A SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF THE ROYAL MILE
By Paul James-Griffiths
Latent Publishing. 58 pages. £6.99. ISBN 0-9548821-2-1
Available from Edinburgh City Mission office (0131 554 6140)
No 58-page booklet covering the entire Christian history of Scotland from the Culdees to the present can hope to be anything more than a sketch — the more so when each page is one-third illustrations! Nevertheless, it is a valuable introduction and shouldn’t be missed. The text is clear and interesting, the photographs attractive, the entire product a treat to handle. It would make a wonderful gift — another reminder that our roots do lie in the Christian not the pagan past.
The author uses Edinburgh as a focus. He himself leads regular walks through the Royal Mile and is quite right to weave together the various threads that make it such a fascinating tapestry of Christian influence generally. Intriguing nuggets appear throughout: that Glasgow means ‘dear family’ because of Mungo’s gracious influence after the founding of the first church there; that the word ‘culdees’, the earliest name for the Christians up north, means ‘Friends of God’ (making the Quakers merely an echo rather than an innovation!) — and so on.
More importantly, we are reminded that the ‘spiritual volcano’ of the Reformation ‘became the workshop for the transformation of our culture’…(from which Christian values like)… a democratic Parliament, freedom of speech, education for all — issued forth to impact the world’. This being the case, more could have been said to explain the extent of the disaster which befell the nation when its Christian leaders, ignoring their Spirit-led convictions, adopted the cause of the worthless and unprincipled Stuart, Charles II. Edinburgh glittered with the names of eminent humanists like David Hume and proudly laid claim to the title, ‘The Athens of the North’. But Rationalism soon gave rise, as it must, to Irrationalism: the oldest freemason lodge is to be found in St. John’s Street nearby. And two centuries later we find ‘a concerted effort to make Edinburgh into the ‘Paranormal Capital of Europe’.
It is what apostate Scotland deserves, of course, but worse is to come unless, like the author, the church recovers the past in order to shape the future.
Ranald Macaulay,
Co-ordinator of Christian Heritage, Cambridge
