Thomas Boston

Thomas Boston was born on March 7, 1676, in Duns, in Berwickshire, in the south of Scotland, the son of John Boston, a tailor, who had suffered imprisonment for his Covenanter convictions, and his wife, Alison Trotter. The family lived through the last years of the persecution of the Presbyterians under Charles II and James VII, when ministers who would not conform to the established church were ejected and their hearers fined or jailed. The boy knew what it was to belong to a hunted church. His father had been in prison for attending a meeting of the Covenanters, and the child grew up in a house where the memory of that cost was alive. It left him with a serious mind and a readiness to bear suffering for conscience.

When he was eleven, he heard the preaching of Henry Erskine, the father of the Erskine brothers who would later found the Secession Church, a minister who had been ejected and who preached in the district. The sermon pierced him. He saw himself as a sinner in the sight of God, and he came to rest his hope in Christ. The experience was not sudden or loud, but it was lasting. He was educated at the school in Duns and then at the University of Edinburgh, where he took his degree in 1694. He was then a tutor in a family for a time and studied theology. He was licensed to preach in 1697. He was ordained in 1699 as the minister of Simprin, a small parish in Berwickshire, with a population of a hundred or so. It was a poor and quiet place.

In the same year, 1700, he married Katharine Brown, the daughter of a minister. She was a woman of deep faith, whom he called his dearest. They had ten children, and six of them died in infancy or childhood. His wife suffered from a long and painful sickness, which probably had a nervous or mental element, and for most of their marriage, she was frequently unwell and sometimes unable to rise. He cared for her with great tenderness over the years. He wrote of his sorrow and also of the comfort that he found in the promises of God. He kept a diary, which he later turned into his Memoirs, in which he set down his struggles with sin, his doubts and his joys. It is one of the great spiritual autobiographies of the Scottish church.

In 1707, he was called to Ettrick, a large, lonely parish in the hills of Selkirkshire, in the Borders, where he spent the remaining twenty-five years of his life. It was a land of scattered farms and of shepherds, with little learning and less religion. The parish covered many miles of rough country. He took up the work as a shepherd takes up a flock. He visited the farms and catechized the families. He taught the people the shorter catechism and the Scriptures. He preached with an intensity that moved them. In time, the parish came to be known for its piety. He also studied Hebrew, with a passion, and he wrote a treatise on the Hebrew accents, which was published after his death. He was a scholar in the wilderness.

His best-known work is Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, which appeared in 1720. It was based on a series of sermons that he preached at Ettrick. It set out the condition of man in four stages. These were the state of innocence, in which man was created, the state of nature, in which man is fallen, the state of grace, in which man is renewed, and the eternal state, in heaven or in hell. It was written in plain, vivid language, with a clear order, and it gave ordinary readers a map of the Christian faith. It became one of the most widely read books in Scotland, and it was found in cottages across the land for a century or more. Spurgeon and others read it with delight.

Boston took a leading part in the Marrow Controversy. In 1718, he came across a book called The Marrow of Modern Divinity, which had been written in the previous century by an English Puritan, Edward Fisher. He was greatly helped by it, in his own struggles with the question of how a sinner may come to Christ. The book taught that Christ is offered freely to all, and that assurance is of the essence of faith. He recommended it to others, and a new edition was published in Scotland. In 1720, the General Assembly condemned the book as antinomian, which means that it did away with the law. Boston and eleven other ministers, known as the Marrow Men, protested. They held that the gospel is a free gift and that the church must not shut the door of mercy. The dispute was bitter. Boston was rebuked, but he held to his view.

He was a man of a melancholy temper, who often struggled with doubt. His journals reveal a man who was hard on himself and who examined his heart with a severity that made him unhappy. He was subject to long periods of illness. He suffered from stone and from other ailments. He was also a man of strong opinions, who sometimes judged others harshly. He had a number of disputes with his neighbors. But his devotion to his flock was complete, and his people loved him.

He died on May 20, 1732, at Ettrick, at the age of fifty-six, after a long illness. His Memoirs and his many writings were published after his death. They include The Crook in the Lot, a study of the way in which God directs the troubles of life. His life shows the effect of a faithful pastor in an obscure place, who gave his life to a flock of shepherds and whose books fed his nation.