Strange Happenings in the Churches.
According to newspaper reports, the pagan habit of playing “MacCrimmon’s Lament” at the funerals of noted ecclesiastics and others, in Church of Scotland services, is becoming increasingly common. Some time ago, for instance, a well-known Church of Scotland Doctor of Divinity, after eulogising his elder, who had passed away the previous Saturday, asked the organist, at the Sabbath evening service, to play “MacCrimmon’s Lament,” and the report in the Highland weekly newspaper emphasised that “the congregation was deeply affected.” More recently, a Doctor of Divinity, though reared in boyhood in a Calvinistic atmosphere, gave orders for the same secular lament to be played on the bagpipes at his funeral. This is nothing short of Celtic paganism and spiritualistic
mysticism run riot, and deserves the severest condemnation, in the light of Christian Revelation. Another popular custom, this time among professedly orthodox evangelicals in Scotland, is becoming sadly common. When a minister, who has served a particular professedly evangelical congregation, leaves for a Modernistic denomination, the congregation is called together; elders and deacons, and some members, laud and eulogise the renegade minister to the skies, as they hand over to him a well-filled purse of treasury notes. The minister, in turn, speaks as flatteringly of the harmony that had existed between them these many years. This seems to indicate that in our backsliding days, solemn ordination vows are treated by people and ministers alike as scraps of paper, whether the minister leaves for a Modernist church or a Mohammedan mosque.—J. P. MacQueen.
Northern Newspaper and New R.C. School.
The following extracts are given from the leading article of The North Star, Dingwall, Saturday, 1st December, 1951:—
‘Among local Scottish items of news in one of our daily papers this week we find this: ‘New R.C. School for Kilmarnock.’ ‘Kilmarnock Dean of Guild Court granted warrant for the erection by Ayr County Council of a Roman Catholic Secondary School in Grassyards Roads, Kilmarnock, at an estimated cost of £167,529. It was stated that it was intended at a later date to erect a primary school at the other end of the site and that playing fields to be laid out in the centre would serve the needs of both schools.’ When we read this item we thought, first of all of the anxiety shown over a proposed road in Protestant Dingwall, in case it might cost too much! Certain departments may be anxious to cut down public expenses. The Roman Catholic Church seems to have no compunction about that part of it!
‘When we come to think of it, we are in a strange condition here, in a Scotland which is nominally a Protestant country. The Roman Catholics are entitled to have separate schools provided for them. The ordinary common-to-others schools are not good enough. So a great exception is made to suit one church. We are a great people, but we are also a peculiar people. Imagine what would happen in Italy or in Spain if Protestants demanded state-aided separate schools for Protestant children as their ecclesiastical right.’