My boyhood friend, Rob, and I spent most of our free time
together, except on Sunday. My family attended the Parish Church, The Church of
Scotland, while his were members of the Free Church of Scotland. The
differences between their theologies had long eroded but the antipathy
remained. Our building had stained glass windows and a pipe organ and had been
built from the stone recovered from the old kirk when it was vandalised at the
time of the reformation. The old kirk had been on a low knoll that overlooked
the old village but, by the time of the reformation, the village had grown away
from it and it no longer dominated and the new kirk was built on a height that
overlooked all but the 20th century part of the village. I suppose the
congregation’s first lesson of Sunday worship was that, like Moses, they had to
climb up the hill to hear the word of God.
Rob’s kirk had no stained glass, that being
a form of graven image, was down near the old kirk and had a small peddle
organ, a modern introduction when the congregation was converted to singing
hymns but not to the extent of having ‘a kist of whistles’.
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