The decision of the Tell Scotland Movement’s leadership to sponsor Billy Graham’s All-Scotland Crusade of 1955 was controversial at the time and has since been considered a turning point in Scottish church life. There was a stark contrast between the declared objectives of the Movement, which advocated local initiative and the primary role of the laity in mission, and the Crusade’s focus on a visiting American evangelist. The availability of previously unconsidered papers enables a detailed reassessment of the motives of the leadership of Tell Scotland 1952–4. The narrow base of the founding group is examined and the contrast between their far-reaching objectives and their leverage in the Church of Scotland highlighted. Their policy of growing the Movement by personal contact and not via the courts of the church is seen as contributing to their institutional weakness when the 1954 General Assembly had to rule on an invitation to Dr Graham. The roles of the key leaders, Revds W.A. Smellie, R.H.W. Falconer, T. Ralph Morton and Tom Allan are examined and the collective responsibility of the group affirmed against a tendency in historiography to focus on the positions of either Allan or George MacLeod.

This paper describes and analyses the financing arrangements underpinning the Free Church of Scotland's programme to build a duplicate national church network in the decade after the Disruption. In hi...

Questions on the human condition, and the fragility of the boundary between human and animal, occupied the minds of early modern theologians. After 1560, when Scotland officially adopted the Reformed faith, early modern Scots were taught that Genesis recorded historical events and that Creation, and the subsequent Fall, had fixed and determined their place in the world. Understandings of what it meant to be human, and of the perceived distinction from, and relationship to, animals, were shaped by discussions of the Old Testament. The Biblical account of Creation and the Fall were by no means a unique concern amongst Reformed theologians but the renewed emphasis on the Old Testament and the concern with sin, understood through an infralapsarian lens, brought such debates into focus in the period. Through discussions of sin and corruption, humans were often portrayed as more beastly than the animals themselves, creating an apparent juxtaposition of human nature as simultaneously superior to but worse than animals. This article will examine these ideas, and their dissemination, considering the role of the Old Testament, the account of Creation and the Fall, and the belief in dominion and the natural law in post-Reformation Scotland.