George Grub

George Grub (1812–1892) was a Scottish church historian.

He was born at Old Aberdeen on 4 April 1812, was the only child of George Grub, a respectable citizen and convener of the trades at Old Aberdeen, by his wife, Christian Yolum. He entered King's College, Aberdeen, at the age of thirteen and a half, and afterwards entered the law-office of Alexander Allan, advocate in Aberdeen, under whom he served the apprenticeship required by the Society of Advocates in Aberdeen.

Passing as advocate in 1836, he was in 1841 appointed librarian to the society. This post he held until his death. In 1843 he became lecturer on Scots law in Marischal College, Aberdeen, and for forty-eight years was practically the sole teacher of law in the university of Aberdeen first, as holding this lectureship; next, after the union of King's and Marischal Colleges (1860–81), as 'substitute' for Professor Patrick Davidson, who held the chair of law at King's College, but never lectured ; and finally, on that gentleman's death in 1881, as professor of law in the university of Aberdeen. He was, perhaps, rather a careful than a brilliant teacher, but he was deeply loved and respected by all his students. In 1856, he graduated A.M. at Aberdeen, and in 1864 he received the degree of LL.D. from his university, and on resigning the chair in 1891 he was presented by his former students and fellow-citizens with his portrait painted by Sir George Reid.

By birth an inheritor of the Scottish non-juring tradition, he was himself an accomplished theologian ; he had followed with discriminating enthusiasm the whole course of the Oxford movement ; and in the congregation to which he belonged (St. John's Episcopal Church, Aberdeen) he had supported his clergyman, Patrick Cheyne, throughout a prosecution in regard to eucharistic doctrine, which had weighty consequences, for it led to the charge and prosecution of the bishop of Brechin, Alexander Penrose Forbes, and the intervention of Pusey and Keble in defence of that prelate. It took some time to heal the sores occasioned by that controversy.

There was at Aberdeen in the early 'thirties' a group of young men, all of them Aberdeen lawyers, all of them episcopalians, and all of them earnest students of history and antiquities John Hill Burton, Joseph Robertson (1810-1866), and John Stuart (1813-1877). With these Grub associated on equal terms. Like them he contributed to the Aberdeen Magazine (1831-2), and took part in a far more important undertaking, the formation of the Spalding Club. For this club he edited (1840-2), in conjunction with Joseph Robertson, Gordon's History of Scots Affairs, 3 vols. (1853) ; Thomas Innes's History of Scotland, Civil and Ecclesiastical (the Life of Thomas Innes which he contributed to this volume was reprinted in the edition of Innes's Critical Essays, published in the Historians of Scotland series), and (1869) the index volume of the Illustrations of the Antiquities of Aberdeen and Banff. In 1861, his own work, by which he is best known, An Ecclesiastical History of Scotland from the Introduction of Christianity to the Present Time (it closes with the death of Bishop Skinner on 15 April 1857), in four volumes, was published at Edinburgh, and at once stamped him as the foremost authority on the subject in Scotland.

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