Friday, 13 October 2023

The Houston-Davidson Debate - REVISITED

In 1896 a Bible Student named Charles Houston had a public debate with a Church of God minister Donald Davidson in the North Eastern tip of Scotland. It received considerable publicity in two local newspapers at the time and was also written up in Zion’s Watch Tower, from where the information was first obtained. A decade or more ago I was moved to investigate further. Nothing from these newspapers was online at the time, and the only copies to have probably survived were in the local library. Contacting them, I found a very helpful staff, who – armed with the information I could send them – did a detailed search of the papers over a lengthy period. They kindly extracted all the references they could find on Houston’s activities and regularly sent me scans from the paper.

At the time my wife had embarked on a night school course connected with our vocation some miles away, so I would take her each week and then sit in the car with my laptop and transcribe what the library sent. As a trained touch-typist I could do this very quickly and in quite a short space of time a book of over one hundred large pages was produced.

Recent interest elsewhere had caused me to resurrect this project, and any curious may check it out on the Lulu platform, using the search term Houston-Davidson Debate. It is available in two formats. The most recent is a print edition from 2020 (below) which can be purchased.

For those who prefer an electronic format, the version produced in 2013 is still up on Lulu and can be downloaded free of charge.

For those who only want an overview and not a blow by blow account of the story, some key features were on this blog some time ago. Just use the search term Houston and you will immediately find them.

Hence the title of this article – REVISITED.

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