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Among the writings of American Presbyterians at Log College Press, we have several significant historical studies of the Westminster Assembly and its members.
James Reid, Memoirs of the Lives and Writings of Those Eminent Divines, Who Convened in the Famous Assembly at Westminster, in the Seventeenth Century, Vol. 1 (1811) and Vol. 2 (1815)
Thomas Smyth - The History, Character, and Results of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (1844)
Charles Augustus Briggs - The Documentary History of the Westminster Assembly (1880)
William Wirt Henry, Sr. - The Westminster Assembly: The Events Leading Up to It, Personnel of the Body, and Its Method of Work - An Address (1897)
Presbyterian Church in the United States - Memorial Volume of the Westminster Assembly (1897)
William Henry Roberts, ed. - Addresses at the Celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Westminster Assembly (1898)
John Moffatt Mecklin - The Personnel of the Westminster Assembly (1898)
John DeWitt - The Place of the Westminster Assembly in Modern History (1898)
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield - The Making of the Westminster Confession (1901) and The Westminster Assembly and Its Work (1908)
One enduring classic history of the Westminster Assembly was published in 1843 by the Scottish Presbyterian William Maxwell Hetherington. But the first such history published by anyone (so far as this writer knows) was published two years prior - by an American Presbyterian, Archibald Alexander: A History of the Westminster Assembly of Divines (1841).
As far as we know, no history of the Assembly has ever been separately written….The compiler of the following history has now indicated the sources from which he has derived his materials. He puts in no claim to original research: if he deserves any credit, it is merely for collecting and arranging what he found scattered in the authors named. For many years he sought for information on this subject, with but little success. He has found the same complaint of a want of information, and a desire to obtain it, in many persons; especially in young ministers, and candidates for the ministry, which induced him to undertake the labour of collecting, under suitable heads, such information as was accessible to him; and if it should prove unsatisfactory to some, whose knowledge is more extensive, yet he is persuaded that it will supply a desideratum to many, who will be gratified with the particulars which he has been able to collect.
As James I. Helm wrote in a review of Hetherington and Alexander’s works in 1843, “It is somewhat remarkable that two centuries should have elapsed before any separate history of the Westminster Assembly was given to the public” (The Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review vol. 15, no. 4 , October 1843, p. 561).
These studies help to shine a light on a most important time and place in church history. The legacy of the Westminster Assembly and the standards it produced and the men who contributed so much to the well-being of the Church constitute a story that was overdue for the telling in 1841, and remains a story worth getting to know here in the 21st century. Check out these fascinating studies and learn more about the Westminster Assembly and its rich spiritual legacy.
