Of Making Many Books There is No End Recommendation #15

I am frequently searching for books online, and as I do so, I will periodically come across a very rare book. I recently came across a volume of sermons by James Thomson, a well loved Scottish Presbyterian minister of the late 18th and early 19th century. Thomson’s works are very hard to find. They usually run somewhere between $500-1000.00. I recently found the two volumes of his theological discourses on Google Books. These contain 29 sermons. You can find volume 1 here, and volume 2 here.

Early in the eighteenth century the village of Quarrelwood, Kirkmahoe, was one of the main centres of the body in Scotland, and it eventually became its chief seat in Dumfriesshire. In 1743, the Quarrelwood pastor, Mr. John Curtis, took part with three other ministers in constituting the Reformed Presbyterian Church, as the denomination came to be called. The region assigned to the little ecclesiastical capital, Quarrelwood, was a very extensive one, bounded by the Esk on the east, the Urr on the west, by a line from New Galloway to Moffat on the north, and by the Solway on the south. It stretched over between thirty and forty parishes, so that the officiating pastor must have undergone immense toil in ministering to the far-scattered families of his flock, at a time when there were few roads and scarcely a wheeled carriage in the County. Mr. James Thomson, ordained in 1796, was the second minister; and in his day a new church and manse were erected at Quarrelwood, and the congregation multiplied extensively. In course of time it became the nursing-mother of new settlements, there being now seven Reformed Presbyterian congregations in the district, all tracing their origin to the little sanctuary at Quarrelwood.