ninth, D.G., King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith. Henry had a gold medal struck, which I have seen, with this inscription, "Henricus, Dei gratia, sed non voluntate Hominum, Mag. Brit. Fr. et Hib. F. D. Rex." Bishop Abernethy Drummond of Edinburgh, the ruling mind among the Scottish Bishops of the period, contrived to satisfy himself, and his reasoning pretty easily satisfied the majority of his brethren of the Episcopate, that a Roman Priest was disqualified from sitting on the throne of Great Britain. So the Bishops quietly ignored Henry's pretensions, and forthwith came to terms with the Hanoverian government. Some may think it was a pity that they stultified the high-souled contention of a hundred years of their Church's history by rushing up to the Hanoverian throne with such undue, not to say indecent, haste, when the breath had scarcely left poor Charles's body. If they could only have had a little longer patience, and waited on a few years more, until Henry's death, their political logic, which they and their predecessors had closely bound up with their religion, would not have been so liable to be called in question. Henry the Ninth was the last Stuart who claimed the allegiance of his subjects; and