- The first in a series; it first appeared in this Magazine in September 1902; it is edited.
1. Thomas Boston’s Human Nature in its Fourfold State
Rev Donald Beaton
There was a time when Boston’s Fourfold State was better known to the religious public of Scotland than it is today. At one time it formed one of the treasured volumes that had a place on the bookshelf in the homes of the humble but intelligent country people in Scotland. It was in keeping with the nature of things that its author should have sprung from that sturdy and pious peasantry that was at once Scotland’s pride and glory. It was in 1676 that Thomas Boston first saw the light of day. The little town of Duns had the honour of being his birthplace, as it was of Thomas M’Crie, the biographer of John Knox. His parents were staunch Presbyterians; from the son’s account, both seem to have been pious people. During the times of persecution, his father had been cast into prison, and the son relates in after years the impression made on his sensitive spirit during one night’s lonely vigil with his father in the dreary prison.
At the age of 11, while attending the ministry of Henry Erskine, the father of Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine, he was awakened to a sense of his lost condition. The sermons that most impressed him and left an abiding effect were preached from the texts, “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” and, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”. Years afterwards, in referring to this important event, he says in his Soliloquy on the Art of Man-Fishing: “Little wast thou thinking, O my soul, on Christ, heaven, or thyself when thou went to the Newton of Whitsome to hear a preaching. When Christ first dealt with thee, there thou got an unexpected cast.” The father, though in humble circumstances, sent him to school, and before he had left school he had a secret longing to become a minister of the gospel. With this end in view he proceeded to college, where it appears he denied himself many of the common necessities of life in order that he might not be a burden on his parents. This enforced asceticism bore fruits in after years in the broken health and the frail body of the saintly minister of Ettrick.
In 1696 he was appointed tutor to the Bruces of Kennet, near Alloa. At times there was some slight friction between the members of the household, with their free and easygoing ways, and the young student walking in the narrow way of life. But whatever irritation he may have caused at first, it soon gave place to the deepest respect for the conscientious tutor. In the following year he was licensed by the Presbytery of Duns, but owing to a variety of causes did not receive a call until two years afterwards. These were years of discipline which bore good fruit afterwards – what it cost him and his feelings as he felt the expected cup passing away from his lips are minutely detailed in his interesting Memoirs.
At last, in 1699, a call came to him from Simprin. 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 public worship. 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”.
From that day, there was a watching for souls that hallowed Simprin for ever 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 Scripture 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, no family worship was held there, but before he left it, worship was kept morning and evening in every home.
These earnest pleadings in secret were answered, and the recollection of these days drew from him the acknowledgment that “Simprin was a field which the Lord had blessed. Simprin, blessed be He for His kindness at Simprin.” In 1706 he received a call from Ettrick, and after serious consideration he 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 Jesus: “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”.
It was in Ettrick, however, that he passed through the severest part of his discipline. The people were as a rule very indifferent to his pulpit ministry; they were exceptionally factious, and yet manifested the liveliest interest in public questions of the day, whether civil or ecclesiastical. Boston had but one resort in all his difficulties; his timid nature shrank many a time from his trials, but he gained the day by pouring out his plaint to the Hearer of prayer. At last the parish of Closeburn was anxious to get Boston for their minister; and all at once it seemed to be brought home to the people of Ettrick that they had such a devoted servant of Christ as their minister. A fast day was held, and the congregation poured out its soul in prayer to the Head of the Church, pleading that His servant might not be removed from his sphere of labour. It was the turning point in the history of the congregation, and from that day onwards Boston had more influence over the people of Ettrick. Then followed years of blessing, in which the seed that was sown with tears was reaped with joy.
If space permitted, reference might be made to the important part he took in the Simson heresy case and in the famous Marrow controversy, but a word in passing must be said about his family afflictions. He lost a number of his children when they were young, and to show the tender-heartedness of the man one cannot do better than quote the following touching incident: “When the child was laid in the coffin,” he says, “his mother kissed his dust. I only lifted the cloth off his face, looked on it, and covered it again, in confidence of seeing that body rise a glorious body. When the nails were driving [in], I was moved, for I had not kissed that precious dust, which I believed was united to Jesus Christ, as if I had despised it. I would fain have caused draw the nail again, but because of one that was present I resented and violated myself.”
During the last ten years of her life, his wife’s mind seems to have been somewhat weak, which left her the prey to awful temptations from Satan. With eagerness, the devoted husband watched for any returning gleam that might tell that the night was past. “Now,” he says, “we were with our broken ship within sight of the shore, and I was like one stretching out his hand and crying, Help forward, help forward. But behold, a little time after, the storm arose anew, and the ship was beaten back into the main ocean, out of sight of land again.” Boston passed peacefully away on 20 May 1732. Well might he say, “The world all along hath been a step-dame [step-mother] to me; and wheresoever I would have attempted to nestle in it, there was a thorn of uneasiness laid for me”.
Boston was what the old divines would call a painful student – he took pains with his work. It is the testimony of James Walker in his Theology and Theologians of Scotland that “he was the best Hebrew scholar in Scotland as he was the freshest and most powerful of Scottish living theologians”. One reads with sympathetic interest his longing for books – a parcel of books even to Boston was no insignificant enjoyment, but there can be no doubt that his lack of books made it necessary to fall back on original meditation and study, the fruits of which are plainly manifest in his works.
His works were published in a 12-volume edition, edited by Samuel Macmillan. Among the best known of these are his Memoirs, The Crook in the Lot and The Fourfold State. The Crook in the Lot is a work dealing with the case of those in sorrow and affliction. But the work by which Boston is best known is The Fourfold State. It was while assisting at a Kelso communion that his attached friend Dr Trotter suggested to him that it was advisable to publish some of his sermons.
Boston considered the matter seriously and decided to publish his sermons on the fourfold state of man: in his primitive integrity, entire depravity, begun recovery and consummate happiness or misery. The work thus embraces a complete system of Christian theology. The book contains the substance of sermons preached first of all at Simprin – these were recast in 1708-09 and preached again at Ettrick. It was in 1712 that Boston seriously set himself to his important task; every page of it was steeped in prayer. One thing or another kept the book from being published and it was not till 1720 that Boston first handled a bound copy. The work immediately found a ready sale. It had the qualifications of a book that was to last, not the mere satisfaction of some fleeting fancy, however prevalent for the time being, but the constant longing and hungering of the human soul. It soon had a place among the religious books next to The Pilgrim’s Progress.
Boston’s correspondence shows that it was eagerly read abroad. Its theology is the theology of the Bible as interpreted by the great Dutch divines and the Marrowmen. The ring of the federal theology and the full and free offer of Christ so much insisted on by the Marrowmen may be traced in this religious classic. Space again forbids us making more than one quotation, which may serve as a conclusion to this article. Speaking of heaven, Boston says, “There we shall see Adam and Eve in the heavenly paradise, freely eating of the tree of life; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and all the holy patriarchs, no more wandering from land to land, but come to their everlasting rest; all the prophets feasting their eyes on the glory of Him of whose coming they prophesied; the twelve apostles of the Lamb sitting on their twelve thrones; all the holy martyrs in their long white robes, with their crowns on their heads; the godly kings advanced to a kingdom which cannot be moved; and them that turn many to righteousness shining as the stars for ever and ever. There shall we see our godly friends, relations and acquaintances, pillars in the temple of God, to go no more out from us.”
- Boston’s Works are in print at present, as are The Fourfold State, The Crook in the Lot and The Art of Man-Fishing.
- A medical doctor.