Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Lindsay, Thomas Martin
LINDSAY, THOMAS MARTIN (1843–1914), historian, the eldest son of Alexander Lindsay, by his wife, Susan Irvine Martin, was born 18 October 1843 at Lesmahagow, Lanarkshire, where his father was minister of the Relief church. He was educated at the universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. At the latter, which he entered in 1861, his unusually brilliant achievement in the philosophical classes was crowned by the Ferguson scholarship and the Shaw fellowship, both open to graduates of any of the Scottish universities. He became assistant to Professor Alexander Campbell Fraser [q.v.], but abandoned the career of a university teacher in order to study for the ministry of the Free Church of Scotland. After completing his course at New College, Edinburgh (1869), he acted as assistant to the minister of St. George's Free church, Edinburgh.
In 1872, the general assembly of the Free Church elected Lindsay to the chair of church history in its theological college at Glasgow, to the duties of which were added, in 1902, those of principal of the college. This appointment diverted his studies from philosophy to history, and his translation of Ueberweg's Logic (1871), to which he appended some original dissertations, remained his only philosophical publication. He was at once recognized as an able and inspiring historical teacher, but his zeal for social work, and especially for foreign missions, at first restricted his literary output, though he found time for wide and varied reading. He reorganized the administration of the important missions supported by his Church, acquiring an acknowledged mastery of their complicated financial arrangements, and he was convener of the foreign missions committee from 1886 to 1900. He visited the mission fields in Syria and spent a year in India. Apart from brief but well-constructed text-books on the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Reformation, the literary product of his earlier professional years is to be found in his articles (including Christianity) in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1875–1888). The contributions of his friend, William Robertson Smith [q.v.], to the Encyclopædia led to the most famous heresy prosecution of recent years, and in the courts of the Free Church Lindsay defended Smith with no less courage than ability (1877–1881).
Lindsay's first historical work which attracted widespread attention was his book on Luther and the German Reformation, published in 1900. It was followed by his remarkable chapter on Luther in the second volume of the Cambridge Modern History (1903), and, in 1906–1907, by his largest and most important book, A History of the Reformation in Europe. He intended this work to be the description of ‘a great religious movement amid its social environment’, and he broke fresh ground in his investigations into popular and family religious life in Germany in the decades immediately preceding the Reformation, and in his exposition of ‘the continuity in the religious life of the period’. This insistence upon the significance of the records of social and domestic life was Lindsay's characteristic approach to any period of history, and it found expression in his collection of caricatures and illustrations of costume. His book on the Reformation added to its learning and candour a full-blooded humanity which makes it fascinating reading, and it is much the most important Scottish contribution to European history since the works of Robertson.
While Lindsay will be best remembered as an historian of the Reformation, the literary activity of his later life, when he prepared for the press the products of many years of reading and thinking, is illustrated by his Cunningham lectures on The Church and the Ministry in the Early Centuries (1903), by chapters in the first volume (1911) of the Cambridge Medieval History (The Triumph of Christianity), and in the third volume (1909) of the Cambridge History of English Literature (Englishmen and the Classical Renascence), and by his estimate of the personality and the achievement of George Buchanan in Glasgow Quatercentenary Studies (1906). These are marked by sureness of touch, width of interest and sympathy, and clearness of exposition. He wrote vigorously and often picturesquely, and he had a remarkable power of visualizing both men and things.
Throughout his life, Lindsay was deeply interested in social problems. He organized the efforts of his students in insufficiently equipped Glasgow parishes, he took part in the crofter agitation in the West Highlands and islands, associated with the early political career of Joseph Chamberlain, and he was the friend of such labour leaders as Ben Tillett, Tom Mann, and Cunninghame Graham. He married in 1872 Anna, elder daughter of A. Colquhoun-Stirling-Murray Dunlop, of Edinbarnet and Corsock, formerly M.P. for Greenock, by whom he had three sons and two daughters; and he shared his wife's enthusiasm for the education of women. His advice was sought by many religious and social workers, who relied upon his sympathy and his robust and penetrating common sense. He died 6 December 1914. A portrait by Fiddes Watt is in the Glasgow United Free Church college.
[Glasgow Herald, 8 December 1914; Janet Ross, The Fourth Generation, 1912; personal information.]