How to Read Ferguson’s Brief Biographical Sketches of Some Irish Covenanting Ministers
James Dodson
Samuel Ferguson’s Brief Biographical Sketches of Some Irish Covenanting Ministers should be read with gratitude, but not with a sleeping judgment. It is a good book because it preserves the memory of men who deserve to be remembered: William James, Thomas Hamilton, William Stavely, Samuel Aikin, Robert Young, Samuel Alexander, and William Gamble. These were not idle names in a denominational catalogue. They were labourers in Christ’s vineyard, many of them under severe hardship, carrying the Covenanted testimony through Ireland in a period of spiritual deadness, political upheaval, ecclesiastical confusion, and national sin.
Ferguson’s stated method is important. He says that the history of the Covenanting Church during the eighteenth century is, to a considerable extent, the history of her ministers. That is true, but it must be understood rightly. The Church is not made by ministers, as though Christ’s house depended upon the personal greatness of men. Yet, under Christ, the visible continuity of doctrine, worship, discipline, and testimony is often preserved through called and qualified men who preach, travel, catechise, administer ordinances, write, suffer, and govern. Ferguson writes biographically, but the careful reader must see ecclesiology inside the biography. These sketches are not merely lives of interesting men. They are traces of a Church maintaining her confession under trial.
The first rule for reading Ferguson is therefore this: do not read these ministers as private religious heroes detached from the public testimony they bore. Their piety must not be separated from their principles. Their evangelical preaching must not be severed from their covenantal doctrine. Their sufferings must not be romanticized as mere Protestant bravery. These men laboured for Christ, His crown, and His covenant. To admire their zeal while neglecting their testimony is to turn living witnesses into harmless relics.
This is the great danger in all later reading of Covenanter history. Men love the graves, the stories, the journeys, the dramatic scenes, the scaffold prayers, the field communions, the aged ministers, the pious mothers, the dying testimonies, and the old meeting-houses. These things are good, and they ought to move the heart. But if they are read without the attainments principle, they become sentiment. The old Covenanter is then praised as an earnest man of his age, while the very obligations for which he suffered are quietly dismissed as belonging to that age alone. This is the leaven against which the reader must be warned.
Ferguson is far more sympathetic to the testimony than many later narrators. He does not write as one embarrassed by the Covenanted cause. He wants the Church to remember her worthies. He speaks with respect of those who bore testimony when there were few to do it. Yet even sympathetic memory can recede from the full force of covenanted obligation if it begins to treat the testimony chiefly as inheritance rather than as binding duty. The reader must therefore accentuate every good thing Ferguson preserves, while remaining alert to any tendency to admire the fathers without standing where the fathers stood.
The life of William James is especially useful. Ferguson begins by locating Irish Covenanting within the historical administration of the Solemn League and Covenant in the district between Derry and Coleraine. That is not a small point. Irish Reformed Presbyterianism did not arise as a local preference or denominational accident. It was connected with sworn national and ecclesiastical obligation. The Covenant had been administered; the memory of it remained; the spirit of the Covenanters lived among the people; and from that soil ministers were raised up. This must govern the interpretation of the whole book. The Irish Covenanters were not merely Presbyterians with stricter habits. They were heirs of public vows.
James’s Homesius Enervatus appears to have contained an essay on Church communion, a vindication of the terms of communion held by the Reformed Presbytery, and grounds of separation from the Synod of Ireland. That alone shows the nature of the struggle. The question was not whether Christians might be found in other communions. The question was whether visible ecclesiastical communion could be maintained without betraying known and sworn truth. Saving faith is invisible and cannot be the term of visible communion. The visible Church must judge visible profession, doctrine, worship, government, discipline, and covenantal conformity. The terms of communion were therefore not arbitrary party walls. They were the visible boundaries of a public testimony.
