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Thomas Boston

Thomas Boston


Thomas Boston was a Scottish church leader. He was educated at Edinburgh, and licensed in 1697 by the presbytery of Chirnside. In 1699 he became minister of the small parish of Simprin, where there were only 90 examinable persons.

His autobiography is a record of Scottish life, with humorous touches, intentional and otherwise. His books, The Fourfold State, The Crook in the Lot, and his Body of Divinity and Miscellanies, had a powerful influence over the Scottish peasantry. His Memoirs were published in 1776 (ed. GD Low, 1908). An edition of his works in 12 volumes appeared in 1849.

      Born in 1676, in the town of Duns, in the Border country of Scotland, Thomas Boston learned through his childhood experiences to sympathise with the Presbyterian cause. His father, John Boston, was a strong opponent of Prelacy; and for this Nonconformity, he suffered a period of imprisonment. Thomas spent at least one night in Duns jail with him "to keep him company." When James II, in 1687, gave liberty of worship to dissenters from the Established Church - which he did out of regard for his RC subjects, John Boston was not slow to avail himself of his new-found liberty. He used to wait on the ministry of Henry Erskine, the father of Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine, with whom Thomas Boston was to be so closely associated in after years in making a stand for the free offer of the Gospel. It was while attending one of these services that Thomas, then a boy of 11, was converted. He refers to the event in his Soliloquy on the Art of Man-fishing, which he published while still a young licentiate.

      After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, he was licensed as a preacher of the gospel in 1697. But he was not ordained until 1699, when he became minister of the parish of Simprin. It was there that he first preached the sermons which were later published under the title of Human Nature in its Fourfold State. Simprin was a discouraging field of service, but under his zealous ministry it became, to quote his own description, "a field which the Lord has blessed."

      In 1707, Boston was transferred to the parish of Ettrick, where he found the people sadly divided by separatism. The Cameronians, who repudiated the Revolution Settlement of 1688, stood aloof from his ministry, and, while among the parishioners generally there was much zeal for the church, there was but little vital godliness. Not until 1710, three years after his induction to Ettrick, did Boston dispense the sacrament of the Lord's Supper there; and, indeed, even after laboring for a further five years there, he concluded that all had been in vain. But when, in 1716, he received a call to Closeburn, his people at Ettrick showed the utmost anxiety at the prospect of losing their minister. But the transferral never took place. Boston stayed at Ettrick and witnessed a great work of grace in what had been a spiritual wilderness. It is noteworthy that whereas at his first dispensation of the Lord's Supper there, only some 60 persons communicated, at his last communion, in 1731, the number of participants was 777.

      It was during his Ettrick ministry that his Fourfold State was first published, and by it his ministry was extended far and wide. But the doctrinal content of those discourses had been greatly influenced by his discovery, in a humble home in Simprin, of Edward Fisher's treatise The Marrow of Modern Divinity. This little book had the effect of giving Boston a fuller insight into the grace of God as the sole cause of salvation; and it immediately "gave a tincture," as he put it, to his preaching.

      Boston was a man of scholarly attainments, a first-class Hebraist, and a theologian of such eminence that Jonathan Edwards judged him to have been "a truly great divine." Never a robust man, he had a full share of tribulation, as his Autobiography so touchingly shows. He left behind him 12 volumes of collected writings. The two books which did most to extend his ministry throughout Scotland, and even England and America, were The Crook in the lot and Human Nature in its Fourfold State.

