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Scottish Puritans – Select Biographies constitute one of the great treasures of Scottish Christian literature. In quick succession, we meet such justly famous and revered figures as John Welsh, David Dickson, William Guthrie, and James Fraser of Brea, but also the lesser known and long forgotten, like the land-labourer of Carrick, John Stevenson. Here are the stories and reflections of men and women who, in times of great darkness, testing, and suffering, tasted what the author of Hebrews calls ‘the powers of the age to come’.
The 17th century was a dynamic period in Scottish church history, and yet many of its rich records lay hidden in privately owned manuscripts for two hundred years. It was only with the evangelical awakening of the 1840s that close attention was given to their publication, and a Society, formed for that purpose in Edinburgh, took the name of the historian, Robert Wodrow (1679-1734). On the 26 volumes thus published subsequent authors have depended heavily, and particularly so with respect to the two volumes originally entitled Select Biographies. In an era when Puritan literature is again being rediscovered their reprint is timely, providing as it does the opportunity to go back to first-hand sources. Here, for the most part, men and women live in their own words, or in the witness of their contemporaries. The 19th-century editor, William Tweedie, himself an evangelical leader, thought it worthwhile to be the editor of this rare material, and all who have possessed them endorse his judgment.
In these records we find a whole gallery of men and women whose lives and deaths speak to us of apostolic Christianity. Although not to be used as models in all things, the Scottish Puritans and Covenanters still exemplify the same kind of spiritual and missionary zeal that has ever been associated with the advance of the kingdom of God. Their lives were centered on the Word of God and prayer and they enjoyed real communion with Christ. They knew the Holy Spirit and believed in his power to change lives and nations. What Spurgeon once said of David Dickson’s Explanation of the Psalms we say of Scottish Puritans – Biographies. ‘We recommend it with much fervour’. Iain Murray
