1. Besides these books–Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion (Edinburgh, 1820),Google ScholarAn Essay on Faith (Edinburgh, 1822),Google ScholarThe Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel (Edinburgh, 1828),Google ScholarThe Brazen Serpent; or, Life Coming Through Death (Edinburgh, 1831),Google Scholar and The Doctrine of Election (London, 1837),Google Scholar the first three of which were translated into French and German–Erskine also wrote: a number of essays and fragments which were published posthumously as The Spiritual Order and Other Papers (Edinburgh, 1871);Google Scholar introductory essays for The Works of John Gambold (Glasgow, 1822),Google ScholarThe Letters of Samuel Rutherford (Glasgow, 1827),Google ScholarExtracts of Letters to a Christian Friend by a Lady (Greenock, 1830)Google Scholar, and The Saints' Everlasting Rest (Glasgow, 1831);Google Scholar and a slender volume detailing his opinion of the charismatic phenomena in Edward Irving's circle entitled The Gifts of the Spirit (Greenock, 1830).Google Scholar

2. Andrew Mitchell Thomson (1779–1831), a powerful Edinburgh evangelical and founder, in 1810, of The Christian Instructor, frequently used the pages of his journal to attack Erskine's views. John Henry Newman attacked Erskine's insistence on interpreting doctrines solely in their relation to human needs and circumstances and charged him with reductionism, circular reasoning, and a prideful determination “not to leave us any thing in the gospel system unknown, unaccounted for,” in Tract 73, “On the Introduction of Rationalistic Principles into Religion,” p. 29. In addition to these two most prominent examples of public censure, the unsigned reviews of Erskine's works in the Eclectic Review and the British Critic are predominately negative in tone and in their evaluations of Erskine's arguments. See Eclectic Review (08 1821), pp. 180–185;Google ScholarBritish Critic (01 1829), pp. 54–80;Google ScholarEclectic Review (07 1830), pp. 61–77;Google ScholarEclectic Review (11 1830), pp. 417–428;Google ScholarBritish Critic (04 1838), pp. 299–328;Google Scholar and Eclectic Review (07 1838), pp. 100–107.Google Scholar

3. The precise nature and extent of Erskine's influence has not been examined rigorously. That Maurice and Campbell found much in Erskine that was congenial with their own thinking and that there was some sharing of vocabulary is beyond dispute. D.J. Vaughn's claim that Erskine's influence lay more in his personal qualities than in his theological arguments gains some credence by virtue of the fact that most of those who acknowledge their indebtedness to him knew him well and corresponded with him; “Scottish Influences Upon English Theological Thought,” Contemporary Review (06 1878), pp. 457–473.Google ScholarRobert, Daniel credits Erskine with contributing to the “theologie du Reveil” on the continent, in Les Églses Réformêes en France (1800–1830) (Paris, 1961), pp. 389, 407.Google Scholar Erskine's influence on American theology is even more difficult to pin down, though in 1866 Noah Porter wrote a letter to Erskine which contained the following passage: “I wished to say to you that your little work on the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion has been in America a work highly esteemed and of potent theological influence. My father, who has been the pastor of one flock for nearly sixty years, once said to me that that book had done more than any single book of his time to give character to the new phase of theology in New England, which began around 1820, and in which DrTaylor, N.W., DrBeecher, L., and DrStuart, Moses, and many others were prominently concerned” Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, ed. Hanna, William, 2 vols., (New York, 1877), 1:365.Google Scholar

4. Reardon, Bernard, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age: A Survey from Coleridge to Gore (London, 1980) p. 159Google Scholar(originally published in 1971 under the title From Coleridge to Gore).

