Thomas Boston (1676-1732) used to be one of the best-known names in evangelical circles, especially in Scotland. George Whitefield may have addressed his thou­sands in the open air each week, but Boston only ever served in two small parishes — Simprin and Ettrick. At Ettrick, Boston bewailed his fate: “My circum­stances are extremely heavy: they seem to have little desire for the gospel.”

Only after almost a decade of gospel preaching did Ettrick begin to respond. Temperamentally, Boston considered himself “naturally bashful, timorous, and much subject to the fear of man”. He lamented this reserve: “My natural bash­fulness and diffidence has often done me much harm. Melancholy is an enemy to gifts and grace, a great friend to unbelief, as I have often found in my experience.” The study of Boston may thus be a partic­ular encouragement for apprehensive pastors who labour in relatively small parishes with many unresponsive persons in the congregations.

Boston viewed preaching in exalted terms: “I saw the preaching of Christ to be the most difficult thing; for that though the whole world is full of won­ders, yet here are depths beyond all.” Above all else, Boston sought to be a preacher. Even as he was dying and unable to preach from his pulpit at Ettrick, Boston gathered his flock together and preached the last two sermons of his earthly life, on 2 and 9 April 1732, from a window in the manse. A preacher had to be earnest about his preaching, or else he would be no preacher. Boston prayed:

'Lord, rather strike me dumb, than suffer me to preach unconcerned for the good of souls; for if dumb, I should murder nei­ther my own soul, nor those of others.' 'The devil,' wrote Boston, 'shames such preachers. He goes about like a roaring lion ...and they ... creep about like a snail.'

Therefore, Boston had much to say about the preacher himself: “A dead man cannot follow any person; a dead preacher cannot follow Christ; there must be a principle of life, spiritual life in him, or else he is naught.” Boston well realized the need for personal holiness. As he put it: “It is hard to play, when the instrument is not in tune.” He had the woeful experi­ence of preaching on certain subjects, only for those very sins to grip him.

Given this need to be holy, Boston wrestled with sin and strove after right­eousness. He lamented: “It is strange that there is scarcely one Sabbath morning wherein I have not deadness to wrestle with, either when I arise, or ere I go out.”

Before deciding to publish his ser­mons, Boston felt beset by temptations to vanity in 1712, and underwent a crisis that led him to seek more earnestly after holiness. He recorded: “I think I never had a more solid and serious sense of the absolute need of Christ for sanctification than this day.”

The preacher must be a Christian before he is a preacher. To cite Boston himself: “It is good for all, especially min­isters, to be emptied of themselves, and to have Christ and the good of souls before their eyes.”

There have been few preachers in Christendom more searching than Thomas Boston. He saw the need to con­vict dead consciences of sin. Hence he warned preachers that “if ever thou be taken up with exercised consciences, have a care that thou do not apply the cure before the wound be deep enough.” He added that “there must be used some legal terrors and law-threatenings to drive the fish into the net”. Noting Isaiah 58:1 (“Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and show my people their transgression”) and Ezekiel 2:7 (“thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear”), Boston warned against the temp­tation of bringing people on little by little by being smooth. He remained convinced that “there is need of a digging deep for a thorough humiliation in the work of con­version, Luke VI. 48”.

Despite his natural timidity, Boston in the pulpit was fearless in seeking to arouse a consciousness of sin. This was because he saw the doctrine of man’s natural state as the foundation of all real religion. Boston asked:

Can a man get a right view of himself as in a state of wrath, and not be pierced with sorrows, terrors, and anx­iety?

He could be pungent indeed:

Do you not hear the law denouncing a curse on you for all you are doing, even for your obedience, your prayers, your tears, your reformation of life ... because, being under the law’s dominion, your best works are not so good as it requires them to be under the pain of the curse?

Boston is at his best in uncovering the human heart. This is seen when he describes the distinguishing marks of the true Christian — something that he regarded as “one of the most difficult parts of preaching”. With ample Scriptural backing, Boston portrays the true Christian as one who worships God in heart, soul, spirit, and body (Rom. 1:9; John 4:24; 1 Cor. 6:20), from a sense of discerning His commandments (Rom. 14:23; Ps. 119:115; John 5:30) out of love (Heb. 6:10; 2 Tim. 1:7) and good-will (Eph. 6:7; Isa. 64:5) for His honour and glory (1 Cor. 10:31) in the Spirit (Eph. 6:18; Jude 20). Boston was too steeped in Scripture to be content to describe a Christian simply as someone who had invited Jesus into his life.

