James Alfred Ewing

An Engineer's Outlook James Alfred Ewing

AN ENGINEER'S OUTLOOK BY SIR ALFRED EWING 1933 PREFACE WHEN my friend E. V. Lucas undertook that his firm should publish this volume of collected papers and addresses, he remarked, with the pregnant brevity that helps to make his talk delightful: ' It will be your monument'. In that spirit I venture to write this preface as a brief biography and to begin it by saying that I was born on March 27, 1855, in Dundee, where my father was a minister of what was then called the Free Church of Scotland. He had been chosen at an early age to be minister of a parish in that thriving industrial town, but had ' come out' in the Disruption of 1843, when the Church of Scotland was rent in twain on a question of spiritual liberty. His people, who were already devoted to their young pastor, had nearly all come out with him. They built a new church, in which the Sundays of my boyhood morning and afternoon ' diets ' were mainly spent. It was a simple, capacious temple with a dignity that fitted the customary Presbyterian rites. Happily, after many years, the breach of 1843 has been healed: the Church of Scotland (save for a few die-hards) is again a united whole. In Scotland it is Episcopalians who are dissenters. (I liked to remind Bishops of that when they came to Edinburgh to receive honorary doctorates of divinity.) In those days, however, besides the weakness of disunion, there was still some of the soreness of recent controversy there was a sense on the part of those who had come into the wilderness that they had left behind them such loaves and fishes as the Church could offer its disciples. They consoled themselves by reflecting, truly.