In time the children of the first hearers of the gospel message were converted, not only outwardly to the acceptance of creeds,--which in their scholastic form they could not at first understand,--not only to symbols, which are ever but the shadows of eternal truths, but were inwardly transformed in the renewing of their minds. Gradually they became so changed in heart and life that we, after having seen Christianity in very many of its varied ethnic forms, and met its exemplars in lands not a few, cannot but feel that in the home, the school, and the church, there is no land on earth in which Christianity is more genuine than in Scotland. Between Columba’s homilies and “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” long centuries were to pass slowly away. Nothing in literature, or art, or history, or statistics, furnishes so true a picture of the leavening of a whole nation, or illustrates more finely the truth that among believers, even the common people may be “kings and priests unto God,” than this poem of Burns. It is a revelation of “Old Scotia’s grandeur.” CHAPTER XIII THE CALEDONIAN CANAL--SCOTTISH SPORTS The long inland waterway, of which the “Caledonian Canal” is the main portion, unites the waters of the German Ocean, at Moray Firth, with those of the Atlantic, which wash the shores of the Island of Mull. Considered as one highway, this trough, which forms also the eastern boundary of “the Highlands,” was made in part by nature and in part by art. In easy and safe passage, it saves the shipmasters about four hundred miles of coasting voyage around the north of Great Britain, through the stormy Pentland Firth which divides Caithness from the Orkney Islands. The total length of the canal proper is about sixty miles; the part made by man’s work covering twenty-two miles. A chain of fresh-water lakes, four in number, on various levels, stretching along the line of the great glen of Scotland, has been united by water ladders, up which ships are lifted and by which time is saved. The route of the canal was surveyed in 1773 by James Watt, the famous engineer, better known in the annals of steam. Following an Act of Parliament in 1803, the canal, constructed under the supervision of Thomas Telford, was opened to navigation in 1822. There are twenty-eight locks, each having the standard dimension of one hundred and sixty feet length, so that steamers of comfortable length can go through. It was on one of these, the Fusileer, that we travelled from Oban to Inverness, on another we moved in reverse order, and great were these days. One was sunny and warm. The other was so cloudy and cold that a grate fire at the hotel at Fort William felt thoroughly delightful.