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Author: Young, John

Biography:

YOUNG, John (1805-81: ancestry.co.uk)

He was born on 1 Nov. 1805 and baptised on 24 Jan. 1806 at St. Cuthbert’s, Edinburgh, the son of William Young, a stonemason, and his wife Helen Robertson, who had married on 23 Sept. 1804 at Mid Calder, West Lothian. He was educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh, and at the University of Edinburgh, where he won prizes in rhetoric and moral philosophy and was awarded an LLD on 3 Mar. 1830. He also studied theology for five sessions at the United Secession Church. He was licensed in 1827 and sent by the synod to be minister at the Scottish Presbyterian Albion Chapel, Moorfields, London (1828-49), where he became part of a loose-knit group of famous non-conformist Evangelicals: John Clayton (Poultry), Caleb Morris (Fetter Lane), James Bennett (Silver Street), and Thomas Binney (Weigh-House, Eastcheap). He married Elizabeth Waugh on 29 Jan. 1833 at St. Marylebone, Westminster. They had four sons and two daughters. He was active in the Christian Instruction Society and an advocate of open-air preaching, speaking at Farringdon Market and Islington Green in addition to his Sunday services at chapel. In Dec. 1849 he resigned and took the family to Heidelberg for three years, partly for his own theological study but also to supervise his sons’ education. On returning to England, they moved to 40 Upper Park Road, Haverstock Hill, northwest London, where his wife, Elizabeth, died on 15 Nov. 1873. Thereafter he lived a somewhat reclusive life and also died there, on 24 Feb. 1881. He was buried at Abney Park Cemetery and left an estate of under £1500 to his surviving children. His Dangers and Doings in a Soldier’s Life(1845) lists as his twenty works, including the volumes listed here and Songs for the Sanctuary (1831), a collection of hymns selected and original. Some works, such as The Affectionate African and Tales of My Father, appear not to have survived. His later theological works, The Creator and the Creation How Related (1857, rev. 1870), The Christ of History (1855, 3rd ed. 1861), and The Province of Reason (1860) exhibit a fusion of Scottish, Oxford, and German theology and were highly regarded in their day. (ancestry.co.uk 29 Mar. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 29 Mar. 2023; Scotland’s People; Nonconformist 3 Mar. 1881; Christian World 3 Mar. 1881) AA

 

Books written (2):

London: Houlston, Palmer, 1830