Thomas M'Crie: VII: The Legacy.

Thomas M’Crie died in 1835, but his legacy is still with us. First of all there was the legacy of his home. His eldest son, also called Thomas, became a minister and followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a historian and pastor of the same congregation! He wrote a biography of his father, a history of the Scottish Church, a volume called ‘The Annals of English Presbytery and ‘Memoirs of Sir Andrew Agnew’, as well as translating and editing an edition of the Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal (my copy, obtained for the princely sum of a pound, rather worryingly contains a bookplate reading ‘Free Church Manse Library, Kirkaldy). The younger Thomas M’Crie was one of the majority of Original Secession (as M’Crie’s denomination was called) ministers to enter the Free Church of Scotland in a merger in 1852. Four years later he became Professor of Church History and Systematic Theology in the English Presbyterian College, then located in London (Now Westminster College, Cambridge).
A grandson of the elder Thomas M’Crie, C.G. M’Crie, was a Free Church minister in Ayr and joined the United Free Church in 1900. He wrote a volume on ‘The Confessions of The Church of Scotland’ (Chalmers lectures, 1906), but sadly from a rather liberal perspective. His other writings include ‘The Church of Scotland: Her Divisions and Re-unions and ‘The Public Worship of Presbyterian Scotland’ (Cunningham Lectures, 1892). He was the last M’Crie church historian.

But Thomas M’Crie’s greatest legacy remains the book which first made his name. Today, nearly two hundred years after it was first published, M’Crie’s Life of Knox remains in print, published by Free Presbyterian Publications, Glasgow. (ISBN 0 902506 05 6). His ‘Reformation in Spain’ is also in print, and both are available from the Tabernacle Bookshop, and from the Free Presbyterian Bookroom, Glasgow. Thousands still read M’Crie, and would agree with Professor John M. Simpson of Edinburgh University, that “Thomas M’Crie was one of the best historians Scotland has ever produced. He had unrivalled dilligence in sifting the records, the raw materials of history, when this was much harder than it is now. He had the literary gifts to bring his findings to life.” (Quoted in the Publishers’ Introduction to the Free Presbyterian edition). And his findings continue to live in the hands of his worldwide readership. But we must remember that all Thomas M’Crie’s abilities WERE gifts, and praise God for them, which is what M’Crie would surely want.

Sources
William Adamson, ‘The Religious Anecdotes of Scotland’ (Second Edition, London, Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1898)
Thomas M’Crie: ‘The Life of John Knox’ (Glasgow, Free Presbyterian Publications, 1991, ISBN 0 902506 05 6)
Thomas M’Crie: ‘The Life of John Knox’ (Edinburgh, William Blackwood and Sons, 1855)
Thomas M’Crie: ‘Vindication of the Covenanters’ (Edinburgh, William Whyte and Co., 1845)
Thomas M’Crie: ‘The Story of the Scottish Church’ (Glasgow, Free Presbyterian Publications, 1988. ISBN 0 902506 25 0)
Thomas M’Crie (translator): ‘The Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal’ (Edinburgh, Johnstone and Hunter, 1851)
Charles G. M’Crie: ‘The Confessions of the Church of Scotland’ (Edinburgh, Macniven and Wallace, 1907)
Jabez Marrat, ‘Northern Lights: Pen and Pencil Sketches of Modern Scottish Worthies” (Third edition, London, T. Woolmer, 1885).

Thomas M'Crie: VI: The Literary Task.

