M'Crie, DR THOMAS

M'Crie, DR THOMAS, a learned Scottish historian and divine, was born at Duns in November 1772, studied at the university of Edinburgh, and was ordained in 1795 pastor of an Anti-burgher congregation in that city. Here he died, 5th August 1835. M'Crie's works are in the highest degree valuable to the student of Scottish ecclesiastical history. They exhibit research at once vast and minute, and though they are essentially apologetic, yet their author is never consciously unfair, and does not misstate facts. He shows, however, such admirable skill in finding palliation even for the less defensible acts of the Reformers, and so warm a zeal for Presbyterianism, that the impartial Hallam described his spirit as 'Presbyterian Hildebrandism.' He attacked Sir Walter Scott's account of the Covenanters in Old Mortality in three trenchant papers in the Edinburgh Christian Instructor, and most unprejudiced readers were compelled to admit that he had the best of the controversy. Readers of My Schools and Schoolmasters will remember the admirable description of the militant-looking divine's person and preaching. His best-known works are The Life of John Knox (1812), The Life of Andrew Melville (1819), and the less satisfactory History of the Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Spain (1829). His works were collected in 4 vols. (1855-56), and a Life was published in 1840 by his son, Thomas M'Crie, D.D., LL.D. (1798-1875), professor in the Presbyterian college at London, and himself the author of Sketches of Scottish Church History (1841), and Annals of English Presbytery (1872).