The rite of baptism had not been performed for several months in the kirk of Lanark.  It was now the hottest time of persecution; and the inhabitants of that parish found other places in which to worship God, and celebrate the ordinances of religion.  It was now the Sabbath day, and a small congregation of about a hundred souls had met for divine service, in a place more magnificent than any temple that human hands had ever built to Deity.  The congregation had not assembled to the toll of the bell, but each heart knew the hour and observed it; for there are a hundred sundials among the hills, woods, moors, and fields; and the shepherd and the peasant see the hours passing by them in sunshine and shadow.

The church in which they were assembled, was hewn by God’s hand out of the eternal rock.  A river rolled its way through a mighty chasm of cliffs, several hundred feet high, of which the one side presented enormous masses, and the other corresponding recesses, as if the great stone girdle had been rent by a convulsion.  The channel was overspread with prodigious fragments of rocks or large loose stones, some of them smooth and bare, others containing soil and verdure in their rents and fissures, and here and there crowned with shrubs and trees.  The eye could at once command a long-stretching vista, seemingly closed and shut up at both extremities by the coalescing cliffs.  This majestic reach of river contained pools, streams, and waterfalls innumerable; and when the water was low—­which was now the case, in the common drought—­it was easy to walk up this scene with the calm, blue sky overhead, an utter and sublime solitude.

On looking up, the soul was bowed down by the feeling of that prodigious height of unscalable, and often overhanging, cliff.  Between the channel and the summit of the far extended precipices, were perpetually flying rooks and wood pigeons, and now and then a hawk, filling the profound abyss with their wild cawing, deep murmur, or shrilly shriek.  Sometimes a heron would stand erect and still, on some little stone island, or rise up like a white cloud along the black walls of the chasm, and disappear.  Winged creatures alone could inhabit this region.  The fox and wild cat chose more accessible haunts.  Yet, here came the persecuted Christians and worshiped God, whose hand hung over their head those magnificent pillars and arches, scooped out those galleries from the solid rock, and laid at their feet the calm water, in its transparent beauty, in which they could see themselves sitting, in reflected groups, with their Bibles in their hands.