Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Halyburton

Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Halyburton (published in 1714, after his early death) is the spiritual autobiography of a Scottish Presbyterian minister and divinity professor, drawn largely from his private diary and never meant for publication.

Halyburton recounts his youthful wrestling with deism and religious doubt and his return to the evangelical Reformed faith of his Covenanter father, followed by his ministry at Ceres in Fife and his appointment as Professor of Divinity at St Andrews.

Long treasured in Reformed and evangelical circles — and admired by John Wesley and George Whitefield alike — it is a classic account of doubt overcome by a settled, experiential faith.

Written in English, this public-domain memoir needs no translation; we offer a clean, readable edition, and the original is freely available online.

This is a modern reading edition of the Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Halyburton. Thomas Halyburton (1674–1712) was a Scottish minister and, at the end of his short life, Professor of Divinity at St Andrews. He wrote this account of himself for his own children, and it was published three years after he died, with a preface by Isaac Watts. Both that preface and the short life prefixed to it are included here; everything after them is Halyburton's own.

It is a memoir of doubt before it is a memoir of faith. He had read the deists — Herbert, Blount, the others whose arguments were the common currency of his student years — and for a long time he could not answer them. He describes years in which he believed himself lost, and he describes them without any flattery of himself. He died more than three centuries ago, so the work has been in the public domain everywhere since long before copyright took its modern form.

A note on what we changed. We set this edition from the Internet Archive's scan of an early printing and used two later ones, of 1825 and 1849, as witnesses. Where our scan had destroyed a word and one of the others had not, we took that printing's reading — fifty-three times, each recorded with the words on either side of it, so the claim can be checked. We did not guess at any of them.

The Internet Archive prints its own confidence into any page it doubts, and it says of thirteen pages here that they are under thirty per cent accurate — three of them nought. Where the readable pages on either side let us find the same passage in the 1849 printing with no ambiguity, we took the whole page from there. Five pages were recovered that way. Where they did not, we left the page as it stands rather than substitute a passage we could not place exactly.

One chapter heading did not survive. The third chapter of Part II falls on one of those ruined pages, and its heading is gone; its text runs on inside the chapter before it. We have not invented a heading to cover the join.

The rest was mechanical, and every rule is written down: the page numbers and running heads, which in this scan are welded to the first word of a paragraph; the words broken at the end of a line; the quotation marks, which this printing sets at the head of every line of a long quotation and which read as a stammer once the lines are joined.

What we did not change. We did not rewrite a sentence or modernise a spelling. Halyburton's Scots English is his own. The free scan is linked from this book's page.