Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Paxton, George
PAXTON, GEORGE (1762–1837), Scottish secession divine, born 2 April 1762, at Dalgourie, a hamlet in the parish of Bolton, East Lothian, was eldest son of William Paxton, a joiner or house carpenter, and his wife, Jean Milne. Soon after George's birth his parents removed first to Melrose, and thence to Makerstoun, near Kelso and the Tweed. The picturesqueness of the place Paxton portrays in his poem ‘The Villager.’ The neighbouring laird, Sir Hay McDougal, colonel of the Scots Greys, became interested in the family, and young Paxton was educated under his eye at the parish school of Makerstoun. He subsequently went to Kelso, learning Latin and Greek, and, after a short experience as a carpenter, entered Edinburgh University, but left without a degree; went to Alloa in 1784 to study divinity under William Moncrieff, and ‘became a firm seceder.’
On 17 March 1788 he was licensed to preach by the associate presbytery of Edinburgh, and his eloquence was at once recognised. He received calls from three churches almost simultaneously, viz., Greenlaw, Craigend, and the united congregations of Kilmaurs and Stewarton. By decision of the synod he was ordained to the last-named congregations 12 Aug. 1789, and took up his abode at Stewarton.
After a few years the two congregations, at the advice of Paxton, separated, and Kilmaurs was assigned to him. Owing to a hepatic malady, he was soon forced to resign pastoral duty for seven years, and on his recovery the general associate synod elected him professor of divinity in 1807. He removed to Edinburgh, but disagreements with the majority of his co-religionists on the subject of the union between the anti-burgher and the burgher synods led him to resign his professorship and to his withdrawal from the associate synod in 1820 [see McCrie, Thomas, D.D.]. He thereupon became pastor to a body of sympathisers who seceded with him, in a vacant chapel adjacent to the Grassmarket under Castle Hill. A new church was afterwards built in Infirmary Street, which his eloquence soon filled, and he and his congregation effected a union with the constitutional presbytery of seceders to which Dr. McCrie belonged, and thus formed the new connection styled the Associate Synod of Original Seceders. Paxton was chosen to the professorship of divinity in the united body, but still exercised his function as pastor. Before entering the new connection he had espoused the cause of national establishments in religion, and, when the question began to be heavily debated, continued to defend them. Some time after he was made honorary D.D. of St. Andrews University. He died on 9 April 1837, and was buried in the West Kirk burying-ground. In 1790 Paxton married Elizabeth Armstrong (d. 1800), a daughter of a manufacturer in Kelso. By her he had two sons and three daughters (cf. Villager, p. 301).
Paxton's only surviving son, George, practised medicine in India, and acquired considerable reputation. Paxton's second wife, Margaret Johnstone, daughter of a farmer in Berwick, survived him. A portrait of Paxton, in oils, became the property of the Rev. W. Macleod, at one time minister of Paxton's church in Edinburgh.
Besides two sermons, Paxton wrote: 1. ‘An Inquiry into the Obligation of Religious Covenants upon Posterity,’ 1801, Edinburgh. 2. ‘Letters to the Rev. W. Taylor on Healing the Divisions in our Church,’ 1802. 3. ‘The Villager, and other Poems,’ Edinburgh, 1813. 4. ‘Illustrations of the Holy Scriptures in Three Parts: (1) from the Geography of the East, (2) from the Natural History of the East, (3) from the Customs of Ancient and Modern Nations,’ Edinburgh, 1819, 2 vols.; 3rd edit. Edinburgh, 4 vols. 1841–3. 5. ‘The Sin and Danger of circulating the Apocrypha in connexion with the Holy Scriptures, with a brief statement of what is known concerning the Authors of the Apocryphal Books,’ Edinburgh, 1828, 2nd edit.
[Brief Memoir by the Rev. John Mitchell, D.D., Glasgow, prefixed to vol. i. of the 1843 edition of the Bible Illustrations; Colburn's Biogr. Dict. of Living Authors, 1816; Reuss's Das gelehrte England; Autobiographical Memoranda in Paxton's Poems; information kindly furnished by the Rev. W. Macleod.]