HOLY WEEK IN SCOTLAND.
[To THE EDITOR or THE " SPECTATOR.") SIR,—Save for the Catholics and Episcopalians who intrude upon a regime that England escaped in the middle of the seventeenth century, thanks to the Independents, Holy Week in Scotland is like the snakes in Iceland. True, a minister here and there holds services or delivers addresses in his church to the beadle and two or three other people. Good Friday nfay be "observed" in the same way. But the sense of the occasion is as sadly to seek as ever, and being an office-bearer, and having something to do with the dates of the periodic Communions, I am able to make a reve- lation that will shock you south of the Tweed. One of the stated two or three Communions of the year falls about this time, and Easter Sunday is deliberately avoided as its date because the communicants are understood to be on holiday!
I am a Presbyterian, born and bred in the faith, and somehow this goes against the grain in me now. So far as I know, the craving that has grown in me for the observance of the festivals, and particularly for the values that are in Holy Week, has net come by reading, argument, or any kind of formal conversion. I am not prone to imitate, and have not the least disposition to strike away from my own people and enter a religious community that does know the value of the festival of Christmas or the festival of Easter. To the best of my belief, it is envy that moves me. Of course, I see these communities getting something out of the cult of sacred seasons. I want to get it too. But how?
I put my case, of course, because I know most about it. So, egotistically, I must carry my confession this much further, that this craving or envy, which most of my fellow-countrymen do not apparently share, has arisen during the war. It seems to be a religious issue of war thoughts. Sunday churchgoing and the stated rare Communion did not satisfy. They were a rationed diet, se to speak. They lacked the intensity of the Mass or the frequent Eucharist. They were too social, and not unworldly enough. One's nature seemed to require a stronger reaction from
horrible news of the war, and from the vengeful or belligerent thoughts of everyday life. So I came to envy the Catholic boy in the trenches whose mother's one care about him was that he should remember his " duty." I bent my head, almost in awe. at the reading of the letters of a bright Anglican lad I knew who was going to death nourished by a religiosity in which the Eucharist and the festivals of the Church had played a part that suddenly lost its mysteriousness for me.
Suspicions of my own treachery were lulled by the reports of two of our Presbyterian chaplains who came home from the front. and simultaneously reported that experience in the trenches had instilled into them a new valuation of Communion. In high- strung moments it was cherished far, far more than the plain service. Now, I said, we are getting on. At least I appeared to be in a stream of terdeney, no traitor, but discovering for myself. in a backwash of the war, a truth that bloody war itself was rnbbing into warriors. These padres did not hesitate to say that the prime lesson of the war for our Church at home was that the Communion or Eucharist must be exalted to a much higher place in the routine of the Church.
But, so far as I know, there is not a more frequent Communion in the congregations of these ministers. There is an active dis- cussion in the Church of Scotland just now about rededication. Following in the footsteps of the Anglican Church, this body is moving towards a revival. There is an organization to that end. and our democratic, or quasi-democratic, constitution allows of a free debate on such matters. But, so far as I can learn, no leading minister has suggested that new life could be put into the Church by " edging " back ever eo little to the general practice or cult of Christendom which Scotland at the Reformation rejoiced to desert. And I have met with no layman who says what I say, whatever he may think.
It is generally admitted that the Presbyterian Church needs revivification. The people are still good churchgoers; the churches have numerous agencies and do " works " of all kinds. The moral tone of the community has not fallea, though there is little evangelical preaching. But something is wanting. The Church avows that it needs to be changed in some way in order to meet the " boys " when they come home. So it speaks of .rededication generally, but in detail mainly-1 speak of the inevitable pamphlets—of a general quickening of what without offence, and with real hereditary sympathy, I call the routine of Presbyterian Church Life. But of the Christian Year, of such a use of the Eucharist as would centralize and crown it in the religious life of the people, not a word.
Naturally I am disposed to think that without any panacea nothing can come of all this energizing, just as so little has come of the late Anglican revival, in vivid contrast to the miracle that was wrought by " Puseyism." Time will show. Surely, however, the Christian Year will win some ground. I cannot be a mere odd eccentric In Presbyterianism. There must be others in the clerical ranks like my two padres. The " boys " who valued the Eucharist near the front line will come home with the war-born craving still in their strained hearts. I do not despair. and I mean to persevere, and seek the means of grace where I can get them within the borders of the Church, and perhaps by borrowing occasionally. For there is a sort of High Church party among us; perhaps I did it a little injustice at the start by offer- ing a simple contrast between its ill-rewarded "offices" iu Hely Week and the general ignoring of the anniversary of the Pussion. It moves, if very slowly. There is already in large cities, and some villages, an opportunity for those who have rediscovered the Christian Year and learned how to be "cheered with thoughts of Christ the living bread."
If the altars of Presbyterianiem are cold and bare, save twice or thrice a year, the altar has at least come back. That is perhaps in the main a fashion in architecture, but go where you will in Scotland, the principal place in the new churches, and in many of the old, is now the Communion table, and the pulpit is pushed to one side. But I am certain that paradoxes awaken sleepers. The day may come when, say in some Holy Week, when thought is an agony or an ecstasy, all Scotland will ask what that exalted table is for, and will answer itself : " To show forth the Lord's death till He come."—I am, Sir, &e., ELDER.
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