As Open as Possible

This chapter draws on recent scholarship on the architect Alexander Thomson, and more briefly on the ecologist Patrick Geddes and the Liberal Young Scots Society, to examine the public significance of churchgoing in the modern history of Scottish theology and society. It asks whether it is possible to speak of a Presbyterian modernity during Scotland’s long nineteenth century by considering the public lives of these lay members of the dissenting Presbyterian churches in the Victorian and Edwardian era who transposed the theological ideas of their ecclesial milieu into the urban buildings, intellectual climate, and liberal politics of a modern industrial society.