[1] Thomas M'Crie (called the Elder to avoid confusion with his son "the Younger") was a Scottish seceding divine and ecclesiastical historian.

He, (the Elder) was himself the eldest son of Thomas McCrie, a substantial linen-weaver, by his first wife Mary (Hood), was born at Duns, Berwickshire, in November 1772.

To qualify himself for the ministry, he studied divinity under Archibald Bruce of Whitburn, Linlithgowshire, professor of theology to the General Associate Synod (anti-burgher).

[3] McCrie was drawn by this conflict about the first principles of ecclesiastical theory to a thorough and searching study of Scottish church history, in its organic connection with the national life, and with the general development of protestant civilisation.

The first fruit of his labour was the life of Knox, finished in November 1811, Its breadth of treatment was something new in ecclesiastical biography.

The post-Reformation church history of Scotland he did not treat with the same fulness: his life of Alexander Henderson, in the 'Christian Instructor,' vol.

Later he broke new ground in his histories of the Italian (1827) and Spanish (1829) movements of evangelical and free opinion at the era of the Reformation; which nothing is more admirable than the fairness of his dealing with schools of thought very different from his own.

'His literary genius,' says Professor Lorimer, "was neither wholly historical nor wholly biographical, but found congenial employment in biographical history or historical biography, buying equal delight in the personal traits and minute facts appropriate to the one, and in the broad views and profound principles characteristic of the other.

[3] On 3 February 1813 the Edinburgh University made him D.D., a degree often conferred on English nonconformists, but never before on a Scottish dissenter.

[3] The chief of them was an Account of the concluding part of the Life and the Death of that illustrious man, John Knox, the most faithful Restorer of the Church of Scotland, being a translation from the work of Principal Smeton.

The journal in which they appeared was of limited circulation, and its literary merits were little appreciated so that these admirable articles were scarcely known beyond the small circle of subscribers to the Christian Magazine, most of whom were Seceders.