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a fatal recovery from a promising illness
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Go where thou wilt, thou canst not go out of thy Father's ground.
topics: god , providence  
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Men believe that fire will burn them; and therefore, they will not throw themselves into it. But the truth is, most men live as if they thought the gospel was a mere fable, and the wrath of God, revealed in his word against their unrighteousness and ungodliness, a mere scarecrow. If
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Most men are so far from making God their chief end, in their natural and civil actions, that, in these matters, God is not in all their thoughts. . . . They seek God indeed, but not for himself, but for themselves. They seek him not at all, but for their own welfare; so their whole life is woven into one web of practical blasphemy; making God the means, and self their end; yea, their chief end.
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Affliction doth not rise out of the dust or come to men by chance; but it is the Lord that sends it, and we should own and reverence His hand in it.
topics: Affliction  
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Whoever be the instruments of any good to us, of whatever sort, we must look above them, and eye the hand and counsel of God in it, which is the first spring, and be duly thankful to God for it. And whatever evil of crosses or afflictions befalls us, we must look above the instruments of it to God.
topics: Affliction  
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God hath decreed the end, so He hath decreed the means that are proper for attaining that end; so that these two must not be separated.
topics: God  
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Has God decreed all things that come to pass? Then there is nothing that falls out by chance, nor are we to ascribe what we meet with either to good or ill luck and fortune. There are many events in the world which men look upon as mere accidents, yet all these come by the counsel and appointment of Heaven.
topics: God  
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Consider the end of God's decrees - and this is no other than His own glory. Every rational agent acts for an end; and God being the most perfect agent, and His glory the highest end, there can be no doubt but all His decrees are directed to that end. "For to Him are all things" (Rom. 11.36).
topics: God  
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It is our duty to look to God's commands, and not to His decrees; to our own duty, and not to His purposes. The decrees of God are a vast ocean, into which many possibly have curiously pried to their own horror and despair; but few or none have ever pried into them to their own profit and satisfaction.
topics: Obedience  
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They that would keep themselves pure must have their bodies in subjection, and that may require, in some cases, a holy violence.
topics: Purity  
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Again, the glory of one attribute is more seen in one work than in another: in some things there is more of His goodness, in other things more of His wisdom is seen, and in others more of His power. But in the work of redemption all His perfections and excellencies shine forth in their greatest glory.
topics: Redemption  
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A righteous man may make a righteous work, but no work of an unrighteous man can make him righteous. Now we become righteous only by faith, through the righteousness of Christ imputed to us.
topics: Righteousness  
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A man shall as soon force fruit out of a branch broken off from the tree and withered, as work righteousness without believing in, and uniting with Christ. These are two things by which those that hear the gospel are ruined.
topics: Righteousness  
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It is great folly to cast your sins upon Satan who tempted you, or upon your neighbor who provoked you; but it is a far greater sin, nay horrid blasphemy, to cast it upon God Himself. A greater affront than this cannot be offered to the infinite holiness of God.
topics: Sin  
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For as the sun darts its beams upon a dunghill, and yet is no way defiled by it; so God decrees the permission of sin... yet is not the author of sin.
topics: Sin  
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the holiest parent begets unholy children, and cannot communicate their grace to them, as they do their nature; which many godly parents find true, in their sad experience.
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And the soul is never cured of this disease, until conquering grace brings it back to take up its everlasting rest in God through Christ—but until this be, if man were set again in paradise, the garden of the Lord, all the pleasures there would not keep him from looking, yes, and leaping over the hedge a second time.
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A creature, as a creature, must acknowledge the Creator's will as its supreme law; for as it cannot exist without him, so it must not be but for him, and according to his will; yet no law obliges, until it is revealed. And hence it follows, that there was a law, which man, as a rational creature, was subjected to in his creation; and that this law was revealed to him. "God made man upright," says the text. This supposes a law to which he was conformed in his creation; as when anything is made regular, or according to rule, of necessity the rule itself is presupposed. Whence we may gather, that this law was no other than the eternal, indispensable law of righteousness, observed in all points by the second Adam, opposed by the carnal mind, and some notions of which remain yet among the Pagans, who, "having not the law, are a law unto themselves," Romans 2:14.
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The most unreserved and unlimited obedience is due to the will and command of the great Lord of heaven and earth, and that without exception or reserve, say to the contrary who will.
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