Thomas M’Crie may have stepped into the seventeenth century to answer Sir Walter Scott and to defend the honour of the ‘Cloud of witnesses for the royal prerogatives of King Jesus’, the Covenanters, but his real love was the sixteenth century, the age of the Reformation. His view was by no means parochial, for he followed Knox to Geneva, that melting-pot where refugees from all over Europe gathered. His fertile mind considered next those countries where the Reformation had failed, Italy and Spain. From his pen came histories of the Reformation in those countries, chronicles of martyrdom and of suffering. They are different from his ‘Life of Knox’, but no less valuable.
His last project was his greatest, a biography of the Reformer of Geneva, John Calvin himself. It would have beenthe capstone to his labours, and one of his sons, who was in Europe, helped with the research in remote libraries. But God intended otherwise, and Thomas M’Crie was called home before he could finish his work. In the beginning of 1835 his health failed and his work became harder for him. The preparation for the Lord’s Day and weeknight meetings became too much for him and the Life of Calvin was laid aside never to be taken up again, and half-an-hour’s speaking exhausted him.

In the summer of 1835 he preached from the text, “Whose fan is in His hand, and He will throughly purge His floor, and gather His wheat into the garner; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” After the service he sat by the vestry door and watched the congregation depart. Early the following week he was stricken with disease, and on August 5th 1835, aged sixty-three, Thomas M’Crie went to be with his Lord and Saviour.
Although a famous historian, Thomas M’Crie was not affected by his fame. In M’Crie’s opinion he was simply honouring the God who had brought about the Reformation. If he replied to Sir Walter Scott, it was because he felt that Scott, in libelling the Covenanters, had libelled their God and his God. Although he could have had any position he wanted, including a university chair, M’Crie remained pastor of that congregation meeting in the old chapel in Carruber’s Close, to the surprise of those who came to hear him from far and wide. He actually refused a number of potentially lucrative book deals because they were not to his liking and would interfere with his congregational work. In fact it was said that the surest way for a publisher to lose Dr. M’Crie was to offer him a lucrative deal!

Next time, God willing, we shall consider M’Crie’s legacy

Thomas M'Crie:V. A Household Name.

Thomas M’Crie’s biography of John Knox is a great book by any standards. As I write my own copy of the seventh edition of 1855 is by my elbow. I refer to the seventh AUTHORISED edition - the book was also pirated. Also to the British edition, it was not only published in the United States but translated into French, Dutch and German. It was the book that every well-read Scotsman was expected to have read, and it gave Scotland a worthy biography of the great national reformer. His son, Thomas M’Crie the Younger wrote in the preface of the seventh edition: “It has long held its place among the standard histories of the land.” It restored Knox to his proper place alongside Robert the Bruce and William Wallace as one of the great Scottish heroes and patriots (although Mel Gibson would probably NOT want to play Knox).
M’Crie did not rest on his laurels. He wrote a sequel, the Life of Andrew Melville, who was in many ways the successor of Knox. It was not greeted with the same interest as the biography of Knox, but it was recognised as a worthy product of the same pen, and in many ways a continuation of the same history.
His next notable work was controversial in tone. It was a review of Sir Walter Scott’s novel ‘Old Mortality’, in which Scott caricatured the Covenanters of the seventeenth century as bigots who even justified cold-blooded murder in the name of the Gospel. M’Crie was not a man to stand for that, both as a careful historian and as an evangelical who professed the principles of the Covenanters. It originally appearred in three parts in the pages of the ‘Christian Instructor’, anonymously (as ‘Old Mortality’ was anonymous). Just as Scott could not hide, neither could his antagonist. The author of the ‘Life of Knox’ was instantly detected by his concern for historical accuracy. I have sitting on top of my copy of the ‘Life of Knox’ a small, fragile book bound in nondescript Brown cloth with a worn paper label on the spine reading ‘M’Crie’s Covenanters’. The publication date is 1845, and the title is ‘Vindication of the Covenanters’. The author of the introduction states: “It is valuable, not merely as a vindication of our fathers from the author of the Tales [Scott - H.H.], but as a piece of interesting and authentic history.” Scott was forced to try to vindicate himself. The judgement of this author is that he failed. Historical novels, M’Crie insisted, had to be historically accurate, expecially when they contained depictions of real historical figures and scenes. Scott was not, and to a careful historian like M’Crie that was unacceptable.
I think he might well have written against ‘The Da Vinci Code’ had he lived today. Although to go from Scott’s prose to Dan Brown’s would be like stepping from a Grecian temple into a pigsty.

