William Leechman was a Scottish minister, theologian and academic.
Background
The son of William Leechman, a farmer of Dolphinton, Lanarkshire, he was educated at the parish school. The father had taken down the quarters of Robert Baillie of Jerviswood, which had been exposed after his execution (24 December 1684) on the tolbooth of Lanark.
Education
In gratitude for this service the Baillie family helped young Leechman to go to the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated 16 April 1724. He studied divinity there under Professor William Hamilton (1669–1732). The family passed the winters at Glasgow, where he attended the lectures of Francis Hutcheson.
Career
In October 1731 he was licensed to preach by the presbytery of Paisley, and in 1736 was ordained minister of Beith in the neighbourhood of Caldwell. He was moderator of a synod at Irvine in 1740, and on 7 April 1741 preached a sermon at Glasgow "on the.. character of a minister of the gospel", which was published, and passed through several editions. At the end of the year was elected professor of divinity at the University of Glasgow by the casting vote of the lord rector, in a closely contested election with William Craig and John MacLaurin also candidates.
He resigned Beith on 3 January 1744 upon his election.
The presbytery of Glasgow refused to enrol him, alleging that he had made heretical statements in a sermon published in 1743 "On the Nature, Reasonableness, and Advantages of Prayer". He was accused of laying too little stress upon the merits of the intercession of the Saviour.
Hume criticised the sermon in a letter to Leechman"s pupil, William Mure, suggesting minute corrections of style, and urging that Leechman really made prayer a mere "rhetorical figure". The synod of Glasgow and Ayr rejected the accusation of the presbytery, and their acquittal was confirmed by the general assembly.
Leechman"s lectures were popular, and he followed the example first set by Hutcheson of using English instead of Latin.
Wodrow gives a long account of them. He refused to publish them. In 1759 he went to Bristol in ill-health and drank the waters at Clifton.
In 1761 he was appointed Principal of the university at Glasgow, but for a time continued to lecture.
He had two paralytic strokes in 1785, and died 3 December in that year.