LIFE OF ALEXANDER DUFF, D.D., LL.D. CHAPTER XVI. 1843-1844. MISSIONARY OF THE FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND. The Power of Youth.-Spiritual Independence and the People of Scotland. Torpor of the Ministers for a century and a quarter. -Anecdotes from Dr. Duff's experience.-On Robert Burns.Reproving an Officer for Profanity.-Sir Charles Napier.-Sir Robert Peel rebuked.-Duff's public silence on the Disruption Controversy.-Appeals from Dr. Brunton and Dr. Charles J. Brown.-All the Missionaries adhere to the Church of Scotland Free.-Dr. Duff's "Explanatory Statement."-A critical time.— The Disruption in Calcutta.-Dr. Simon Nicolson. - Messrs. Hawkins, M. Wylie and A. B. Mackintosh.-The Free Church in Calcutta. Dr. Duff's four Lectures.-Lord Brougham and Gibbon.-Duff describes the Disruption.-Free Church resolves to extend Foreign Missions.-The Property Wrong.-Sympathy of all Evangelical Churches.-Duff's disinterestedness.-Opening of the General Assembly's Institution of the Free Church of Scotland.-A Professorship of Missions urged. NOT only is the world the heritage of the young, as has been said. The young make the world what it is. Dr. Duff had really done his work in India when he was twenty-eight; he had, apparently, completed its parallel side in Great Britain when he was thirty-three; he had consolidated the whole sys VOL. II. B tem, and he saw it bearing rare spiritual as well as moral and intellectual fruit before he was thirty-seven. So, in the same field of reformation, Luther and Melanchthon in Germany, Pascal and Calvin in France, Wesley and Simeon in England, and Chalmers in Scotland had sowed the seed and reaped the early harvests while still within the age which Augustine pronounces the "culmen " and Dante the "key of the arch" of life. Dr. Duff might have spent the rest of his career in quietly developing the principles and extending the machinery of his system on its India and Scottish sides, but for two forces, in Church and State, which the shrewdest took long to foresee. His Kirk had to work its way back to the purity and spiritual independence of covenanting times-a process in which all the Churches of Europe are following it, from Italy and Germany to France and Irelandand in so working it became broken into two. And the Afghan War was to prove only the first act in the prelude to the history of British India. That prelude closed in the Sepoy Mutiny. That history fairly began with the too rapid obliteration of the military and political system by which the old East India Company had brought the empire to the birth and had reared it into a vigorous childhood. Foreign Missions being of no ecclesiastical party but the privilege of all, we have seen how Dr. Duff, during his first visit to Scotland, had kept aloof from even the most vital controversies. To him, as charged with the conversion of a hundred and thirty millions of human beings, Whig or Tory, Voluntary or State Churchman, even "Intrusionist or "NonIntrusionist" were of little account save in so far as they could promote or hinder his one object. Even in India, on his return in 1840, he was so silent regarding his relation to parties and the course he |