17. ‘Incomparable Thomas Goodwin’
17
‘Incomparable Thomas Goodwin’
It was in my third year at the University [of Aberdeen during the winter of 1860-1861] that I first became acquainted with Thomas Goodwin. On opening the Witness newspaper one propitious morning my eye fell on the announcement of a new edition of Thomas Goodwin’s Works. I entered my name at once as a subscriber to the series, and not long after the first volume of Goodwin’s Works came into my hands. And I will here say with simple truth that his Works have never been out of my hands down to this day. In those far-off years1 I read my Goodwin every Sabbath morning and every Sabbath night. Goodwin was my every Sabbath day meat and my every Sabbath day drink. And during my succeeding years as a student, and as a young minister, I carried about a volume of Goodwin with me wherever I went. I read him in railway carriages and on steamboats. I read him at home and abroad. I read him on my holidays among the Scottish Grampians and among the Swiss Alps. I carried his volumes about with me till they fell out of their original cloth binding, and till I got my bookbinder to put them into his best morocco. I have read no other author so much and so often. And I continue to read him to this day, as if I had never read him before.…
I frankly confess to you that I sometimes say to myself that I must surely be all wrong in my estimate of Goodwin’s worth,… But when I am led to open Goodwin again all my old love for him returns to me, and all my old indebtedness and devotion to him, till I give myself up again to his incomparable power and incomparable sweetness as an expounder of Paul and as a preacher of Jesus Christ.…
Take…the following texts and topics and themes as so many illustrations of Goodwin’s wealthy and suggestive mind:
• “God is glorified only by being made known.”
• “The one great end of Christ’s preaching was to reveal the Father.”
• “Faith answers to the whole of Christ, and Christ answers to the whole of faith.”
• “Eye not the promises, but the Promiser.”
• “Holy Scripture is not abhorrent of the metaphor of purchase in the work of Christ.”
• “Our greatest sins are those of the mind.”
• “Their indwelling sin is by far the greatest misery of the regenerate.”
• “Self is the most abominable principle that ever was.”
• “The conscience is what the snout is in a bear, a tender part to take him by.”2
• “We are to seek to have affections suitable to our knowledge.”
• “Hell fire is not culinary fire.”
• “Good swimmers seek out deep waters.”
• “Judas heard all of Christ’s sermons.”
• “God had only one Son, and he made him a Minister.”
Do not go away supposing or saying that I am demanding that any of you shall feed your mind and feast your heart on Thomas Goodwin as I have done. All I have said today but leads me up to say this with some experience and with some authority, I hope. Find out the food and the relish convenient for your own mind and heart, and then feed continually upon it. Amid the immense intellectual and spiritual riches of our biblical and theological and experimental and autobiographical literature, find out some first-class authors who shall be to you something of what Paul was to Luther, and Luther to Bunyan, and Calvin to [William] Cunningham, and Athanasius to Newman, and William Guthrie to John Owen, and Augustine to Dean Trench, and Thomas Shepard to Jonathan Edwards, and Butler and Edwards to Chalmers, and Foster and Faber to Dods.3 And then study with all your might to put the theology of Paul and Luther and the Puritans into the written English of [Richard] Hooker and Newman, or into the spoken English of [F. W.] Robertson and [C. H.] Spurgeon.4 And thus studying, and thus preaching, and thus living, you will both save yourselves and them that hear you.
*From Thirteen Appreciations (New York: Fleming H. Revell Co., [1913]), 157-59, 173-74. The title for this selection is taken from Bible Characters: Our Lord’s Characters (Edinburgh/London: Oliphants, n.d.), 61.
1. Whyte was making these comments in an address to the students of New College, Edinburgh, more than fifty years later.
2. This one saying of Goodwin is cited by Clarence E. Macartney, “Foreword” in Ralph G. Turnbull, ed., The Treasury of Alexander Whyte (Westwood, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1953), 10.
3. William Cunningham (1805-1861) was one of Scotland’s most distinguished Reformed theologians in the nineteenth century. For Whyte’s appraisal of Cunningham, see his Former Principals of New College, Edinburgh (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), 17-26. John Owen (1616-1683), called the “Calvin of England” in his own day, was an important and prolific Puritan theologian. R.C. Trench (1807-1886), Archbishop of Dublin, was a noted philologist and New Testament scholar. Joseph Butler (1692-1752), Bishop of Durham, is best remembered for his Analogy of Religion (1736), a famous defense of Christianity against certain forms of eighteenth-century Deism. For a study by Whyte of Butler, see Bishop Butler: an Appreciation (Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson & Ferrier, 1903).
Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847) has been well described as Scotland’s “greatest nineteenth-century churchman” [A. C. Cheyne, “Chalmers, Thomas” in Nigel M. de S. Cameron et al., eds., Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 158]. He was the key leader in the Disruption of 1843 that led to the formation of Whyte’s denomination, the Free Church of Scotland.
F.W. Faber (1814-1863) was raised a Calvinist, but through the influence of John Henry Newman he eventually became a Roman Catholic. He was the author of a number of hymns and books dealing with spirituality. Marcus Dods (1834-1909) was a Presbyterian New Testament scholar, who had definite liberal tendencies.
4. Richard Hooker (c. 1554-1600) was an accomplished Elizabethan divine and advocate of Anglicanism. F. W. Robertson (1816-1853) was a well-known preacher in Brighton, England, whose sermons had a great influence among the working classes. C. H. Spurgeon (1834-1892) was the most important Baptist preacher of the Victorian era. His sermons are still widely read and appreciated.