The True Foundation for Scotland’s Great Past
Closing Remarks at the 2008 Faith and Freedom Tour
by Bill Potter, July 14, 2008
Editor’s Note: The following remarks were given by historian Bill Potter on July 4, 2008, in Edinburgh, Scotland, as part of the closing ceremonies of the 2008 Scotland Faith and Freedom Tour.
Once again, Doug Phillips has been my boon companion and an esteemed fellow-worker in the quarries of the past. Never have we had more stories to dig and fashion than here in Scotland. Nowhere on Earth have the bones of the earth been more exposed.
Think of the places we have been and the sites we have seen.
What do they all have in common? Stones.
We are fond of talking about stones of remembrance, but who has more of them than Scotland? We see them in the cemeteries and churches: St. Giles, the Canongate, Greyfriars, Dalserf, the Old Parish Church of Hamilton, St. Andrews, the burial grounds of Iona, the Kirk at Kilmartin and the cairns and monoliths of the fields.
We see them in the castles: Edinburgh, Stirling, Bothwell, St. Andrews, and Urquhart, as well as the 595 we did not visit. We viewed the stone markers commemorating the great battles of Scottish history at Stirling Bridge, Bannockburn, Bothwell, and Culloden.
All of those places give me a sense of permanence — even the ruins. But, the reality is, they are only symbols now, left by the men of the past, all of whom have perished — every single one of them. And what have we historians found in the quarries of the past regarding these dead men? I think that once again we see the truth of I Corinthians 3:11 — “there is no other foundation that man can lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” That is, that there are still only two types of people in history: those whose foundation is Christ and those whose foundation is something or someone else.
We are not here primarily for sentimental reasons, though I am very sentimental about this history. We are not here for patriotic reasons, though we may well be patriotic about all this. If we study this history for its own sake, we become nothing but antiquarians and, in the end, find that our past was irrelevant.
No, we are here because the past has meaning. It is the story of God’s Providence, of how He has ordered the lives of men through time for His own glory. It is the goal and hope of we who possess Christ, the Eternal Cornerstone, to make the stones of the cities and fields of Scotland live again in order to learn the lessons God would have for our generation; not just for our generation, but to pass the stories and the messages on to the succeeding generations.
If we don’t, who will?
The lives of the Covenanters here in Scotland tell us to stand fast in the faith, regardless of the cost. Christ was their cornerstone and we see the results. I close with the words of James Guthrie, my own kinsman of thirteen generations past, one of the martyrs hanged in Edinburgh for his faithfulness to Jesus Christ. When asked by a friend to “jouk” (duck, i.e., compromise) just a little to save his life, he replied: “There’s nae joukin in the cause of Christ.”