There was no church of the Original Seceders at Thornliebank, so we worshipped at Pollokshaws, the town that lay between Thornliebank and Glasgow, and is now incorporated with the great city. My father was the precentor for the Original Seceders, who would as soon think of having a box of whistles to lead the praise in God’s house as they would of praying to the accompaniment of fife and drum. Old associates of his son in Portage la Prairie might not have been astonished at the accountant of the Manitoba and North Western Railway venturing on the perilous seas of choir-leading at the Presbyterian church, had they seen Precentor Hanna at the Original Seceders in Pollokshaws, standing up when the psalm was called, striking his tuning fork, bending his ear to it, sounding the note in harmony, and then leading off with “Duke Street” or “Martyrdom”. The Original Seceders are a survival and a combination of several schisms in the Presbyterian church in Scotland. The rigid qualities of the Covenanters caused some of them to resist all innovations, and to keep themselves separate from such as yielded to new-fangled fashions in worship and belief. The settlement of William and Mary, as sovereigns of Scotland as well as of the rest of the British Isles, imposed an oath on ministers which some refused to take, so that there was a secession of Burghers, as they were called. These, in their turn, had a split of their own, resulting in churches of Anti-Burghers. In opposition to the advancing tide of more liberal ideas and less severe practices, the Auld Lichts also set up a new identity among the folds of Christ’s Presbyterian flock. To any of these divisions of the church militant may be ascribed the overworked story of the good soul who, lamenting the decay of faith, as indicated by the true kirk of the truly faithful having dwindled to the minister and herself, said: “And I’m no’ so sure of the meenister.” At all events, the Anti-Burghers, the Auld Lichts and the Covenanters gathered themselves together in the Original Seceders, of whom there were not more than a baker’s dozen of churches in all Scotland. Our family belonged to the church at Pollokshaws, where we walked every Sunday, rain, snow or shine, and where father led the psalmody. We were never taught, in so many words, that it was impossible to praise God in any other metres or melodies, than the versions of the psalms that belong to the period of the Westminster Confession, and the tunes which were venerably associated with various of them. The idea of a predestinated psalmody which was of the essence of our Sabbath meat and drink was as much a part of our religious make-up as the day of judgment itself. Hymns were taboo. Somehow, they didn’t fit in with the true doctrine of the survival of the fittest; not even such dournesses as “Great God! what do I see and hear? The end of things created, The judge of all men doth appear On clouds of glory seated.”