‘Alright, alright, I’m coming!’ called out William Creech as he scurried through his bookshop next to St Giles’ Cathedral in the Royal Mile. It was his famous weekly breakfast, which he held in a large room above the shop, and the line of ‘Creech’s Levées’ outside was lengthening all the time. Wrestling with the key in the lock, he opened the door to be greeted by cheering and clapping. In they came, one after another: Lord Kames, a high court judge; Lord Woodhouselee, a professor of history who proclaimed that democracy left to itself would fall into dictatorship; Adam Smith, the author of the Wealth of Nations; Professor William Cullen, the chemistry pioneer; Dr Gregory, the famous physician; Henry MacKenzie, the author of The Man of Feeling; and Revd Professor Thomas Reid, the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, who was deep in conversation with Professor Dugald Stewart, who gave the name Athens of the North to Edinburgh during the Enlightenment. Just as Creech was about to close the door, up came Robert Burns with his fellow poet Robert Fergusson, huffing and puffing as they strode up the Royal Mile.
The crowd poured into the room upstairs, eager to be served coffee and breakfast, amidst raucous laughter and mind-bending discussion and debate. It was 1773 and the cream of Edinburgh’s intellectual élite had gathered in ‘Creech’s Land’, as it was called. For hours they would grapple together with weighty subjects, from religion and philosophy, to science, history, poetry and books, to politics and the economy. Creech’s publishing partner, Alexander Kincaid, had left the shop and firm to him when he became Lord Provost. Finding that the leading men of the city gravitated to his bookshop to discuss God, life and the universe, he diverted the discussions to a weekly meeting upstairs, so that he could run his business properly during the week. So many of the literati of the city gathered at the shop, that the locals would call it ‘The Mirror Club’, because Creech had first suggested publishing a journal called The Mirror.
William Creech (1745-1815) was a Presbyterian Christian, who followed in the footsteps of his father, Revd William Creech of Newbattle Parish Church, just outside Edinburgh. Even though his father died when he was a small child, the godly evangelical reputation of his father had a lasting impression on William Creech junior. Even as a child he used to spend hours labouring over sermons. Known and appreciated by the literati of his time, he held his own in debate, wore a cheerful countenance, and never let the philosophy of the day drive him away from his Christian convictions, daily Bible study and morning and evening prayers. He published Robert Burns’ second edition of his poems, with Burns calling him ‘my honoured friend’, and even writing a poem for him, entitled ‘Willie Awa’’ when Creech had to travel to London and was away for months, much to the consternation of his admiring friends.
Although Creech was right in the thick of the Enlightenment set, seeking to be salt and light for Christ there, he has left us the disturbing facts about the downside of this era with its majoring on impractical philosophy, and divergence from sound biblical teaching. The backsliding of Edinburgh’s population into a miry pit of sin between 1763 and 1783 was catalogued by Creech: whisky addiction had gone viral, driving the people into a toxicity of wickedness; cock-fighting and animal-baiting had become popular sports for gamblers; divorce and separation had escalated; the number of brothels had grown by twenty-fold, and street prostitutes by a hundred-fold; an epidemic of house-breaking, theft and burglary had sprouted up, and public executions had multiplied.
William Creech was laid to rest in Greyfriars’ Kirk graveyard in 1815, after being Lord Provost and a successful publisher, being grieved by many. He left us a number of writings, but below is the last part of a poem, which sums up his life:
‘While nature’s circle like a chariot wheel
Rolls beneath their elevated aims,
Makes their fair prospect fairer every hour,
Advancing virtue in a line to bliss,
Virtue which Christian motives best inspire,
And Bliss which Christian schemes alone ensure!’
‘Therefore, he reasoned… in the marketplace daily with those who happened to be there’ (Acts 17:17, NKJV).
Image: William Creech (1745-1815), attributed to William Beechey, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons