In Reformed circles in Scotland today, John Kennedy of Dingwall (1819-1884) is regarded as the greatest champion of the Reformed faith in the Highlands during the latter years of the nineteenth century. If Kennedy was outspoken about the dangers resulting from a superficial presentation of the gospel, he had reason to understand that saving faith can be lacking in a profession of faith made under the most orthodox of ministries. Kennedy himself had only been converted in 1841 while in his second year of academic preparation for the ministry, and after the death of his father, who had exercised a compelling preaching ministry at Killearnan. Licensed to preach soon after the Disruption, Kennedy was settled as pastor of the Free Church of Scotland charge in the county town of Dingwall, in Ross-shire, where he remained for his entire ministry. There he served a congregation of over one thousand, half of whom were Gaelic speaking.

Through the years Kennedy was a stalwart opponent of the drift in Scottish Presbyterianism away from the Westminster Confession, allying himself with Hugh Martin and James Begg to resist erosion of the doctrine of the particular design in Christ’s atoning work, and to contend for the propriety of a cooperative association of church and state to promote the true religion.

The essay here reprinted appeared in 1874 in the wake of an evangelistic campaign by Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey, whose 1873 tour wrought a revolution of sentiment in Scotland. Scottish pastors, wishing to think the best, and inattentive to the new trends of thought and practice, were caught up in the swell of excitement. Though Kennedy was temperamentally disinclined to controversy, he was constrained to raise his voice for a full-orbed proclamation of the biblical gospel.

Kennedy’s words of warning have an undiminished relevance in our generation, when constitutionally sound Presbyterian churches hear voices calling them to a presentation of the gospel which abandons the characteristic traits of a biblical and Reformed piety. Methods of church growth and evangelism, and practices of worship which are alien to the historic Reformed faith, are offered as helps to overcome the offense which sinners feel, and the indifference which they display, toward the Scriptures and a godly life.

The features of modern American revivalism brought to Scotland by Moody are traceable to a man whose influence over evangelistic practice in our time has been immense, the Presbyterian minister Charles G. Finney (1792-1875). For an exceptionally fine critique of Finney’s message and method, Iain H. Murray’s address on Finney at the 1992 Banner of Truth Minister’s Conference is available on tape for $6 postpaid, from Sound Word Associates, P.O. Box 2035, Mall Station, Michigan City, IN 46360.

At Kennedy’s death, his friend C. H. Spurgeon who had journeyed to Dingwall in 1870 to preach at the opening of the Free Church’s new building wrote of him as one “whom I venerated as every inch a man of God. His death was a loss to the Highlands greater than could have befallen by the death of any other hundred men. True as steel and firm as a rock, he was also wonderfully tender and sympathetic.” Further information about Kennedy can be found in Maurice Roberts’ address at the centenary of Kennedy’s death: “Dr John Kennedy—A Memorial Sketch,” Banner of Truth, Issue 251-252, Aug-Sept 1984. Two books in which Kennedy wrote of the history of the Reformed faith in the Highlands have been reprinted in Scotland in recent years: Days of the Fathers in Ross-shire, and The Apostle of the North.