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bookslover · #19 (**permalink**) 03-01-2007, 10:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by armourbearer

The Whyte and Macpherson volumes were part of the Handbooks for Bible Class series, completed mostly by Free Church ministers and professors who were more sympathetic to the critical movement which was apace at the back end of the 19th century.

I remember reading Whyte's commentary a couple of years ago and being impressed with the breadth and depth of his reading. I don't remember there being anything doctrinally suspect in it.

Full title: A Commentary on the Shorter Catechism by Alexander Whyte (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1882).

An excerpt (from page 137):

The honouring of our parents comes in the order of the commandments after the honouring and worship of God; but in the order of nature, and in our actual lives, the fifth commandment is the first fulfilled. A child's father is more than a father to him; his father is both his father and his god. A little child cannot rise above his father. It is impiety, to him, to think that there can be anywhere anyone greater or better than his own greatest and best of fathers. To every child, his father is the man of men. There is nothing he cannot do. There is no valour, no nobleness, no resources, no wisdom with which he is not clothed. The pious heart which will afterwards rise to everlasting adoration and love of its Father in heaven, for a long time knows Him not, and feels no need of Him. What child cares for more than just to have his father ever near him to love and worship? And, in all this, "earthly fathers learn their craft from God." For God, for a time, clothes every father among us with His own attributes, and prerogatives, and dues. The divine throne, the divine sceptre, the divine sword, are immediately made over to the house of every man into whose keeping and care a little child is committed.

I think this paragraph is especially poignant in that Whyte grew up in a fatherless home.