Letters of a Traveller; Or, Notes of Things Seen in Europe and AmericaBryant, William Cullen
General
Letters of a Traveller; Or, Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America
Bryant, William Cullen
Cuba -- Description and travel; Europe -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
It was a very different spectacle from the crowd in the Saturday evening
market, that met my eyes the next morning in the clean and beautiful
streets of the new town; the throng of well-dressed church-goers passing
each other in all directions. The women, it appeared to me, were rather
gaily dressed, and a large number of them prettier than I had seen in some
of the more southern cities.
I attended worship in one of the Free Churches, as they are called, in
which Dr. Candlish officiates. In the course of his sermon, he read long
portions of an address from the General Assembly of the Free Church of
Scotland, appointing the following Thursday as a day of fasting and
prayer, on account of the peculiar circumstances of the time, and more
especially the dangers flowing from the influence of popery, alluding to
the grant of money lately made by parliament to the Roman Catholic College
at Maynooth. The address proposed no definite opposition, but protested
against the measure in general, and, as it seemed to me, rather vague
terms. In the course of the address the title of National Church was
claimed for the Free Church, notwithstanding its separation from the
government, and the era of that separation was referred to in phrases
similar to those in which we speak of our own declaration of national
independence. There were one or two allusions to the persecutions which
the Free Church had suffered, and something was said about her children
being hunted like partridges upon the mountains; but it is clear that if
her ministers have been hunted, they have been hunted into fine churches;
and if persecuted, they have been persecuted into comfortable livings.
This Free Church, as far as I can learn, is extremely prosperous.
Dr. Candlish is a fervid preacher, and his church was crowded. In the
afternoon I attended at one of the churches of the established or endowed
Presbyterian Church, where a quiet kind of a preacher held forth, and the
congregation was thin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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