By REV. D. BEATON.
(Continued from page 146.)
It was allowable in his time for a student who had attended the theological classes for one session and who desired to support himself by teaching, to complete his studies under the superintendence of the Presbytery. Boston determined on this course, and after one month’s experience of teaching in Glencairn, he was appointed tutor in 1696 to the stepson of Lieutenant-Colonel Bruce of Kennet, at the salary of a hundred marks per annum. The Bruces of Kennet were the ancestors of the present Lord Balfour of Burleigh, the distinguished Scottish statesman. While at Kennet, Boston did not hide his light under a bushel. The master and mistress being away from home, he thought it his duty to keep family worship with the members of the household, while he catechised the servants, pressed the careless to secret prayer, and reproved and warned against sinful practices. He reported the conduct of two servants to the lady, and as they were guilty of cursing and swearing after repeated admonitions, he advised her that it was her duty to reform them, and if they still refused, to dismiss them from her service. This she promised to do, but when the term day came she dismissed the only two servants who had any show of religion, retaining the other two. Needless to say Boston felt this to be “very grievous,” but it did not keep him from acting as a faithful monitor to the domestics at Kennet House, for he tells us that one Saturday night the servants had set a fire in the hall for drying their clothes, which they had been washing and which were to remain there until the Sabbath was over. “Grieved with this profanation of the Lord’s Day,” he says, “I spoke to the gentlewoman: who insinuating, that she had not done without orders what she had done, refused to remove them: whereupon I spoke to the lady, who soon caused remove the clothes and dispose them otherwise.”10 He also took good care that his pupil would not neglect attendance at church; hearing one day that he was not going to the means of grace, Boston made inquiries about the matter, with the result “both the mother and son went to church that day.” But Kennet was one of Boston’s Ebenezers, where his Lord abundantly blessed him. Writing of this period of his life in his Memoirs he says: “The time I was at Kennet, continues to be unto me a remarkable time among the days of my life. Once I fainted there, being on my knees at evening secret-prayer . . . It was a time of much trouble to me, yet in the main a thriving time for my soul.” He left Kennet in February, 1697, and in June of the same year he was licensed by the Presbytery of Duns and Chirnside. For two years Boston remained without a call; heritors who did not understand the spiritual teaching of the young preacher, and who by no means relished faithful preaching in the pulpit, did their best to keep the people from having the man of their choice. At last, in 1699, he received a call from the parish of Simprin, and on the 21st September of that year he was ordained to the office of the ministry. A minister could scarcely have entered on a more forbidding sphere of labour. The people were grossly ignorant, and as a result there was a chilling indifference to the exercises of the sanctuary. Nothing daunted, the young minister accepted the call, and as a keynote to his ministerial labours preached his first sermon from the text—”For they watch for your souls as they that must give account.” And from that day, there was a watching for souls that hallowed forever Simprin in his memory. He devoted his time to pastoral visitation, studying, praying with and for his people. He instituted prayer meetings and catechisings, and gradually the blighting frosts of a long and dreary spiritual winter began to show signs of passing away. To use the Scriptural figure: “Instead of the thorn there had come up the fir tree, and instead of the briar there had come up the myrtle.” When he came to Simprin, there was no family worship held in the place, but ere he left it, worship was kept morning and evening in every home. Those earnest pleadings in secret were not unanswered, and the memory of those days drew from him in after years the acknowledgment: “Simprin was a field which the Lord had blessed; Simprin! O blessed be He for His kindness at Simprin.” But diligent as Boston was as a pastor, he was no less diligent as a student. He read the De Economia Fæderum of Witsius, and it is not too much to say that it left its impress on his theology. Another book that greatly influenced him was the first part of the Marrow of Modern Divinity, to which reference will be made afterwards. His library was not princely in its treasures, but what he lacked in books he made up for in good, honest, original thinking. Booklovers will understand the following from his Memoirs: “The first parcel of books I got added to my small library was in the year 1702. The which year, in August, Mr. Simson aforesaid being in my closet, and looking at my book-press, smiled: the which from whatever principle he did it, touched me to the quick, being conscious of my want of a tolerable quantity. Among these were Zanchy’s works, and Luther on Galatians, which I was much taken with: and Providence also laid to my hand, about that time, Beza’s Confession of Faith. Most of the books mentioned in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th pages of my catalogue yet in retentis whose prices are set down with them, were purchased in that year, and the following 1703.”11 It was while at Simprin that he set to acquire a knowledge of French from a paper of rules given by a neighbour. He went through the book of Psalms in Hebrew and from the pulpit he delivered those remarkable sermons that were in after years to be used as the substance of the Fourfold State. In the quiet of his study, he faced some of the deepest questions of theology, and we have his answers in his remarkable Miscellaneous Questions and Tracts.12 It was while at Simprin he took to himself a wife. “Whenever I saw her,” he says, “a thought struck through my heart about her being my wife.” It was a married life in which love of husband and wife burned with a beautiful flame, but it was a life which was likewise checkered with sore sorrow. Five children were born to them at Simprin, and two of these were soon laid in the churchyard. In 1706 he received a call from Ettrick, and after serious consideration accepted it. The wrench from Simprin was painful in the extreme, and as he beheld the deep grief of his beloved and attached people, his tears mingled with theirs. “How could my eyes fail,” he said, “to trickle down with tears.” He bade farewell to them in those impressive words of his Master so suggestive of passing opportunity, “In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.”