Yet we should not be left with the impression that Boston worked on his congregations in the same way that a hammer works on an anvil. Boston took time to deal with those who possessed an over-scrupulous conscience. In order to know whether one is regenerate, one need not know the precise time of conversion, nor is perfection the mark of a true Christian. Pointing to 1 John 2:13-14, Boston affirmed: “There are saints of sev­eral sizes in Christ’s family.” If someone were to object that his temptations were great, Boston cited Psalm 73:13 to demonstrate the blasphemous temptation that afflicted even the Psalmist. If one were to note one’s strange and unusual afflictions, Boston could point to the example of Job, and to the teaching of 1 Peter 4:12, to show that the regenerate could be called upon to endure great hard­ship.

As searching as Boston could be, espe­cially in calling for rigorous self-examina­tion of the soul, he never lost sight of the need to proclaim Christ freely to the neediest of sinners. He understood the human heart: “I saw it was in vain to attempt to empty the heart of what is its carnal choice, unless I got it filled with something better than what I was to take from it.” The free offer of grace goes out to every man, woman and child: “God excludes none from the benefits of the gospel that will not exclude themselves; it is free to all.” He urged sinners to “come speedily to Jesus Christ: he has cleansed souls as vile as yours”. In short, Boston sought to be fearless in proclaiming both the searching nature of the law of God and the free graciousness of the mercy of God.

In preparing his sermons, Boston wrote them out in full. He regarded that as “a yoke which often since that time I would have been glad to have shaken off, but could not get it done”. While Boston lamented his bondage to this practice, it undoubtedly helped to clarify his thinking and to develop his talent for the memo­rable turn of phrase.

Boston’s preaching was possessed of a certain memorable quality. In his first work, The Art of Man-Fishing, he occasionally overloads his sen­tences and mixes his metaphors. For example, he writes of the unconverted as fish that are unmindful of Satan’s hook:

natural men drink in sin greedily, as the ox drinketh in the water ... They play with it, as the fish with the bait; but, Oh! alas, when they take the serpent in their bosom, they mind not the sting ... Alas! they are poor blinded souls; they see the bait, but not the hook; and therefore it is that they are even seen as it were dancing about the mouth of the pit; therefore rush they on to sin as a horse to the battle, not knowing the hazard.

There are too many images here, and even the most poetic of minds is overtaxed by the fish, oxen, serpents, and horses, in water, in the bosom, about the mouth of the pit, and in battle. As Matthew Henry used to say: “overdoing is undoing.”

Before too long, however, Boston was able to develop his gift for vivid illustra­tions, and a memorable turn of phrase. In describing the proud, Boston declared that “those men are such a spectacle of commiseration, as one would be who had set his palace on fire, and was glorying in a cottage which he had built for himself out of the rubbish, though so very weak, that it could not stand against a storm”. In short, “they that were brought up in scar­let do now embrace dunghills”.

Man in the state of nature is said to be like the eye — it sees many things but never itself. His heart is like an ant’s nest where God need only remove the stone on top to allow Satan to stir it up. In describing the eternity of hell, Boston says that a bird removing a grain of dust every thousand years would eventually remove a moun­tain — but hell would still remain forever.

Succinct summaries are Boston’s specialty. For example, “the sum of our natural religion is, to do good from and for ourselves (John 5:44); the sum of the gospel religion is to do good from and for Christ (Phil. 1:21)”. The act of justifica­tion is set out in a most memorable way: “God the Father takes the pen, dips it in the blood of His Son, crosses the sinner’s accounts, and blots them out of His debt-book.” Union with Christ is described in no less vivid terms:

Christ takes the soul, as one marries a widow under a burden of debt: and so when the creditors come to Christ’s spouse, she carries them to her Husband, confesses the debt, declares she is not able to pay, and lays all upon Him.

In The Crook in the Lot, Boston addressed those who complained about the trials and tribulations of this world: “Will nothing please you but two heavens, one here, another hereafter?” Some, said Boston, wish to go from Delilah’s lap to Abraham’s bosom.

Preaching is learnt by imitation more than anything else. Boston was a preacher who sought to conform to Christ in all things, apply that to himself and to his congregation, and do so in a memorable way. We all would do well to imitate him.