6. Later Years and Writings
Roy Middleton
Later Ministerial career. After being an assistant to the minister of two Church of Scotland congregations, first at Rutherglen and then at Greenock, John Love was ordained as minister of a Scots Presbyterian congregation on Crispin Street in Spitalfields, London, on 22 August 1787. In 1795, whilst he was in London, Love was one of the founders of the London Missionary Society and its first foreign secretary, a position he retained as long as he remained in the capital. When a chapel of ease2 was set up in Clyde Street, Anderston, Glasgow, in 1799 he was elected to the charge and returned to Scotland. Once back in the north his zeal for foreign missions continued and he became the secretary of the Glasgow Missionary Society, which had been set up in 1796.
His ability and reputation as a scholar and theologian was widely acknowledged and led, in November 1815, to an invitation to be one of the candidates for the professorship of divinity at King’s College, Aberdeen. He complied, but due to the ascendancy of the Moderates, the vacant chair was filled by a man who sympathised with their theological stance. Academic authorities in Aberdeen were, however, impressed by him and he was awarded the degree of DD by Marischal College the following year.
In Glasgow, as we have noted, a great congregation rallied about his ministry, and there he became the recognised centre of the old school gospel folk of the West of Scotland. Among those on whom John Love’s ministry made an indelible impression were Peter MacBride, Gavin Parker, Archibald and Finlay Cook, Jonathan Ranken Anderson and John Duncan. Principal John Macleod notes regarding Duncan: “As a preacher and divine he was recognised by the admirers of Dr John Love as the Elisha on whom the mantle of their master had fallen”.3 These men would all have heartily approved of Macleod’s assessment that Love believed in thoroughness of personal self-examination and that he put it into practice in his own life. Love died at his manse in Clyde Street, Anderston, on 17 December 1825; he was 68. The Church of Scotland’s first important mission station in Kaffraria (South Africa) was named after him, Lovedale.
John Love’s writings. During his lifetime. John Love published little. The only publications he saw through the press were a number of sermons preached on various occasions and his Addresses to the People of Otaheite,4 designed to assist the labour of missionaries and other instructors of those who were ignorant. After his death, his wife Janet (née McKillop),5 entrusted to a committee his diary and other shorthand manuscripts, along with his unpublished papers, with a view to printing what they regarded as suitable for publication. The committee who acted as his literary executors first published two volumes of Discourses in 1829. This was followed by a volume of Letters almost a decade later in 1838.
In 1846, three years after the Disruption of the Church of Scotland and the formation of the Free Church of Scotland, a further volume of Love’s Sermons and Addresses was published in Edinburgh. Another volume of sermons was published in 1853; these were sermons preached during the time he was an assistant in Greenock. This volume was published independently of his literary executors. The Greenock sermons were derived from shorthand notes
1This is the final section of an abridgement of a new introduction to John Love’s Memorials, which has now been reprinted, by Free Presbyterian Publications, and costs £35.50 for the two hardback volumes, running to around 1000 pages in total. The previous section, last month, told about Love being licensed to preach the gospel and gave some reasons why such a young man, both chronologically and spiritually, was able to write as maturely as he does in the Memorials. References to the Memorials are placed in the body of the text, with volume and page numbers in brackets.
2A church connected with the Established Church built to cope with the rising population in Scotland. However, these chapels did not have their own Kirk Session.
3Scottish Theology, p 283. It was once said to Duncan, in criticism of Love’s works, that his discourses were only skeletons. This called forth the reply from Rabbi Duncan, “that the bones then must be the bones of a mammoth” (Scottish Theology, p 222). In Macleod’s Some Favourite Books (pp 42-43), he attributes this comment not to Duncan but to Alexander Stewart of Cromarty, whose aunt was a hearer of Love in his Anderston days.
4Now Tahiti.
5It seems that, near the end of Love’s life, his wife suffered from depression. John Morison writes, “One of the heaviest calamities of his life, and which he bore with becoming fortitude and submission to the will of God, was the great mental depression endured for many years by his beloved wife, of whom he was wont to say, that ‘the arrows of the Almighty had drunk up her spirit’. She had been for many a long year the cheerful and devoted companion of his private hours, had sympathised in all the objects connected with his ministry, had aided him by her prayers and gentle counsels; and in the evening of his days, it bore heavily upon his sensitive mind to see her ‘walking in darkness, and having no light’ at all; but the God in whom he trusted did not suffer his spirit to be overwhelmed; and with her, too, it was ‘light at eventide’; for a few years after the decease of her revered husband, she passed into the joy of her Lord, in the full assurance of a glorious immortality” (Fathers and Founders of the London Missionary Society, p 265).
taken by a hearer and not from the papers that had been entrusted to the committee by Mrs Love. The publication of these sermons led his literary executors to make a thorough examination of the papers that were in their possession to see if anything more might be done in the way of publication. This examination resulted in the two volumes of Love’s Memorials being published in 1857-58.
Jonathan Ranken Anderson, an ardent admirer of Love, reviewed the volume of his Greenock Sermons in the first issue of his magazine, The Alarm.6 Anderson’s estimate was typical of those who were attached to Love’s ministry. He writes, “The theology of Dr Love is distinguished by a depth which the lines of few thinkers can reach; a grandeur which fills the reader with admiration of the noble mind that handles it, and with awe at the lofty objects that are presented to him; and withal a simplicity which ever characterises the productions of sanctified genius. . . .
“Everything is calm, and solid and well-proportioned. The light that is thrown upon portions of Scripture is rich and striking: and argues on the part of the author a profound and intimate acquaintance with the fountain of truth. He is full of the unction of the Holy Ghost; and under the sacred influence approaches the Word of God, to learn the mind of Him who is light. He subjects an understanding of extraordinary penetration and power to the authority of God; and with the docility of a little child, receives the testimony which comes to him with that sanction. The result is, that in the illustration of the subjects of his discourse, he opens one vein of truth after another; and to those who are sanctified to accept them at his hand, he offers a plentiful supply of the richest treasures.”
6The Alarm! A Magazine for the Times, January 1855, pp 11-12.