William Lindsay Alexander

[1] He was educated at Leith High School then the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh, where he gained a lasting reputation for classical scholarship.

[citation needed] He deliberately put aside the ambition to become a pulpit orator in favour of the practice of biblical exposition, which he invested with charm and impressiveness.

[2] Alexander took an active part in the "voluntary" controversy which ended in the Disruption of 1843, but he also maintained broad and catholic views of the spiritual relations between different sections of the Christian church.

[5] He published also: memoirs of John Watson, minister at Musselburgh (1846), Ralph Wardlaw (1856), and William Alexander, his father (1867); expositions of Deuteronomy (Pulpit Commentary, 1882) and Zechariah (1885); and translations of Gustav Billroth on Corinthians (1837), Heinrich Andreas Christoph Havernick's Introduction to the Old Testament (1852), and Isaak August Dorner's History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, vol.

[5] In 1861 Alexander undertook the editorship of the third edition of John Kitto's Biblical Encyclopaedia, with the understanding that the whole work should be revised and brought up to date.

To the Encyclopædia Britannica (Eighth edition) he contributed several articles on topics of theology and philosophy (the publisher Adam Black was a member of his congregation).