Thomas M'Crie the Elder

Thomas M'Crie (November 1772 – 5 August 1835) was a Scottish historian, writer, and preacher born in the town of Duns in November 1772.

Thomas M'Crie was born in Duns, the eldest of a family of four sons and three daughters. His father was a manufacturer and merchant in Duns, and lived to witness the literary celebrity of his son, as his death did not occur until 1828. Thomas was educated at the High School in Edinburgh.

He was nursed in the class of Secession called "Anti-burghers" during the time when it still retained much of the primitive earnestness and simplicity of the old days of the covenant. Upon being sent to the parish school, young M'Crie soon became not only an apt scholar, but distinguished for applying the habits of hard work in which he would later employ in his historical and antiquarian research. This progress, however, was somewhat alarming to his cautious father, who saw no reason for impoverishing a whole family to make his first-born a finished scholar. Had these paternal purposes been carried out, perhaps the future biographer of John Knox and Andrew Melville would have become nothing better than a thriving Berwickshire store-keeper, or a prosperous mercantile adventurer in London. But kind relatives interposed, and the boy was allowed to follow his original bent. This he did so effectually that before he had reached the age of fifteen, he was himself able to become a teacher in two country schools successively.

At the age of 16, Thomas M'Crie enrolled as a student in the University of Edinburgh. His favourite studies at the university were those allied with ethics, philology, and history. In this way his course went on from year to year, his studies being frequently alternated with the laborious work of a schoolmaster, but his mind exhibiting on every occasion a happy combination of student-like diligence. In September 1795, he was licensed to be a preacher by the Associate Presbytery of Kelso; and in this capacity his first public attempts were so acceptable that, little more than a month after being licensed, he received a call from the Associate congregation in Potter Row, Edinburgh, to become their second minister.

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