DR. DUFF ORGANIZING

Abstract

F ar more effectually than even the speaker had dared to dream, the first Assembly oration of the first missionary of its Church set Scotland on fire. The excitement of the general election, which for the hour made Dr. Chalmers so much of a Tory as to call forth the remark in his broadest Fifeshire accent, “I have a moral loathing of these Whugs,” had spent itself. The new spiritual life which was to work itself out in the disruption of 1843 had asserted its power in the General Assemblies of 1834 and 1835. Even Dr. Inglis had declared just before his death, “The kingdom of Christ is not only spiritual but independent. No earthly government has a right to overrule or control it.” Chalmers, with such disciples as the young Thomas Guthrie, had begun to go forth on his evangelical mission of church extension throughout the length and breadth of Scotland. Side by side and in loving co-operation with that, as Chalmers had always taught and he himself had again enforced, Duff proclaimed and established the claims of foreign missions. The whole people were ready to receive the missionary; almost every parish competed for a visit from him. Zealously anticipating St. Andrews and the other universities, Marischal College, Aberdeen, had hardly met for the autumn session of 1835 when it honoured itself and surprised the young divine, still under thirty, by presenting him with the diploma of Doctor of Divinity.