Æt. 43. ANDREW MORGAN AND THE DOVETON COLLEGE. III

heart interest enough to unite in a plausible charge against our Church. Out here we have felt at one with you from the first-I mean, our Free Church members. When your article appeared in the North British, some of our ultra-liberals here at once took it up, and turned it into an argument against our Church, and it may amuse you to learn that I felt myself obliged, even here, on the banks of the Ganges, to vindicate our Free Church cause from public aspersion by vindicating Dr. Cunningham and his article in the North British Review, yet so it was. As a curiosity I thought of sending you some of the papers; but remembering how full your hands were, I refrained. How strangely tangled and ramifying has the web of human affairs become.

"Some time ago I hinted at a professorship of Missions and Education in your new college, but have not seen any symptom of a movement towards it. I have been surprised that an object so glorious should not have been contemplated in such a college. A missionary and educational professorship would indeed be a crown of glory to it."

At last the man was found in the Rev. Andrew Morgan, who had made Auchterarder almost as famous by his school as the Disruption controversy had done. From February 1849 to December 1854 he gave his life for the elevation of the Eurasians and resident Europeans of India, in Bengal and Madras, till he died of overwork. Dr. Duff rejoiced in his success. Mr. Morgan stamped his manly God-fearing nature on a generation of youths who still, many of them high in the Indian services, call him blessed.

Dr. Duff thus concluded one of his importunate letters to Dr. Cunningham about the Rector: "Oh what a loss has been sustained in the death of Dr. Chalmers! It is too great for utterance."

CHAPTER XIX.

1849-1850.

DEATH OF DR. CHALMERS.—TOUR THROUGH SOUTH INDIA.-HOME BY THE GANGES AND INDUS.

The Death of Dr. Chalmers.-Dr. Duff on his Career.-A Missionary to the Heathen rather than a Divinity Professor.-Addresses from all classes of the Indian Community.-The Brahman Pundits. Mr. Lacroix and a Professorship of Missions.-Dr. Duff Summoned Home to Organize the Free Church Mission Scheme.--Tour in South India. His Journal.-The People and the LandTax.-French and British.-Fort St. David and the East India Company.-Tranquebar.-Ziegenbalg, his Church and House.Caste Christians and German Rationalism.-Jesuit Missions.The Land of the Great Pagodas.-In the Seringham Temple.Schwartz and his Work.-Heber.-Robert de Nobili's Tomb.Bishops Sargent and Caldwell.-Nagercoil and Lace-making.Ceylon.-Up the Ganges to Simla.-Futtehpore Sikri.-Lahore and Sir Henry Lawrence.-Brigadier Colin Mackenzie.-Meeting on the Indus with Dr. Wilson.-Bombay.-Edinburgh.

It was early on a Friday morning in July, 1847, while Dr. and Mrs. Duff were enjoying on the house-top, as was their wont, the too brief hours of coolness before the tropical sun should rise high in the heavens, that an Episcopalian friend communicated to them the fact of the death of Dr. Chalmers, "the venerated father of your Church." The news seemed incredible. By the previous mail Dr. Duff had heard of his evidence, before the House of Commons' committee, on the refusal of sites for the erection of Free churches, and of the gathering of statesmen like Lord John Russell and of the London crowd to hear his ripened eloquence.

Æt. 41.

THE DEATH OF DR. CHALMERS.

113

But the Government express mail had brought the intelligence, which moved even educated Hindoo society, familiar with his writings and taught by his greatest students. To Dr. Duff the loss, suddenly announced, was not that of a father and a friend alone. Nor was his sorrow the offspring of gratitude merely to the memory of one whose lectures and training and personal influence for five years had done more to make the Highland student what he had become than any other single influence. Nor did he think chiefly, moreover, of the solemn hour of his ordination in St. George's, and the second charge given to him in the same place by the great departed as by Paul to Timothy. Dr. Duff in the fulness of his own experience on the wide arena of India and the East, and of his knowledge of the men who make the history alike of the Church and the world, thought of Thomas Chalmers as the earliest Scottish apostle of evangelical missions, as the preacher who, before even Dr. Inglis, had in 1812, and again in 1814, dared to tell his countrymen that they stood alone of all Englishspeaking peoples in their contempt for the missionary cause, and that the time was at hand when they must become the foremost of missionary nations.

