The Reformation 1560, The Greatest Year in Scotland’s History, by John J Murray, published by the Free Church (Continuing), 60 pages, £3.00.
This booklet provides a useful summary of the events leading up to what was indeed the most significant year in the whole of Scotland’s history. After a brief survey of the country’s spiritual darkness before the Reformation and a whirlwind tour of the early Reformers, both on the Continent and in Scotland, the booklet’s focus is very much on John Knox, a man who “had a passion to put God first”. The final chapter emphasises Scotland’s need of another Reformation (yet while P T Forsyth’s thoughts on the importance of preaching are appropriate, a sounder writer might have been quoted here). But the quotation from C H Spurgeon is apt: “We want John Knox back again. . . . It were well if he did but rouse our hearts to action.”
John Henry Newman, The Greatest Perver to Rome, by Matthew J Hyde, published by the the Huntingtonian Press, 31 pages, £1.95.
As a teenager Newman was an Evangelical and professed conversion. However, he drifted; he became a Anglo-Catholic and was prominent in the Tractarian movement of the 1830s, with its Romanising doctrines and practices, before ending his life as a Roman Catholic cardinal. His beatification was the centre-point of the Pope’s recent visit to Britain.
Dr Hyde summarises Newman’s life and beliefs before drawing five lessons for today. Commenting on Newman’s “conversion”, the author emphasises the need for the work of the Spirit in bringing sinners to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus. His third point warns against putting confessions of faith above Scripture, but it is not clear who this is directed to. His final point places appropriate emphasis on the biblical doctrine of justification.
This booklet outlines an able man’s departure from the truth into very serious error. This is helpful because of the prominence that Newman has recently been given, and it is a warning to all not to rest in an intellectual conviction of the truth but to make their “calling and election sure”.
When God Made the World, The Six Days of Creation Explained to the Very Young, by Daniel and Naomi Sayers, published by Gospel Standard Trust Publications, 16 pages, £1.95.
Little children should find this booklet attractive. It provides them with coloured pictures, suitably captioned, associated with the seven days of the creation week. Appropriate verses from Genesis 1 are quoted also.