Eadie, John, Dd, Lld

Eadie, John, D.D., LL.D.

a distinguished divine of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, was born at Alva, Stirlingshire, May 9, 1810. He graduated from the Universityof Glasgow, studied at the Divinity Hall of the Secession Church (United Presbyterian), and in 1835 was ordained pastor of the Cambridge Street Church, Glasgow, in which he speedily attained great eminence and usefulness. He was regarded as the leading representative of the denomination to which he belonged and of the city which has always been its stronghold. As a preacher he was distinguished for his hard common- sense and occasional flashes of happy illustration, for his masculine piety, deep earnestness, and breadth of sympathy, both intellectual and emotional. He was frequently called to other important charges, but was too strongly attached to Glasgow to leave. In 1836 he removed with his congregation to a new and beautiful church at Lansdowne Crescent, where his influence continued unabated until his death, June 3, 1876. Dr. Eadie bore the reputation of extensive and profound scholarship, and in 1843 was appointed by the Church to the chair of hermeneutics and the evidences of natural and revealed religion in Divinity Hall. As a critic he was acute and painstaking, as an interpreter eminently fair-minded. In the pulpit, as in the professor's chair, his strength lay in, the tact with which he selected the soundest results of Biblical criticism, whether his own or that of others, and presented them in a clear and connected form with a constant view of their practical bearing. If this last fact gave a non-academic aspect to some of his lectures, it rendered them not less interesting and probably not less useful to his auditors. Being engaged in two distinct offices, either of which were sufficient to claim all his energies, he nevertheless found time for an amount of work in a third sphere, of which the same thing may be said. Most of his works were connected with Biblical criticism and interpretation, some of them being designed for popular use and others being more strictly scientific. To the former class belong his contributions to the Biblical Cyclopaedias of Kitto and Fairbairn, his edition of Cruden's Concordianae, Oriental History, and his discourses. The Life of Dr. Kitto obtained a deserved popularity, also his Dictionary of the Bible for the

Young, Lectures on the Bible to the Young, etc. His last work, the History of the English Bible (1876, 2 volumes), will probably be the most enduring memorial of his. ability as an author. He is the author of valuable expositions on the Greek text of Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians. See his Lie, by Brown (Lond. 1878). (W.P.S.)