Select Sermons of Zachary Boyd

Scottish Text Society-1989. hb. 48+317pp.

A selection from both the published and the unpublished sermons of this seventeenth-century divine. Boyd’s writings afford valuable insights into both Protestant spirituality and Protestant politics in the wake of the National Covenant of 1638. They also provide splendid illustration of the development in Scots of the Protestant plain style: “The most part of gods children are like the psalmists mariners. They reele to and fro and stagger like drunken men. But when all their cunning is gone, then they crye unto the Lord in their trouble [Ps 107; 28]”.

Zachary Boyd, 1585-1653 was minister of the Barony Parish, Glasgow. He was rector and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Glasgow and friend and colleague of Robert Baillie, Patrick Gillespie, David Dickson etc. He was the Cousin of Robert Boyd of Trochrigg. His widow would go on to marry James Durham.