5. Letters 1:318.

6. Shortly after his death new editions of most of his works appeared, along with an anthology of previously unpublished papers and two volumes of letters. Reviewers in the Spectator used the publication of books to portray Erskine as a great religious reformer; see the Spectator 44 (24 06 1871), pp. 768–770;Google ScholarSpectator 50 (23 06 1877), p. 749;Google Scholar and Spectator 50 (29 12 1877), pp. 1661–62.Google Scholar Honorific accounts of Erskine's influence can be found also in Wedgwood, Julia, “Thomas Erskine of Linlathen,” Contemporary Review 14 (1870): 262;Google ScholarLincoln, Varnum, “Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, His Life, Writings, and Theology,” Universalist Quarterly and General Review (1880): 149–163;Google ScholarTulloch, John, Movements of Religious Thought in Britain during the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1888), p. 138;Google ScholarMachar, Agnes Maul, “Leaders of Widening Religious Thought and Life,” Andover Review (1890): 464–479, 588–609;Google ScholarPfleiderer, Otto, The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant and its Progress in Great Britain since 1825, trans. Smith, J. Frederick (London, 1893), P. 382;Google ScholarHenderson, Henry F., Erskine of Linlathen: Selections and Biography (Edinburgh, 1899) p. ix;Google ScholarEncyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Erskine, Thomas of Linlathen” (1910), vol. 9, p. 756;Google ScholarStorr, Vernon F., The Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 1800–1860 (London, 1913), p. 353;Google Scholar and Franks, Robert S., The Work of Christ: A Historical Study of Christian Doctrine (London, 1918; reprint ed., 1962), p. 655.Google Scholar

7. Drummond, Andrew L. and Bulloch, James, The Scottish Church, 1688–1843: The Age of Moderates (Edinburgh, 1973), pp. 194, 199.Google Scholar Recent articles on Erskine are Philip Devenish, “Divinity and Dipolarity: Thomas Erskine and Charles Hartshorne on What Makes God ‘God’,” Journal of Religion 62 (1982): 335–358Google Scholar (in a footnote Devenish promises a book on Erskine); Finlayson, Duncan, “Aspects of the Life and Influence of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, 1788–1870,” Records of the Scottish Church History Society (1978), pp. 31–45;Google Scholar and Logan, John B., “Thomas Erskine of Linlathen: Lay Theologian of the ‘Inner Light’,” Scottish Journal of Theology 37 (1984): 23–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In addition, Brose, Olive J. goes beyond the obligatory nod to Erskine in secondary works on Maurice in her Frederick Denison Maurice: Rebellious Conformist, 1805–1872 (Athens, 1971).Google Scholar

8. Brose, , Frederick Den isorl Maurice, p. 44n.Google Scholar Brose points out that this judgment, taken from Logan's, John B. master's thesis, “The Religious Thought of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen” (Union Theological Seminary, 1931),Google Scholar “is a variant of Pfeiderer's and Storr's earlier liberal-minded studies.”

9. The phrase “house of authority” is taken from Farley, Edward, Ecclesial Reflection: An Anatomy of Theological Method (Philadelphia, 1982).Google Scholar

10. Tulloch, , Movements of Religious Thought, p 132.Google Scholar

11. One way to get a sense of the character and persistence of the evidential tradition is to review the history of some of the major lecture series in Britain, especially the Bampton Lectures. For a list of titles of these lectures from 1780–1879, as well as for an excerpt from the will of the founder of the lectureship, see Hurst, John F., Bibliotheca Theologica (New York, 1883), pp. 16–22.Google ScholarHunt, John, Religious Thought in England in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1896),Google Scholar provides brief synopses of the lectures delivered between 1801 and 1894.

12. Chalmers, Thomas, The Evidence and Authority of The Christian Revelation, 6th ed. (Edinburgh, 1818), pp. 207–209.Google Scholar

13. Letters, 1:44.

14. Erskine, Thomas, Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion (Philadelphia, 1821), p. 8.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., p. 129. On this point Erskine anticipates Coleridge's remark in Aids to Reflection (London, 1825):Google Scholar “Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust to its own Evidence”.

16. Erskine, , Remarks, p. 7.Google Scholar

17. It should be noted, however, that thinkers such as Thomas Arnold, Julius Charles Hare, and John Sterling were acquainted with and influenced by Coleridge's views on the Bible long before the publication of Confessions of an inquiring Spirit.

