ground evenly with Argyll,' passes quietly beneath the picturesque cliff on which the Cathedral stands, and where the saintly Leighton loved to walk. At each little city was a ruined cathedral, with some special grace and glory of its own, one of which, Dunblane, was gradually restored during Bishop Wordsworth's latter years in a manner which augurs well for the future progress of Church life in Scotland in the beauty of holiness. At Abernethy, an old Pictish centre, stands one of the two round towers of Scotland, which a good authority supposes to have been erected as early as the reign of the third King Nectan (A.D. 712-727), and by the Northumbrian architects of the monastery of Jarrow, and to be a remarkable link of connection with the golden age of the North-Anglian Church in the time of the Venerable Bede. 2 At Glamis, in the northern part of his Diocese, is a castle of unparalleled dignity and strangely fascinating traditions. At Forfar, hard by, is a centre of Church life, and of persistent ministry in the evil days of the last century, which has shown what the Episcopal Church may be to the people when led by devoted men. At Dunfermline, on rising ground overlooking the Firth Station, are the largest and most complete in Britain, and are supposed to be those used by Agricola A.D. 88. See Tacitus, Agricola, chap. 29 foll. I visited them 2 September, 1895. I find from his diary that my uncle visited them 11 August, 1876. At the battle of Sheriffmuir, though neither side gained the victory, Argyll prevented the Pretender's army from crossing the Forth. * Dr. Petrie, quoted in Murray's Handbook to Scotland, p. 279, ed. 5, 1884. See also J. Russell Walker, Pre-Reformation Churches in Fifeshire, fol. Edinb. 1895, from which I gather that it was connected with a Church dedicated to St. Bridget. The other round tower in the Scottish mainland is at Brechin, and is considered to be several centuries later. It is connected with the Cathedral. Abernethy is sometimes called the Pictish capital, but that is said rather to have been at Forteviot. See Grub, E. H. S. i. 132 and 116 foll. who records the intercourse between Nectan and Ceolfrid and possibly Bede himself, from Bede, H. E. v. 21. of Forth, the southern boundary of the Diocese, is a busy manufacturing city which contains some of the most interesting memorials of the royal families of Scotland. Here on a mound, surrounded by a deeply-cut defile, Malcolm Canmore built his modest tower, where he welcomed his sainted wife Margaret flying from the Norman Conqueror, and here they became parents of a line of kings. Here, too, in close proximity, they founded together the Benedictine Abbey, where they and their descendants, down to Robert the Bruce, lie buried. The solemn almost empty Norman nave, in style not unlike Durham, is nearly all that remains of the Westminster Abbey of Scotland,' but the great ruined front of the later palace, close to and connected with the abbey buildings, is intimately associated with the history of Queen Mary and her descendants the English Stewarts, and carries on our thoughts to times that closely affect our own. At Kinross, which lies half-way between Dunfermline and Perth, is a bright little county town, with red-tiled roofs that might belong to Lincolnshire, lying on the western shore of the picturesque basin of Lochleven--the glory of that little county-guarded by the two Lomonds. The reader needs hardly to be reminded of the historic islands which rise from its surface, one, St. Serf's, carrying us back to the early times of the Culdees, the other, with its peel tower and rampart wall, the scene of one of the hard captivities, and of the romantic escape of the ill-fated Mary Stewart. It would take too long to describe, even in few words, the castles, forts, and battlefields, the abbeys and churches and sacred shrines, of this fair district. Everywhere throughout these counties are scenes that delight those who look upon them, and raise images of love and pity in the reflecting mind. Everywhere are signs of old piety disturbed by conflict, and suddenly arrested in its development, but ready to rise again; of old honour and glory, of baronial state and Highland chieftaincy, now bent down. and ruined in civil warfare, now emerging from it with renewed bravery. Everywhere are signs of modern activity in religion, but of religion at variance with itself and eager to display its differences. Everywhere, and above all other sources of interest, is a strong and selfconfident humanity, yet with a quaint charm, like that of the country itself, from its blending of Celtic and Lowland characteristics. Here you have enthusiastic devotion to a cause or a person, reckless of consequences, side by side with plain good sense of duty and respect for others. Here you will find tenderness and poetry mingled with roughness and bluntness, strange outspokenness and equally strange reserve, generosity and shrewdness of dealing, the expected and the unexpected, doors opened into the soul and suddenly shut-in fact all the marked characteristics of our composite British nature, more developed than in England, and, more often perhaps than with us, united in the same persons. To Bishop Wordsworth, who had come into such close contact with his uncle William, and was in many ways imbued with his spirit, the country which had inspired some of