God willing, next time we shall conclude our look at Thomas M’Crie’s labours.

Thomas M'Crie: IV. The Rebel and the Writer.

Thomas M’Crie and three of his fellows had objected to the Anti-burgher Secession Church changing its Testimony so as to remove a commitment to the Establishment Principle. They were told in no uncertain terms that their silence on this theological point which was dear to them was the price of remaining in the denomination. It was a price they were not willing to pay, and they viwed themselves as already ejected de facto and in 1806 formed themselves into a Presbytery of their own, ‘The Constitutional Associate Presbytery’.M’Crie was seen as the ringleader and deposed from the ministry and put under a sentence of excommunication. Many in his congregation were outraged at such action, and some of them went to express their sympathy.
“I certainly looked for being suspended; I hardly expected they would proceed to this length: but what am I that I should be counted worthy to suffer shame for His Name?” was his reply.
Worse was to come. The Potter-row congregation were divided nearly equally over their pastor's stand, and both parties claimed the meeting-house. Sadly there was a lawsuit, and finally M’Crie’s supporters agreed to give up their claim in exchange for a sum of money in compensation. So they left their chapel to an obscure little place at the foot of Carruber’s Close, where in an ugly old chapel they worshipped as they had been accustomed to do.

Thomas M’Crie had studied the history of the Scottish Church dilligently, and it was now that he was the pastor of an obscure congregation, a secession from a secession, that his studies bore fruit. In the late eighteenth and early 19th century John Knox and the other Scottish Reformers were popularly seen as a band of narrow-minded bigots. M’Crie longed to change that perception and began to research the life of Knox. In 1811 the first edition of his ‘Life of John Knox’ was issued. It was a best-seller. The reviews praised its historical accuracy and attention to detail, and when the University of Edinburgh discovered that the author was one of its graduates it awarded him the honourary degree of Doctor of Divinity.
But the greatest honour M’Crie recived was from his favourite professor, Dugald Stewart. One Lord’s Day Stewart was confined to bed with sickness and his old servant John had stayed home from church to look after him. Needing help Stewart rang the bell, but there was no answer. He rang several more times, but still with no response. Rising from his bed the professor descended the stairs to find John absorbed in a book. Stewart shook his servant’s shoulder and asked what the book that had so captivated him was. “Why, sir, it is a book that my minister has written, and it really is a grand one,” the servant said. It was M’Crie’s life of Knox. Stewart borrowed it and found that it was every bit as rivetting as John had found it. Stewart wrote a letter to the author praising it.
So Thomas M’Crie, excommunicated pastor of a rebel congregation, became a household name. Of which more, God willing, next time.

Thomas M'Crie: III. Pastor of Potter-row.

As the name suggests, Thomas M’Crie did not minister in a fashionable part of Edinburgh. Nor was he ever to do so. Even when his biographies of the Scottish Reformers had made him a famous man he ministered in a nondescript chapel in a back street to the ordinary folk of the area. This was a great advantage to him as it required him to moderate his natural love of rhetorical display in the pulpit.
He was also a pastor in the best sense. Like Baxter’s ‘Reformed Pastor’ he visited his people in their crowded tenements and dark courtyards and wynds. He did not have any thought of the financial side except that he did not want to burden his people too much. When they proposed to increase his stipend in 1798 he thought they were already giving all they could afford and he begged them to delay until the increase would be possible without their denying themselves necessities. “Abound yet more and more in the fruits of righteousness,” he wrote to them. “Let me have joy in beholding your good order and the steadfastness of your faith in Christ; and every other good thing shall, in due time, be added to me.”
But Thomas M’Crie was also forced to be for a time a man of strife. The matter of the Church’s ‘Testimony’ came before the synod for revision, amd M’Crie found himself in the minority.
The ‘Testimony’ of a Scottish Church is basically a statement of principles indicating where it differs from all the other Scottish Presbyterian Churches holding to the Westminster Confession of Faith. The Anti-burgher testimony included, among other points, a condemnation of ‘voluntaryism’, the idea that Church and State should be separate. The revisers wanted to omit that passage, among others. M’Crie thought it vital. In his opinion a healthy church-state relation was vital to the proper development of Christianity in a nation.
There were fierce debates in Synod, and finally the Revision was accepted. M’Crie and three other members of Synod protested against it. The Synod offered them the liberty to remain in the church holding their views so long as they did not speak against Voluntaryism. M’Crie refused, and he and his fellow protesters found themselves practically shut out of their own church.

