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KNOX, under God, made the Scotch and Scotch-Irish.... .
. . Observe well, the influence
of this prophetic patriot was felt most at St. Andrews, through the long
Strathclyde, in the districts of Ayr, Dumfries and Galloway. the Lothians
and Renfrew. There exactly clustered the homes which thrilled to the
herald voice of Patrick Hamilton; there were the homes which drank in the
strong wine of Knox; there were the homes of tenacious memories and
earnest fireside talk; there were the homes which sent forth once and
again the calm, shrewd, iron-nerved patriots who spurned as devil’s lie
the doctrine of ‘passive resistance’; and there—mark it well— were the
homes that sent their best and bravest to fill and change Ulster; thence
came in turn the Scotch-Irish of the Eaglewing; thence came the
settlers of Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and
Kentucky; and the sons of these men blush not as they stand beside the
children of the Mayflower
or the children of the Bartholomew martyrs. I
know whereof I affirm. My peculiar education and somewhat singular work
planted me, American born, in the very heart of these old ancestral
scenes; and from parishioners who held with deathless grip the very words
of Pedan, Welsh, and Cameron, from hoary-headed witnesses in the Route of
Antrim and on the hills of Down, have I often heard of the lads who went
out to bleed at Valley Forge—to die as victors on King’s Mountain—and
stand in the silent triumph of Yorktown. We have more to thank Knox for
than is commonly told to-day.
"Here we reach our Welshes and
Witherspoons, our Tennents and Taylors, our Calhouns and Clarks, our
Cunninghams and Caldwells, our Pollocks, Polks, and Pattersons, our Scotts
and Grays and Kennedys; our Reynoldses and Robinsous, our McCooks,
McHenrys, McPhersons, and McDowells.
"But the man behind is Knox. Would
you see his monument? Look around. Yes: To this, our own land, more than
any other, I am convinced must we look for the fullest outcome and the yet
all unspent force of this more than royal leader, this masterful and
moulding soul, . . . Carlyle has said: ‘Scotch literature and thought,
Scotch industry; James Watt, David Hume, Walter Scott, Robert Burns. I
find Knox and the Reformation at the heart’s core of every one of these
persons and phenomena; I find that without Knox and the Reformation, they
would not have been. Or what of Scotland?’ Yea, verily; no Knox, no Watt,
no Burns, no Scotland, as we know and love and thank God for: And must we
not say no men of the Covenant; no men of Antrim and Down, of Derry and
Enniskillen; no men of the Cumberland valleys; no men of the Virginia
hills; no men of the Ohio stretch, of the Georgian glades and the
Tennessee Ridge; no rally at Scone; no thunders in St. Giles; no testimony
from Philadelphian Synod; no Mecklenburg Declaration; no memorial from
Hanover Presbytery; no Tennent stirring the Carolinas; no Craighead sowing
the seeds of the coming Revolution; no Witherspoon pleading for the
signing of our great charter; and no such declaration and constitution as
are ours-—the great Tilghman himself being witness in these clear words,
never by us to be let die: ‘The framers of the Constitution of the United
States were greatly indebted to the standards of the Presbyterian Church
of Scotland in modelling that admirable document.’ "
(Rev. John S. McIntosh, D.D., L.L.D.) |
