Lady Victoria Campbell

218 "THE FAIR HAVENS"
the history of the Scottish Church in London. The
influence of Dr. Cumming was literally world-wide,
and he had gathered into the ark in Covent Garden
" every beast after his kind," and the Scot was by no
means in the majority. He might have reared a
church three times the size of that whose name he
had made famous, and had he thought of the future
of the Church of Scotland, and its people in England,
he ought to have exercised his gifts as a seer, and
established and settled the things that remained.
He saw otherwise. His affections were rooted in
the old church and the place, and particularly the slums
in which it then stood, and which he had adopted
for the field of his philanthropic labours. There he had
preached, and there he wished to end his ministry.
Fortunately for the Presbyterian system of Church
government, the minister is but the centre of a Kirk
Session, and the wisdom and power of that Church
Court was never better exemplified than in the de-
cision which brought St. Columba's Church into
Belgravia, and gathered a congregation of Scots
around its new minister, with a name dear to the
hearts of all who loved the Church of Scotland.
Among those who became members of the congre-
gation was the Duke, who came to the church after
Lady Victoria began the connection which was to last
for the rest of her life. Argyll Lodge passed, with the
death of her father in 1900, out of the number of her
resting-places, and Lady Victoria's visits to London
were more intermittent, and the times she spent there
were always short. Wherever she lodged, her first