What they did next we shall, God willing, see next time.

Thomas M'Crie: II. Student and preacher.

Thomas M’Crie took immediately to the Edinburgh University course. He had worked hard to be able to attend, and he wasted not one minute of his time when he was there. He graduated with distinction and in 1791 he entered the Divinity Hall of his denomination. In common with the Burgher Secession Divinity Hall taught by George Lawson of Selkirk, the Anti-burgher Hall was taught by one professor who was also a full-time pastor. The Anti-burgher Hall was taught by Rev. A. Bruce at Whitburn. When the Hall was not in session M’Crie taught a school in Brechin, where his ability as a teacher was such that the school soon became one of the best in the town.
He was licensed to preach in 1795 by the Anti-burgher Presbytery of Kelso, and the following year he was called to the pastorate of a congregation in the Potter-Row, Edinburgh. At first he suffered from a problem that is all too common among those recently out of theological college - the young graduate’s sermons were so rhetorical that they went straight over the heads of most of his hearers. Some despaired of ever being able to understand their pastor, but a visit to the Orkney Islands completely cured him.
He was going to Kirkwall to assist at an ordination and to preach on one of the islands swhere a revival had broken out in a prayer-meeting and a request for ministerial help had been sent to the Anti-burgher synod. There M’Crie saw the Gospel preached by older men in a simpler style than his to the salvation of many souls. He was convicted and vowed from then on to preach ‘not with words of human wisdom’ as he had before, but to ‘preach Christ, and Him crucified.’
The change was amazing. The poor folk of Potter-row were made glad when they had the Gospel preached to them.

Thus was Thomas M’Crie made an evangelical preacher, although he had been an evangelical believer before. Next time, God willing, we shall see what sort of a pastor he was.

Thomas M'Crie: I. ‘The Boy is Father of the Man’

Perhaps one of the greatest Scottish Christian biographies ever written is Thomas M’Crie’s “Life of John Knox’. Often republished (most recently by the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland in a cheap popular edition) it is still regarded as THE biography of Knox in Reformed circles. But perhaps relatively little is known of its author. Our intention in this series, God willing, is to remedy that defect.
Thomas M’Crie was born, like Thomas Boston, in the town of Duns in the old county of Berwickshire. Since Berwick is in England Duns has long laid claim to the place of country seat of Berwickshire, and in order to secure that claim it has laboured long and hard. Many people believe that Duns was also the birthplace of the medieval scholastic theologian Duns Scotus, but that is debated.
Theologically M’Crie’s parents were in agreement with Thomas Boston, members of the Anti-burgher Secession Church. Thomas was born in November 1772, and his mother prayed with him from an early age. A serious lad, Thomas M’Crie early thought of becoming a minister, and although the ambition was by no means uncommon in Scotland, Thomas took it very seriously. He was a boy of studious habits and read everything he could lay his hands on - which in the pious Anti-burgher atmosphere meant books of the kind today republished by the Banner of Truth Trust.
His father was less keen on the idea, declaring that he would not make one of his sons a gentleman at the expense of the rest. Thomas agreed with him, and as soon as he could became a school-teacher - at the age of fifteen. At sixteen he left home for the University of Edinburgh. The following year his mother died, having seen her son set off on a career that no-one could have predicted.

Next time, God willing, we shall follow him through university and into the beginning of his ministry.