On May 1, 1707, Boston began his ministerial labours at Ettrick. He now set his face to a sea of troubles, and as one sees the timid student facing his difficulties one might well wonder from whence came the strong resolution that never faltered until the difficulties vanished or were completely conquered, and the only answer that suits the circumstances is that Boston had learned that “prayer moves the Hand which governs the world.” There now began a ministry memorable in the annals of the Scottish pulpit. Through years of strenuous toil, beset with trials of no ordinary kind, the faithful pastor went out and in among his people, breaking to them the bread of life, comforting the sorrowing, chiding their wanderings, but relieving their pain. Boston soon learned that Ettrick was not Simprin. He felt, to use his own words, that he was now from home and that he was but beginning to be a minister of a parish. The people of his new charge, generally speaking, were “naturally smart, and of an uncommon assurance; self-conceited and censorious to a pitch, using an indecent freedom with church and state.” Opposition came to him from three sources. First, there were the followers of Rev. John MacMillan, the minister of the United Societies (now represented by the Reformed Presbyterians)—these he regarded as a dead weight on his ministry, though in its closing years the opposition was not so marked; the second source of opposition was a heritor supported by two elders, all of whom forsook attendance on the means of grace, though the heritor appears to have relented after Boston had received the call to Closeburn; the third source of trouble was the congregation, which was open to the influences brought to bear on it by the foregoing parties. It is almost needless to add, in view of the above account, that the Sabbath sermons were coldly received, “but remarkable,” says Boston, “was the pricking up of ears when anything relative to the public fell in; which was a wounding observe to me.” But after years of strenuous toil the faithful pastor could bear testimony to the remarkable change that had come over the people: “They are by far more polished,” he says, “in their manners than at that time and much more tractable and easy to me; and fewer scandals fall out among them. The old dissenters continue immovable; but their increasing is ceased.” When it is remembered that Boston was “naturally timorous and diffident,” the task before him at Ettrick seems too Herculean for a man of his disposition to face, but being a man whose life was steeped in prayer and “eager in pursuit when once engaged,” he set his face to the high mountains that lay between him and the fruitful plains of his ardent hopes, and for him, like Napoleon, there were no Alps.
The parish to which Boston was called is a rural one in Selkirkshire. It is a place full of interesting traditions; to students of English literature it recalls James Hogg, “the Ettrick Shepherd.” But to the student of ecclesiastical history, it will be always linked with the name of Thomas Boston. During the time of the persecutions, many conventicles were held among the mountains of Ettrick. Peden and Renwick preached at Birkenhope, Dobb’s Linn and Talla Linn, and in this way a leaven of godliness was introduced. So that some of the families who had known the truth as it is in Jesus relished the preaching of Boston and did their best to protect him from the malice of his enemies. In the midst of all his trials, Boston did not relinquish his studies, for we find the following entry in his Memoirs for the year 1711: “This was the happy year wherein I was first master of a Hebrew Bible and began the study of it.” And all along it continued to be his “darling study.” In the following year, 1712, the Church of Scotland found herself face to face with a new controversy over the Abjuration Oath. Scotland had now lost her Parliament through the Union of 1707, and the English Parliament—or perhaps more correctly the British Parliament—passed an Act in 1712 imposing the Oath of Abjuration upon all ministers. The intention of the Oath was to safeguard the Queen and secure the Protestant succession to the crown. But if this were all, none would have been more willing to take the oath than the Scottish ministers. It so happened, however, that the Oath was based upon two Acts passed by the English Parliament before the Union, in which it was expressly stipulated that the reigning sovereign should belong to the Church of England. Apart altogether from the excusable hatred of the more orthodox Presbyterians to “black prelacy,” the oath was inconsistent with the Treaty and Articles of Union. The matter came up before the General Assembly.
It was at this time under the leadership of William Carstares, a wise statesman, but one who was more governed by the principles of worldly-wise policy than by the simplicity that is in Christ. Boston gives an account of the discussion in the Assembly: “The lawfulness of the Abjuration Oath was debated pro and con in a committee of the whole house, betwixt the Scruplers and the Clear brethren. All I had thereby was, that the principles on which the answers to the objections were founded, seemed to me of such latitude, that by them almost any oath might pass. The parties were, at that time as I think, at the very point of splitting; till Mr. Carstairs, principal of the college of Edinburgh and clear for the oath, interposed and prevented the rupture; for the which cause I did always thereafter honour him in my heart. For all that I heard advanced to clear the difficulties about it, I still continued a Scruper; and therefore a little before I came away home, the Act imposing the oath being printed and offered to me at the door of the assembly-house, I bought it on purpose to know exactly the penalty I was like to underlie. Being come home, I did this day spend some time in prayer for light from the Lord about that oath. And thereafter entering on to read the prints I had on it, in order to form a judgment about it, I immediately fell on the act, whereby it was first of all framed and imposed; and finding thereby the declared intent of the oath to be, to preserve the act inviolable on which the security of the Church of England depends, I was surprised and astonished; and upon that shocking discovery, my heart was turned to loathe that oath which I had before scrupled.” The penalty for refusing to take the oath was £500, more money, says Boston, than ever he had received as salary, but his mind was made up as to his course. The sorely tried pastor “being wrestled out of breath with the parish” looked forward to the impending banishment, or whatever punishment the Government would inflict, with equanimity, as a relief out of his present distresses. At last the fateful day came, December 1,13 the last day for taking the oath, but the Government found so many Scruplers that they wisely refrained from exacting their fine. So passed away another dark cloud from the Ettrick pastor’s firmament and Boston continued a Non-jurer till the day of his death.
(To be continued.)
- This series of articles are reprinted from the Princeton Theological Review.—Editor.