One of the best-known episodes in John Erskine's life occurred in 1796, during a debate in the General Assembly over whether the Church of Scotland should participate in the overseas mission movement. A cultivated minister, seeking to discourage missionary activity, delivered an eloquent speech arguing that because Christianity was intimately linked with Western culture it was futile to present the Christian message to peoples of Non-Western cultures, until they had over time become “properly enlightened.” “Philosophy and learning,” he continued, “must in the nature of things take precedence.” Erskine immediately rose in response. “Moderator,” he exclaimed, “Rax [hand] me that Bible.” With Bible in hand he proceeded to demolish the arguments from enlightened philosophy and assert a Christian imperative of mission (G. White, “‘Highly Preposterous’: Origins of Scottish Missions,” Records of the Scottish Church History Society, 19: 2 [1976]: 119–20).

This episode is not included in Jonathan Yeager's biography of Erskine, though it gives a flavor of the man and his times—his forthright nature, commitment to a scriptural Christianity, and fear of God and none other. John Erskine (1721–1803) was a conservative Calvinist minister of the established Church of Scotland, the acknowledged leader of the Popular, or Orthodox, party within the Church from the 1760s, and a warm friend to the North American Protestant colonists. A member of a prominent Scottish landed family, Erksine had trained as a lawyer before coming under strong religious influence during the Cambuslang revival of 1741–1742 and deciding to enter the ministry. In theology and practice, he embraced the authority of the Calvinist Westminster Confession (1647), the legal standard of faith within the Scottish Church. Erskine's family name and his own abilities assured his rise to influence within the Church; by 1758 he had secured a well-endowed Edinburgh parish living. He was by all accounts a warm-hearted and generous man in his personal life. In one popular story, Erskine's wife, frustrated by the loss of so many of his pocket handkerchiefs and suspecting (rightly) that Erskine was allowing himself to be pick-pocketed by Edinburgh's desperate poor, took to sewing his handkerchiefs into his trouser pockets.

In this well-researched biography, the first Erskine biography to appear since that by Sir Henry Moncreiff Wellwood in 1818, Yeager has presented an account of Erkine's life with emphasis on two themes: Erskine as a figure within the moderate or mainstream Enlightenment and Erskine as generous friend to the North American Protestant colonists. First, Yeager seeks to portray Erskine as an Enlightenment thinker. As recent scholarship has highlighted, the majority of those who contributed to the Enlightenment were neither deists nor atheists; rather they combined Christian beliefs with the Enlightenment emphases on the harmonies of nature, the capacities of human reason, the value of toleration, the moderation of the passions, critical approaches in scholarship, and the prospects of social improvement. Yeager believes that Erskine embraced many priorities of the Enlightenment and represented an “enlightened Evangelicalism.”

This is highly questionable. Erskine was, in the Scots term, “thirled” [closely bound] to the Calvinist Westminster Confession of Faith, including the belief in the total depravity of human nature, limited election, and double predestination. He had little confidence in the natural capacities of a depraved humankind and little interest in social progress. Nor did he exhibit the Enlightenment virtue of toleration. He hated John Wesley for his Arminian theology and did all he could to thwart Wesley's evangelistic activity in Scotland. When in 1778, the government proposed a modest relief act for Scotland's tiny and oppressed remnant of Roman Catholics (representing about three per cent of the Scottish population), Erskine launched a series of attacks on Catholicism, in the press and from the pulpit, that contributed to vicious anti-Catholic rioting in Edinburgh. Nor was he an original critical thinker. While Yeager seeks to commend Erskine's “outstanding original thought” (89) and “theological genius” (90), it is telling that of his five theological treatises, three were never published, and the other two received little attention. Erskine was a pawky, old-style Calvinist, who looked back to the early seventeenth century. He was bound to a Westminster Orthodoxy that had broad, popular support in rural Scotland, but that was increasingly out of touch with new movements of thought. While he accepted some Lockean epistemology, Erskine did not share in the Enlightenment's striving for human autonomy, calls for religious tolerance, confidence in human capacities, or sense of exhilaration at the dawning of a new era.

Yeager is on firmer ground in his discussion of Erskine as a friend to the North American Protestants. A keen bibliophile, Erskine used his personal wealth to collect and send large numbers of books, especially works dealing with Orthodox Calvinism, to individual correspondents, such as Jonathan Edwards, or to the college libraries at Princeton, Yale, and Dartmouth. He recognized and encouraged the talent of Jonathan Edwards, and played a key role in ensuring the publication of Edwards's works. During the American War of Independence, he was a vociferous supporter of American claims and a critic of British policies. He viewed the Americans as heirs to the Puritans and the colonies as an ideal Puritan Calvinist society at a time when such an ideal was fading at home amid the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment. What Erskine made of the Constitutional separation of Church and State from the 1790s or the extension of religious toleration in the new American Republic we are not told.

This is a highly sympathetic biography, which offers little critical analysis of its subject. The sections on Erskine's relations with the American colonists are well researched and convincing. The book is weaker on Erskine's activities in Scotland, including his leadership of the Popular party, his opposition to aristocratic and Crown patronage in the appointment of Church of Scotland ministers, his commitment to the established Church of Scotland, or his warm support for overseas missions. Yeager's effort to explore the connections between Enlightenment thought and evangelicalism is commendable. However, his thesis that this particular old-style and intolerant Calvinist—who dismissed much of humankind as “fraudulently sown in God's field by the devil” (97) and who appealed to “natural reason” in order to justify God in damning the heathens whose failure to discover Christian truths without hearing the Gospel was due to “their own negligence or perverseness” (104)—was a “propagator of Moderate Enlightenment thought” (207) is unconvincing, unless the Enlightenment is defined so broadly that the term becomes largely meaningless.