his most characteristic, that is to say, at once most spiritual and most human poems, could not but be full of an inexpressible charm. It had also a sort of family interest of another kind, from the exertions of the men whom the Wordsworths were specially brought up to honour, Bishop Horsley, William Stevens, and Joshua Watson, who were the particular friends and benefactors of the Scottish clergy. No region could be fitter than this to evoke the desires of an earnest and persistent man in the fulness of life and power, anxious for the coming of the Kingdom of God. It was, as he said to a friend' (towards the close of his long life), to our Lord's office as King that he looked with most earnestness for stay and comfort, in the midst of the controversies and divisions in which his lot was thrown. It would not be untrue to say that this was the guiding principle of his life. Such a country could not fail to stimulate him to vigorous action of some sort in the hope of contributing to the fulfilment of his Master's designs and prayers. Here was a strong people and a religious people all about him, separated as to its great bulk into three opposing Presbyterian communions, divided, as every Englishman feels, for no sufficient reasons, and yet divided by a hostility, or at any rate a rivalry, of a most practical kind. His own historic Church, which had the right, as he notes, to the territorial titles, at least as regards its Dioceses, was but a fraction of the population (in his later 2 1 Dr. J. Myers Danson (of Aberdeen), who quoted his words in his paper entitled Charles Wordsworth,' one of the lectures on Scottish Church Worthies, given in St. Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, in 1895. This is his note, MS. i. 11: Our use of territorial titles.-Some persons imagine that the use of territorial titles-of the ancient titles of their respective sees-is a usurpation on the part of the Scotch Bishops, and an intrusion into the privileges of the Established (Presbyterian) Church. But this is a mistake. When Lord John Russell brought in his Ecclesiastical Titles Bill it included the prohibition of these titles, but the clause was withdrawn and our titles were purposely left unprohibited; in other words, they were recognised and allowed by the Legislature. In my own case, when I was elected Fellow of Winchester [the new statutes made by the Governing Body and approved by her Majesty in Council, November 20, 1873, contained the following clause, under the title "Fellows," p. 4: “The Right Reverend Charles Wordsworth, Bishop of St. Andrews, shall enjoy as a Fellow of the College the same pecuniary interest, as well as the same status therein, as the Fellows elected before the passing of the Public Schools Act, 1854 ']."' I have completed this note by the words in brackets taken from a memorandum on a loose paper. My uncle has not, perhaps, stated his case quite as strongly as he might have done, for not only are the titles left unprohibited,' but section 3 of the Ecclesiastical Titles Assumption Act (14 & 15 Vict. c. 60) of 1851' provides as follows: This Act shall not extend or apply to the assumption or use by any Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Scotland, exercising episcopal functions within some years he described it as 3 per cent.). In the Diocese which he was called upon to administer, it had, with the partial exceptions of Perth, Forfar, and Muthill, no such strong traditional centres as exist in the great towns of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, and Aberdeen. At the end of his life the total Church population of the Diocese was returned as under 7,000, and it had largely increased in forty years. It was, in fact, to a flock of only about 3,239 souls, divided among some twenty-one charges, that he was at the first called to minister. We can readily imagine what a constant disproportion he must have felt between his will and power to guide and teach on the one side and the willingness of those about him to be guided. Nor could he be blind to the many points of difference and of superiority which marked the position of the Presbyterian clergy and their flocks when compared, for instance, with the majority of the dissenting ministers and their congregations in England. The Genevan polity, introduced by Melville, though much out of harmony with our ways of thought and feeling in the Church of England, nevertheless retained and exhibited many of the elements of true Church life, and discharged many of the educational functions which are characteristic of a national Church.' It was a polity, not a conglomerate of varying congregations. Not only in the Establishment, but in the two great schisms from it there was strong parochial feelinga realisation that every resident in a place stood or ought to stand in some relation to the Christian religion. The district or place in Scotland, of any name, style, or title in respect of such district or place, but nothing herein contained shall be taken to give any right to any such Bishop to assume or use any name, style, or title which he is not now by law entitled to assume or use.' This Act was repealed in 1871 by 34 & 35 Vict. c. 53. In illustration of what I mean, I may be permitted to refer to my Charge of 1894 (part 2), entitled The Educational Functions of a National Church (Salisbury: Brown & Co.). Ꭰ |