It was thus he wrote of Chalmers to Dr. James Buchanan, on the 7th August, 1847:

"Apart altogether from considerations of a more private or more general character, I feel that I could not, in my specific capacity as a missionary, keep silence. It is impossible for me to forget that one of the first steps in his splendid career as a Christian philanthropist, was his unanswered and unanswerable defence of Bible and Missionary societies. It was, indeed, a defence which swept away the wretched sophisms of the indifferent and ungodly, like chaff before the whirlwind. It demonstrated to the world, that if such societies threatened to become popular, it was not from poverty of intellect on the

VOL. II.

I

part of their friends, or from a drivelling irrational pietism on the part of their champions. From Bibles the transition was easy to the translators and distributors of Bibles and the promulgators of Bible truth. Accordingly, at a time when missions were most despised, and missionaries held most despicable by the great and the wise and the mighty of this world, he stood forth the intrepid and triumphant vindicator of both. In his two discourses, entitled The Two Great Instruments appointed for the Propagation of the Gospel,' and, 'The Utility of Missions Ascertained by Experience,' preached and published upwards of thirty years ago, there are bursts of eloquence which he himself never subsequently surpassed; downright genuine eloquence, which does not lead us to the goal by slow marches of argument, or parade of verbal logic, or ingenious devices of subtlety, but flashes upon the subject with the revealing power of heaven's lightning, and at once makes every understanding to perceive, and every heart to feel. In the whole range of missionary literature it would perhaps be difficult to meet with any treatises which, within a shorter compass than that occupied by the discourses now named, portray more strikingly the unrivalled claims of the Bible, exhibit a finer delineation of the missionary character, or embody a more powerful exposition and defence of the great object of the missionary enterprise.

"But it has at times, and by interested parties, been more than insinuated, that the noble author's own example in some respects belied the glowing portraiture of his pen. Of this, no one that knew him well could ever be persuaded. As one of the few that have been raised up in any country or age, gifted from on high with a sight of mind that was telescopic, among the millions endowed with ordinary vision he was constantly liable to be misunderstood in his plans and doings. The schemes of such a man, rightly interpreted, would be found to affect, not Scotland or England alone-not the present age only, but the world and all posterity. And centuries hence, the truth not less than the magnificence of his conceptions, may be appreciated and admired by the grateful descendants of those who have often joined the vulgar throng in vilifying the man, and in ridiculing or condemning his

measures.

"Mighty, however, though he was in performance, his mind

Et. 41.

CHALMERS AND EVANGELICAL MISSIONS.

115

was as much, if not more, of the legislative caste than the executive. Using speculation' in its highest, noblest sense, he may truly be said to have been at once the most speculative and the most practical of living men. In religion and morals, as well as general philosophy, he was a theorist and experimentalist on the largest, surest scale. He first began, or rather, God, in mercy to his country and mankind, enabled him by His good Spirit to begin, with himself. His own personal experience he generalized and instantly rendered available in his management of human nature in a rural parish. His rural experience he generalized and applied to the unravelling of the more arduous complexities of an urban and suburban population. His rural and civic experience he next generalized, and transferred with giant power to the scaling of almost insurmountable difficulties, in the erection of new churches, and the establishment of a vigorous parochial economy, with a view to effectuate and complete the christianization of a kingdom. But would he have stopped here? The wishes and the hopes of many earnestly suggested, No. When, through the blessing of Heaven, he should have succeeded in rearing a monument of his later labours in the land of his fathers, mightier and more enduring far than that of the monarch whose boast it was that he found the capital of his empire of brick and left it of marble; when he should have established the means of everywhere converting that 'bulky sediment,' which now putrefies in all the loathsomeness of moral corruption at the base of society, into materials more precious than the gold of Ophir-materials enstamped with the name and superscription of the King of Zion; then, if spared by the kindness of a gracious God, then it was that the Church, the world, expected that he would generalize his national experience, and bring it to bear, in the full breeze of triumph, on the countless outcast population of a globe. And, if privileged by Providence so to do, with a field so vast for the range of his excursive powers, and an object so transcendent for the sympathies of his benevolent heart, was it too much to hope that he would have been empowered from on high to speak in such a voice of thunder, and lighten in such flashes of love, as to arouse all Christendom from its guilty slumbers, and to awaken nations to seek their God? But all fond hopes of such a glorious culminating crown to his mani