BOSTON, Tnomss, a Scottish divine, once extensively popular, was b. of poor parents at Dunse. Berwickshire, Mar. 7, 1676. As early as his 12th year he was concerned about the state of his soul, and while only a boy at the grammar school, lie formed a society of three for religious conference and social prayer. After a hard struggle, lie succeeded in entering Edinburgh university in 1691. Ile received license as a preacher in 1697, and was greatly appreciated by the serious portion of the community; but his uncompromising character prevented him from receiving a clerical charge for two ye/as. Ile was then ordained minister of Simprin, and in 1707 was translated to Ettriek, where he died on the 20th May, 1782. Of his voluminous works, the best known, but not the most agreeable, is the l'inn:foid State, published in 1720. ft discourses of man's paradis aical his ruin by the fall, his begun regeneration on earth, and consummate bliss or woe hereafter. An excellent little treatise of B.'s is entitled The Crook in the Lot. As a pastor, B. was eminently laborious, and deservedly popular. In the ecclesiastical courts he distinguished himself by his zeal in defense of the church's independence, and in the controversy regarding the Marrow of Modern Divinity (which was objected to as being too free in its offers of salvation), be was one of the ten ministers who declared their approval of that work. See Mannow CoNTnovEnsv. As a theologian. B. is per
haps the most " representative man" in the whole list of Scottish divines. His language, sentiments. and peculiar modes of expressing the peculiarities of Calvinistic psychology, have colored the style of Scottish preaching more than any other writer of the same school has done. Although often displaying what we should now call narrowness and ignorance, B. exhibits also flashes of insight and beauty, quaint felicities of diction—as, for instance, when, in The Crook in the Ira, he warns the profligate against the possibility of a "leap out of Delilah's lap into Abraham's bosom"—and an occasional shrewdness of thought, which arc even yet worth studying. B.'s autobiography used to be a great favorite with the Scottish peasantry.