Eadie, JOHN

Eadie, JOHN, a learned Scotch divine, was born at Alva, in Stirlingshire, 9th May 1810. He studied at the university of Glasgow, and was licensed in 1835 as a preacher of the United Secession Church, in which, soon after, he became minister of a Glasgow congregation—a post he retained after its union with the Relief Church (1847) as the United Presbyterian Church. From 1843 to the close of his life he also lectured on the exegesis of Scripture in the theological college of his church. He received the degree of LL.D. from Glasgow in 1844, and of D.D. from St Andrews in 1850, was moderator of the synod of his church in 1857, and was one of the original members of the New Testament Revision Company. He died 3d June 1876. Eadie maintained throughout life an incessant literary activity. If not an exegete of the highest order, he possessed wide learning and great power of exposition. Few books are more generally useful and more intelligible to the non-theological reader than his Biblical Cyclopædia (1848), and his Ecclesiastical Encyclopædia (1861). Sound contributions to New Testament exegesis were his commentaries on St Paul's epistles to the Ephesians (1854), Colossians (1856), Philippians (1857), Galatians (1869), and Thessalonians (posthumously, 1877). His latest work was The English Bible (2 vols. 1876), a learned and yet popular history of the English translations of the Scripture. See his Life by Dr James Brown (1878).