The strange case concerning Matthew Lynn also deserves careful reading. James defended a minister he believed to be falsely accused. The whole episode reminds us that reputation, ministerial usefulness, and ecclesiastical process are no light matters. Yet the deeper lesson is that the Covenanter courts did not imagine themselves free from order. They examined, heard witnesses, involved commissioners, and gave judgment. This was not enthusiasm. It was visible government, however difficult the circumstances. Even where the Church was weak and scattered, she sought to act as a church.
Thomas Hamilton’s life supplies another caution. He came out of conflict within the Presbyterian Church and was received into the Reformed Presbytery. The reader must be careful not to romanticize every man merely because he became a Covenanter. Men may come to the testimony by mixed paths. Some may be drawn by conviction; others may also carry wounds, controversies, or personal irregularities. The testimony does not become less true because some who attach themselves to it are imperfect men. But neither should the testimony be judged by the disorder of men who only partially understood or inconsistently adorned it. The cause is Christ’s; the vessels are earthen.
William Stavely is the great figure of the volume. He must be read as a model of learned, evangelical, public, suffering Covenanter ministry. He was no mere controversialist. He preached with power. He travelled through Ulster in hardship. He laid the foundations of many congregations. He wrote on oaths, Christ’s conquest, prophecy, and the defence of Scripture against infidelity. He confronted Paine not with timid apology but with Christian confidence. He argued that an oath is an act of worship, and therefore must be regulated by the Word of God. That point is central. Covenanter doctrine reaches into public life because worship reaches into public life. The form of an oath is not indifferent when God is invoked.
Stavely’s sufferings in the troubles of 1798 must also be read with precision. The modern mind wants only two categories: loyalism or revolution. The Covenanter position was neither. Stavely opposed tyranny, oppression, and injustice; yet he also rejected sinful association, deistical principles, Romanist confederacy, and revolutionary disorder. He would not take an oath of allegiance to an immoral constitution in order to purchase safety; neither would he join himself to the United Irishmen. He suffered from the Government, but he was not a rebel in the revolutionary sense. He was politically dissenting because Christ’s crown rights are higher than the claims of an uncovenanted civil power. He was anti-revolutionary because no lawful reformation can be built by sinful confederacy.
This is one of the most important lessons in Ferguson. The Covenanter must not be forced into modern political categories. He was not a conservative in the ordinary loyalist sense, and he was not a radical in the infidel revolutionary sense. He was a covenanted Presbyterian. He judged magistracy, oaths, war, association, and national duty by the revealed will of Christ. That is the category. Without it, Stavely will either be slandered as a rebel or tamed into a generic friend of liberty. He was neither. He was a witness.
Samuel Aikin’s answer is beautiful and must be preserved: when asked whether there was no salvation outside the Covenanting Church, he replied that he thought no such thing, but there was no comfort for him outside it. This sentence is a fine example of the distinction between the invisible and visible Church. Aikin did not deny that Christ had His people outside his communion. But he could not, with comfort, abandon the visible testimony where he believed Christ had placed him. That is not sectarianism. It is conscience ordered by truth. The man who says there is no salvation outside his party is a sectarian. The man who says he cannot with comfort leave a lawful testimony is a faithful churchman.
Robert Young’s life teaches another lesson: the distinction between order and necessity. He does not appear to have been regularly called and settled in one particular congregation, yet he laboured among scattered societies, dispensing ordinances as circumstances required. This must be read carefully. The Reformed doctrine does not turn ordination into a sacerdotal charm. Ordination belongs to order and to the well-being of the Church, not to the absolute being of the Church in every case of necessity. Where lawful ordination and ordinary settlement can be had, they should be sought and maintained. Where they cannot be had, the opening of the hearts of the people and their election may stand in the place of ordination until regular order can be recovered. Necessity does not justify contempt of order; but neither does order become an idol against necessity.
