Works Author:Thomas M'Crie Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. 1574—1580. Hitherto we have considered Melville chiefly as a literary character : we must now contemplate him in a different light. His immedi... more »ate object in returning to Scotland was to assist in the revival of its literature, and not to take part in the management of its public affairs. But he did not think that the attention which he was called on to give to the former necessarily required that he should be altogether indifferent to the latter. He had embraced an academical life from choice ; and the situation in which he was placed afforded sufficient gratification to his taste, and ample employment to his time and talents. But partial as he was to literary pursuits, he was not a mere academic, whose ideas are all confined within the cloistered walls of his college. He was a citizen as well as a man of letters. From constitution and from education he felt a lively interest in the welfare of his native country, and of his native church, to whose bosom he had returned after a long absence, and to whose benefit he had consecrated his gifts and his labours. His right to take a share in ecclesiastical managements did not rest merely on his personal gifts, or on the common interest which all the members of a society have in its welfare. He was officially connected with the Church of Scotland. During the three last years of his residence in Glasgow he officiated as minister of the church of Govan j1 but although this was the only period of his life in which he acted as the pastor of a particular congregation, yet he all along held a public situation in the church as a professor of divinity. Those who taught theology in colleges were considered as belonging to the order of doctors, and under this name were recognised as ecclesiastical office-bearers from the beginn...« less