m
highly; but there is an element in evangelism which repels admiration,
unless it be an admiration grounded in faith and love; and the appeal
in such cases must lie, therefore, not to the justice of the world,
but to the judgment-seat of God. We may remind the reader, in passing,
that it was the venerable minister of Lairg who, on quitting his manse
on the Disruption, was received by his widowed daughter into a cottage
held of the Duke of Sutherland, and that for this grave crime--the
crime of sheltering her aged father--the daughter was threatened with
ejection by one of the Duke's creatures. Is it not somewhat necessary
that the breath of public opinion should be let in on this remote
country? But we digress.

A peculiar stillness seemed to rest over this Highland parish on the
Sabbath. The family devotions of the morning, the journey to and from
church, and the public services there, occupied fully two-thirds of
the day. But there remained the evening, and of it the earlier part
was spent in what are known in the north country as fellowship
meetings. One of these was held regularly in the 'ha'' of our
relative. From fifteen to twenty people, inclusive of the family, met
for the purposes of social prayer and religious conversation, and the
time passed profitably away, till the closing night summoned the
members of the meeting to their respective homes and their family
duties. We marked an interesting peculiarity in the devotions of our
relative. He was, as we have said, an old man, and had worshipped in
his family long ere Dr. Stewart's Gaelic translation of the Scriptures
had been introduced into the county; and as he was supplied in those
days with only the English Bible, while his domestics understood only
Gaelic, he had to acquire the art, not uncommon in Sutherland at the
time, of translating the English chapter for them, as he read, into
their native tongue; and this he had learned to do with such ready
fluency, that no one could have guessed it to be other than a Gaelic
work from which he was reading. It might have been supposed, however,
that the introduction of Dr. Stewart's edition would have rendered
this mode of translation obsolete; but in this and many other families
such was not the case. The old man's Gaelic was _Sutherlandshire
Gaelic_. His family understood it better, in consequence, than any
other; and so he continued to translate from his English Bible, _ad
aperturam libri_, many years after the