The Ruthwell Cross and the Story it has to Tell. 113 



zealous General Assembly had resolved to reform the Cross 

 out of existence ; and we cannot wonder that during the time 

 in which six generations of parishioners had come and gone 

 certain parts of the obnoxious column had been irretrievably 

 lost. It was in 1799 that Mr Henry Duncan had been pre- 

 sented to the living of Ruthwell. Although the attention 

 of the voung minister was at once arrested by the beauti- 

 ful shaft, with its mysterious inscriptions and its wonderful 

 carvings of Scripture scenes, which he discovered lying in 

 pieces in the churchyard, it was not until nearly a quarter of a 

 century later that he had it finally pieced together and set up in 

 the form in which it is now preserved to us. The two pieces of 

 the monolith of grey sandstone, twelve feet in length, and weighing 

 several tons, which formed the largest part of the Cross, had 

 been dragged outside when the church fabric was being provided 

 with a new floor of flagstones, and with fixed pews. This was 

 during the incumbency of Dr Andrew Jaffray, in 1771. These 

 large portions were readily discovered. But the smaller frag- 

 ments of dark red freestone — which had formed the upper and 

 more slender portion of the shaft — had to be gathered together 

 from other parts of the graveyard. Indeed, a con.siderable por- 

 tion of the top of the Cross — including the top stone itself — was 

 accidentally found in a grave several feet from the surface. Dr 

 Duncan's immediate predecessors, Mr John Craig and Dr Andrew 

 Jaffray (w"ho was afterwards minister of Lochmaben), had, as was 

 natural, left the Cross severely alone. In looking upon it as a 

 relic of Popery they but reflected the prevailing sentiment of the 

 times in which they lived. Can it be asserted with any degree 

 of confidennce that the tone and temper of public and of ecclesi- 

 astical opinion in regard to these matters had undergone any per- 

 ceptible change at the commencement of last century ? I fear 

 not. That being so, it has always appeared to me a very 

 courageous act on the part of the minister of Ruthwell of that 

 day to stand sponsor for the maligned and contemned 

 "idolatrous monument." In many respects Dr Henry Duncan 

 was a man far in advance of his time, but in none, probably, 

 more than in this. But in this year of grace we cannot fail to 

 remember him as a great political economist, and the " Father 

 of Savings Banks." For, as you are well aware, the first 

 Savings Bank, started and conducted on strictly business prin- 



