Gib, Adam

, a Scotch divine of considerable talents and zeal, and one of the founders of the Secession church in Scotland, (See Erskine, Ebenezer, and Ralph), and the leader of that division of the seceders called the Antiburghers, was born in Perthshire, in 1713, and was educated at the university of Edinburgh. Soon after 1730, violent disputes occurring in the general assembly of the church of Scotland, respecting the law of patronage, Mr. Gib was among the keenest opponents of private church patronage, and in 1733 was with three others dismissed from his pastoral charge. These afterwards formed congregations of their own, to one of which, at Edinburgh, Mr. Gib was ordained, in April 1741. This congregation gradually increased, and with others of the same kind, was in a flourishing state, when in 1746 a schism took place among them respecting the swearing of the oaths of burgesses, and from this time the secession church was divided into two parties, called burghers and antiburghers, and Mr. Gib was considered as the ablest advocate for the latter. In 1774 he published “A display of the Secession testimony,” 2 vols. 8vo, and in 1786 his “Sacred Contemplations,” at the end of which was an “Essay on Liberty and Necessity,” in answer to lord Kames’s Essay on that subject. Mr. Gib died at Edinburgh, June 18, 1788, and was buried in the Grey-friars church-yard, where art elegant monument has been erected to his memory, at the expence of his congregation, among whom he had unweariedly laboured for the long period of forty-seven years. ¹