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Last year we announced the addition of two Reformed Presbyterian catechisms to this site, one by William Louis Roberts (1853), and one by George Alexander Edgar (1912). This week we have added two more by ministers of the Reformed Presbyterian (Covenanter) Church of North America (RPCNA).
The first is a 1923 pamphlet by Owen Foster Thompson titled Scotland Through Her Character Windows: A Catechetical Exposition of Covenanter History (1923). It is a remarkable work which covers in 54 pages the history of the Covenanters from the time of the Reformation to their establishment in America. It concludes with James Hislop’s famous poem “The Cameronian’s Dream.”
The next is an undated pamphlet, produced by the joint collaboration of James Melville Coleman, David Raymond Taggart and Owen F. Thompson, titled A Catechism for Covenanter Children. With the note that this is intended to serve as preparation, not a substitute, for the Westminster Shorter Catechism, these men authored a catechism for the young which covers both doctrine and church history.
Presbyterians have long held that there is great value both in the use of catechetical teaching and in the knowledge of church history. These Covenanter catechisms employ the question-and-answer format to install a knowledge of their own particular historical background and distinctive doctrines for the young and old. The three co-authors of the latter work, borrowing from Hebrews 12:11, tell us that:
"Training always seems for the time to be a thing of pain, not of joy; but those who are trained reap the fruit of it afterwards in the peace of an upright life."