Many, many years have now passed since this God-fearing young girl passed from time to eternity into the house, “not made with hand, eternal in the heavens;” at the tender age of seventeen. Indeed, little time has expired since, without my having sweet recollections of her.
As a boy, I used to wonder at her continual reading of God’s Word, and how she could quote spontaneously from it. With tears in her eyes she often uttered; “My beloved is mine and I am His; he feedeth among the lilies.” After family worship she usually retired upstairs for further reading of God’s Word and secret prayer.
With great delight she walked ten miles to Tarbert Church in all weathers, both on Sabbath and weekdays. Here her soul was fed with the “finest of wheat” under the ministry of the Rev. D. N. MacLeod, then our minister in Harris before his translation to Ullapool. On several occasions, Mr MacLeod told me:— ‘One Sabbath, I spoke from the Song of Solomon, 1, 4 “Draw me, we will run after thee; the king hath brought me into his chambers: . . .”. While preaching that Lord’s Day, I felt as if my lips were touched as with a live coal from off the altar, as I took notice of the gracious and heavenly smile on Catherine’s young countenance, as she drank in the gospel message, thus closing in with the Lord Jesus Christ in an everlasting betrothal.’ The Great Day alone shall manifest how many souls were added to the visible church during Mr MacLeod’s ministry in Harris.
Shortly afterwards Catherine took ill, with an illness from which she was not to recover. She knew that. “The bridegroom cometh and calleth for thee” — this she often quoted with great joy whenever she noticed our keen concern for her, and how with many tears we longed for her full recovery.
One night I dreamt of her decease, and the funeral procession as it actually took place from our home. In the morning, I told my Mother, who, dismissed it as a mere dream; however, it seemed to have had a preparatory result by way of preparing my parents for the severe sorrow in store for them, in the providence of God. When we bemoaned her, my Mother always said, ‘Remember, “the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”.’ Job 1: 21.
While memory lasts, I shall always remember that solemn early morning in September towards the break of dawn, when Catherine said farewell to us all, but assuring us she was going to that place of which it is written: “and the street of the city was pure gold, as if it were transparent glass” Rev. 21: 21.
The other members of the family in order to conceal their tears, together with their grief of heart, left the bedchamber, while I remained as if it were in hiding. Catherine then softly whispered to her Mother “Mother, dear, I am now entering the valley of the shadow of death, and let us sing together for the last time Psalm 118 from the nineteenth verse:—
“O set ye open unto me
the gates of righteousness;
Then will I enter into them
and I the Lord will bless.”
She herself had a beautiful musical voice, and sang it audibly to the end of the verse; then closed her eyes in death, never to open them again until the heavens be no more. She entered in both to sing and to bless Him whom she loved from her infancy, we believe.
In Luskentyre cemetery lies her precious dust, with that of her Father and Mother, her two sisters, and brother, with that also of the writer’s wife Margaret and our infant child. May we be among those, who, with David, shall rise on the Resurrection morning with His likeness: “And with His likeness, when I wake, I satisfied shall be” Psalm 17: 15.
(Rev.) J. A. Macdonald.