140 Krrx-Session Recorvs or Ironcray, 1691-1700. 
congregation were liberal, and gave him for two quarters at least 
about £3 Scots. 
The charity of Irongray went beyond its own poor and the 
stranger within its gates. At the request of the Synod they 
collected £2 16s Scots for one Anna Bailie, a distressed gentle- 
woman in the Presbytery of Lochmaben. They gave £1 Scots 
to “ane old minister’s daughter,’’ 13s Scots to “ Jo. Vandaboll, 
a broken merchant.”’ 
One special collection, made in November, 1695, has a very 
old-world association connected with it. “Collect for the poor 
slaves in Turkie, £5 1s.’’ Probably for the victims of the 
Barbary pirates, who in these times ravaged even the coasts of 
Ireland. Another collection, taken in 1697, brings us in touch 
with the greatest of modern philosophic thinkers. In 1697 a 
petition was presented to the session from the Scots congregation 
in Konigsberg, backed by the Council of Scotland, for funds to 
build a church. Elders were appointed to go through the con- 
gregation and receive the people’s offerings, which amounted to 
£29 Scots. Twenty-seven years later Immanuel Kant was born 
at Konigsberg. He is said to have been of Scottish descent, as 
his name implies, and perhaps some of his forbears belonged to 
that Scots congregation. 
In these dry bones of our old parish annals there is not a little 
humour, not a little pathos. Even the church accounts contribute 
a help to the imagination to picture what sort of people lived in 
Irongray more than two hundred years ago. It is pleasing, too, 
to find that some parishioners to-day can trace their descent back 
to some whose names appear in the records. Two of the 17th 
century elders’ names still survive with us, Welsh and M‘Burnie. 
Our session records are very human documents; they show there 
was a great deal of human nature in men two hundred years ago, 
that they were very like us both for good and for evil, that progress 
has not made us so very much better or so very much wiser than 
our fathers, though like Homer’s heroes we boast ourselves to be 
better than they. 
