1. His Background
Roy Middleton
In 1825 a respected Church of Scotland minister died whose voice had never been heard in the courts of the Established Church. He had been the minister of a chapel of ease2 at Anderston, Glasgow for a quarter of a century. Chapel ministers at that time did not have a seat in Church courts and his exclusion from Church courts had the effect of concentrating his attention on the special work of the preacher and pastor. Before coming to Glasgow he had been the minister of a congregation in London that was connected with the Scots Presbytery in the English capital. There he was one of the founders of the London Missionary Society and its first foreign secretary.
In his lectures on Scottish theology delivered in April 1939 at Westminster Theological Seminary in America, Principal John Macleod spoke of this Scottish minister as follows: “At Anderston he had a great congregation that rallied about his ministry, and there he became the recognised centre of the
1This is the first section of an abridgement of a new introduction to John Love’s Memorials, a two-volume work which is to be republished later this year, DV, by Free Presbyterian Publications.
2Between 1755 and 1831 the population of Scotland grew by almost 87%. The failure of the Church of Scotland to create additional places of worship for this growing population led to the creation of independent churches connected with the Established Church that were called chapels of ease. These early chapels were the forerunners of Thomas Chalmers’ great drive for church extension in the 1830s. The formation of these congregations had the effect of creating a two-tier ministry in the national Church as chapel ministers had neither their own Kirk Session nor a seat in Church courts. Most of the chapel ministers were Evangelicals and when their party gained the ascendancy in the General Assembly the Chapel Act of 1834 was passed, which gave these ministers a seat in Church courts for the first time. When the Court of Session declared the Chapel Act to be illegal in January 1843, it made the Disruption, four months later, to be inevitable.
old school gospel folk of the West of Scotland. He was a man of a great mind with a majestic type of thought. His thinking was of a searching and penetrative quality as well as of a comprehensive range. In his early spiritual experience he was very thoroughly searched by the teaching of Jonathan Edwards and the men of the older New England introspective school.
“This left its mark on his teaching in turn. And he was remarkable for how he opened up not only the truth in regard to God’s glorious Being and Name, but also in particular the truth in regard to the sovereign effectual work of the Holy Ghost in the New Creation. He believed in thoroughness of self-examination and practised it. There was with all this a serene aloofness about him so that men might say of him that his soul was like a star that dwelt apart. Yet for all his majesty and aloofness he was as much loved as he was revered by a wide circle. In those days there was no man who was more looked up to or in whose judgement his friends more implicitly rested.”3
The minister being spoken of was John Love of London and Anderston. After he died, his wife, Janet, entrusted to literary executors his diary and papers for them to publish as they thought appropriate. Two volumes of Discourses were published shortly after his death, but it was over a quarter of a century before excerpts from his diary and his papers on theology and experimental religion were published in two volumes that together comprise almost a thousand pages. They were titled the Memorials of the Rev John Love. The reader of these volumes will be struck by the maturity of Love’s thought, the extent both of his learning and his reading, and the depth of his spiritual experience.
This is all the more remarkable when it is realised that practically the entire contents of these volumes were written by John Love in the three years after his conversion, before he had completed his twenty-first year, and before he was licensed as a probationer. Accordingly, the introductory biographical material prefacing this first reprint of the Memorials since their original publication in 1857-58 concentrates entirely on the early years of his life. This has been done in order to discover what the influences were that contributed to a young man, newly converted, being able to produce the material contained in these volumes.
Childhood. John Love was born at Paisley on 15 June 1757; he was the son of James Love, who was a weaver, and his wife, Margaret Laing. The editor of his Memorials states, “His parents occupied a middle station in life – his father being enabled, in the prosecution of a respectable calling, to provide a moderate competency for a family of several children, of whom John was
3John Macleod, Scottish Theology in Relation to Church History since the Reformation, Edinburgh, 1943, pp 221-222.
the eldest”.4 During his childhood years, John Love’s privileges were very considerable. His parents taught him from his earliest years – and by their own example – a reverence for God and divine things, strictly to observe the Sabbath, to be unfailing in his attendance in the house of God at the regular diets of worship and to give attention to all the moral and religious duties prescribed in Scripture. In their home, family worship, in all its parts of praise, prayer and the reading of God’s Word, was daily maintained morning and evening. James and Margaret Love enjoined personal religion, and secret prayer, both morning and evening, on their family (1:13).
It was surely due to this parental encouragement and influence that we must attribute mainly the remarkable circumstance that, at the age of 12, John Love had already read the Bible through at least six times (1:13-14). When converting grace, at a later period, visited the household, apprehending first the son, and afterwards in succession both parents, it became evident that with all their conscientiousness and exemplary conduct, during the period of their eldest son’s childhood, they had not known the grace of God in truth. Presbyterianism in Paisley. During John Love’s childhood, there were six Presbyterian churches in Paisley: four were connected to the Church of Scotland, and the other two were Secession congregations. James Love and his family attended the Abbey Kirk in Paisley, where the ministry, according to the editor of the Memorials, was not on Evangelical principles. This would imply that the ministers in Love’s early years were Moderates in their theological persuasion. “Moderatism” and “Moderate” thinking originated in the rather lenient provisions whereby the Episcopalian clergy were accommodated in the Church of Scotland after Presbyterianism was re-established in 1690.
However, the term has been more generally applied to the party in the Scottish Establishment which from around the middle of the eighteenth century was led by William Robertson (1721-1793), Principal of Edinburgh University. Moderatism was characterised by its adherence to the Scottish Enlightenment, and its opposition to Evangelicalism, which was regarded as enthusiasm. Moderates were critical of what they called “man-made creeds” and they disapproved of dogmatism. Their preaching concentrated on morals at the expense of the gospel. In addition, they had a profound respect for the Established Church, which led them to support the system of patronage, the arrangement whereby parish ministers were not chosen by the people but by the patron – usually a member of the landed gentry.
In contrast to the Abbey Kirk, the ministry in both the High and Laigh
4Memorials of the Rev John Love, Glasgow, 1857-1858, vol 1, p 9. (Further references to the Memorials are placed in the body of the text, with volume and page numbers in brackets.)
Kirks was thoroughly Evangelical. The first ten years of John Love’s life were spent in the family home, and gospel preaching could easily have been found both in Paisley and the surrounding district. He was not, however, under the sound of such preaching, but was a regular worshipper with his parents at the Abbey Kirk and was, therefore, brought up under the ministry of men who were Moderates. However, there are retrospective references in his diary, and in other reminiscences, to this period in his life when he acknowledges that he had precious opportunities of hearing gospel preaching from James Baine5 and especially from George Muir6 during the five years of his ministry in Paisley between 1766 and 1771.