Samuel Alexander shows the loveliness of evangelical Covenanter piety. His great theme was the love of God in Christ. His people loved him deeply. His preaching on Hosea and the love of God lived long in memory. The reader must mark this well. Covenanter testimony was not merely polemical. It was not only protest, covenant, magistracy, and separation. It was Christ crucified, Christ loved, Christ preached, Christ pressed upon the conscience. The same men who maintained the testimony also preached the love of God in Christ with tenderness and power. If later men preserve the political shell while losing evangelical warmth, they have not preserved the testimony. If they preserve evangelical warmth while losing covenantal obligation, they have not preserved it either. The two belong together.
William Gamble illustrates perseverance, strength, dignity, and ministerial faithfulness over a long course. His ministry across Donegal and surrounding districts shows that the Covenanting cause expanded through ordinary labour: preaching, travelling, assisting communions, forming congregations, and maintaining pastoral care. There is no romance here apart from endurance. Gamble’s life reminds the reader that testimony is not maintained only at dramatic moments. It is maintained through punctuality, repeated sermons, wet journeys, session meetings, communion seasons, discipline, and the slow gathering of scattered families under the means of grace.
Ferguson’s volume should therefore be read as a testimony to the goodness of God in preserving an Irish Covenanter ministry. It shows learned men, godly men, severe men, tender men, controversial men, suffering men, and missionary men. It shows the Church in weakness, but not in death. It shows presbyterial connection across Scotland and Ireland. It shows the importance of theological training, licensure, ordination, calls, sessions, elders, and communion seasons. It shows that Christ did not leave Himself without witnesses.
But the warning must be spoken plainly. The reader must beware of the leaven of recession from covenanted attainments. This leaven works quietly. It rarely begins by denying the fathers outright. It begins by praising them as men of their time. It speaks respectfully of their courage, piety, sincerity, and usefulness, while treating their public principles as historically conditioned peculiarities. It admires their sufferings but avoids their claims. It loves their memories but not their censures. It keeps their names on plaques while removing their terms of communion. It publishes their biographies while neglecting their bonds.
This leaven is deadly because it allows a church to feel historically continuous while becoming morally discontinuous. A body may still honour Stavely, James, Alexander, and Gamble, and yet no longer stand where they stood. It may still speak of Christ’s crown and covenant, while emptying those words of national obligation, judicial consequence, terms of communion, and separation from sinful constitutions. It may praise the old ministers as “faith’s worthies” while refusing to maintain the attainments by which their worthiness was publicly proved.
Therefore read Ferguson with this question always in mind: what obligations do these lives lay upon us? Not merely, what emotions do they stir? Not merely, what historical information do they preserve? Not merely, what denominational pride do they awaken? But what duties do they press? What vows remain? What terms of communion were vindicated? What sinful associations were refused? What attainments were maintained? What defections were condemned? What public claims of Christ are still binding?
This is the profitable way to read the book. Accentuate the good. Give thanks for Ferguson’s labour. Bless God for the ministers whose names he preserves. Admire James’s defence of communion principles, Stavely’s evangelical courage, Aikin’s tender conscience, Young’s useful itinerancy, Alexander’s Christ-filled preaching, and Gamble’s long endurance. Let their lives provoke gratitude and imitation.
But do not let gratitude become softness. Do not let biography replace testimony. Do not let the fathers be turned into safe ancestors. They were not safe men in their own day. They bore witness against corrupt churches, unlawful oaths, sinful associations, revolutionary infidelity, governmental tyranny, and national defection. If we read them rightly, they will trouble us still.
Ferguson should be read, then, as a book of memory under judgment. It teaches that Christ preserved His witnesses in Ireland; that the Covenanted testimony was evangelical, learned, pastoral, and public; that ministers mattered because Christ used them to carry doctrine through history; and that the Church must never allow admiration for the past to become an excuse for retreat in the present.
The way to honour these Irish Covenanting ministers is not merely to remember them. It is to stand again upon the attainments they maintained, to repent of whatever has been surrendered, and to resist the leaven by which later generations praise the testimony while quietly receding from it.