18. Letters, 1:323–324.Google Scholar

19. Erskine, Thomas, The Spiritual Order and Other Papers, 3d ed. (Edinburgh, 1884), p. 85n.Google Scholar

20. Brose, , Frederick Denison Maurice, p. 44.Google Scholar

21. Erskine, , Spiritual Order, p. 77.Google Scholar

22. Letters, 2:218.

23. Although he sometimes attended services of Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Nonconformist congregations, Erskine remained outside the institutional church. He believed that some evangelicals as well as the Tractarians were in danger of making an idol of the church by denying that the spirit of God could work in the lives of individuals, apart from all ecclesiastical contexts. Erskine's own experience spoke forcefully against this denial, and, as a result, he was loath to identify with any church: “I feel the weakness and meagreness, and selfishness and speculativeness, that arise from our isolated condition, but I dare take nothing for granted in this weighty matter”, Letters, 1:210.

24. Ibid. 2:202.

25. Erskine, , Spiritual Order, p. 16n.Google Scholar

26. Erskine, Thomas, An Essay on Faith (Edinburgh, 1823), p. 65.Google Scholar It seems to me that Matthew Arnold misunderstood and misrepresented Erskine on the issue of doctrine when he wrote the following in Literature and Dogma (London, 1873):Google Scholar “Nothing is more common, indeed, than for religious writers, who have a strong sense of the genuine and moral side of Christianity, and who much enlarge on the pre-eminence of this, to put themselves right, as it were, with dogmatic theology, by a passing sentence expressing profound belief in its dogmas, though in discussing them, it is implied, there is little profit. So Mr. Erskine of Linlathen, that unwearying and much-revered exponent of the moral side of the Bible: ‘It seems difficult’, he says, ‘to conceive that any man should read through the New Testament candidly and attentively, without being convinced that the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to and implied in every part of the system’. Even already many readers of Mr. Erskine feel, when they come across such a sentence as that, as if they had suddenly taken gravel or sand into their mouth”; The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 6, Dissent and Dogma, ed. Super, R.H. (Ann Arbor, 1968), p. 383.Google Scholar (The quotation is from Remarks, p. 81.) When Arnold tasted the grit he must have stopped cold in his study of Erskine, for later in Remarks, as well as in some of his later works and letters, Erskine makes it very clear that he has no use for the Trinity, or any other doctrine, as a matter of metaphysical speculation.

27. Only rarely did Erskine identify and confront a specific representative of the Calvinistic views he opposed. However, he did devote the final pages of The Doctrine of Election to a rebuttal of Jonathan Edwards's Freedom of the Will, a work which he believed misrepresented the distinctive nature of the liberty of moral beings. Erskine held that, as far as humans are concerned, the will is free only if it is capable of sympathizing with, or entering into uncoerced agreement with, the purpose which God has for it. By depriving humans of this higher freedom, Edwards, , in Erskine's, opinion, left “a dark legacy to the world”, p. 347.Google Scholar

28. Erskine believed that if the parental nature of God is taken seriously, then God must be seen as exercising his power persuasively rather than coercively and as sharing emotionally in the lives of his children: “The idea of a sorrowing God shocks the minds of many. It does not shock mine. I cannot conceive of love being without sorrow. God bearing man's burden with him; God, as it were, sacrificing Himself that man might learn to sacrifice himself—this is the sympathy which can alone heal the broken heart with true healing”, Letters, 2:270.

29. Erskine, Thomas, The Brazen Serpent, 3d ed. (Edinburgh, 1879), p. 44.Google Scholar

30. Erskine, Thomas, The Doctrine of Election, 2d ed. (Edinburgh, 1878), p. 125.Google Scholar

31. Erskine, , Remarks, p. 42.Google Scholar

32. Erskine, , Doctrine of Election, p. xv.Google Scholar

33. Letters, 1:216.