the sanctuaries of peace, their
sorrow will be transmuted into joy.

IV

The Power of Prayer

IV

For eight centuries the Church of St. Giles has been the centre of the
religious life of Scotland. At all times of sorrow the nation has
turned to it, and within its walls, consecrated by the prayers of so
many generations, the surcharged heart has voiced its woe in the
presence of the Unseen. But in all the years of the dim and fading
past there never was a day like this in which we now stand. Death has
come as a grim spectre, and has looked into our eyes. The winds carry
to our ears the moans of our perishing sons, dying gloriously for
freedom on the bloody fields of Flanders. The great ships guard our
shores, and we know that if that vigil failed, our cities and villages
and fair countryside would become as Louvain and the Low Country.
Death itself would be welcome rather than that.

If there ever came to any nation a call to seek the refuge which eye
has not seen, that call soundeth persistently, compellingly in our
ears. And that call soundeth not in vain. To-day[1] the two great
Churches of Scotland met as one in St. Giles, the days of their
misunderstanding ended, to pray for King and country--for all the
things which make life beautiful. They have come through days of
alienation and isolation, but to-day they are with one accord in one
place. And in their hearts only one purpose--to seek the blessing of
God for their nation.

[1] November 18, 1914.

***

As one sat there, under the tattered flags on which many bloody fights
for freedom are emblazoned, and watched the stream of men flow into the
church, what memories came crowding through the echoing corridors of
time.

Four hundred years ago there came to Edinburgh the news of Flodden, and
out of the closes the women rushed to St. Giles, until round all the
altars there was no room to kneel because of the great crowd wailing
for their dead. The moaning of their lamentation was as the sound of
the surf wailing on the shore, and their sobbing as the cry of the
grinding pebbles in the backwash of the tide. But the city fathers
could stand upright even in that most cruel day when the cloud of
destruction was creeping over the Pentlands; and there is the note of
the heroic in that resolution which called all the able-bodied men to
rally to the defence of the capital, and exhorted "the good women to
pass to the kyrk, and pray whane