fast until their turn comes to move. It is said
that a new officer once gave the command, "Church of Scotland, right
about face, quick march! Fancy releegions, stay where ye are!"

Just as we were being told this story by an attendant squire, there
was a burst of scarlet and a blare of music, and down Castle Hill and
the Lawnmarket into Parliament Square marched hundreds of redcoats,
the Highland pipers (otherwise the Olympian gods) swinging in front,
leaving the American female heart prostrate beneath their victorious
tread. The strains of music that in the distance sounded so martial
and triumphant we recognized in a moment as "Abide with me," and never
did the fine old tune seem more majestic than when it marked a measure
for the steady tramp, tramp, tramp, of those soldierly feet. As "The
March of the Cameron Men," piped from the green steeps of Castle Hill,
had aroused in us thoughts of splendid victories on the battlefield,
so did this simple hymn awake the spirit of the church militant; a no
less stern, but more spiritual soldiership, in which "the fruit of
righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace."

As I fell asleep on that first Sunday night in Edinburgh, after the
somewhat unusual experience of three church services in a single day,
three separate notes of memory floated in and out of the fabric of my
dreams: the sound of the soldiers' feet marching into old St. Giles'
to the strains of "Abide with me;" the voice of the Reverend Ronald
ringing out with manly insistence: "It is aspiration that counts, not
realization; pursuit, not achievement; quest, not conquest!"--and the
closing phrases of the Friar's prayer: "When Christ has forgiven us,
help us to forgive ourselves! Help us to forgive ourselves so fully
that we can even forget ourselves, remembering only Him! And so let
his kingdom come; we ask it for the King's sake, Amen."

X

Even at this time of Assemblies, when the atmosphere is almost
exclusively clerical and ecclesiastical, the two great church armies
represented here certainly conceal from the casual observer all
rivalries and jealousies, if indeed they cherish any. As for the two
dissenting bodies, the Church of the Disruption and the Church of the
Secession have been keeping company, so to speak, for some years, with
a distant eye to an eventual union. In the light of all this pleasant
toleration, it seems difficult to realize that earlier Edinburgh,
where, we learned fr