Unity and Separation: Contrasting Elements in the Thought and Practice of Robert and James Alexander Haldane

Abstract

In June 1799 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland issued a Pastoral Admonition to its congregations denouncing the missionaries of the newly formed Society for Propagating the Gospel at Home (SPGH). They were, it alleged, ‘a set of men whose proceedings threatened] no small disorder to the country’. In issuing this warning the Assembly brought to public attention for the first time the work of two of the most prominent Scottish leaders of the Evangelical Revival, Robert and James Alexander Haldane. The Haldane brothers, two of the moving spirits behind the offending organization, were wealthy Presbyterian converts to an undenominational activism already much in evidence south of the border. For a decade spanning the turn of the century their religious enterprise challenged Scottish ecclesiastical conventions, provoking strong contemporary reactions and leading to a marked divergence in subsequent historical assessment. From ‘the Wesley and Whitefield of Scotland’, at one extreme, they have been described less fulsomely as the source of a movement which, though it alarmed all the Presbyterian churches, proved to be short-lived, dying away ‘among its own domestic quarrels’, ‘marred by bitterness of speech, obscurantism and fanaticism’. Contemporaries seem to have found it little easier to agree on the leaders’ personal qualities. In 1796 Thomas Jones, the minister of Lady Glenorchy’s Chapel in Edinburgh, commended Robert Haldane to William Wilberforce as ‘a man of strickt honour integrity religion prudence and virtue’, who being ‘possessed of a fortune from £50,000 to £60,000 … thinks it is his duty… to employ a considerable portion of it in promoting the cause of God’. By 1809 Haldane’s former friend and colleague, Greville Ewing, had become so disenchanted with his methods that, having referred to him scornfully as ‘the POPE of independents’, he accused him bitterly of ‘the greatest effort [he had ever seen] from any motive whatsoever, to ruin the comfort, and the usefulness, of a minister of the gospel’. Though his brother, James, appears to have inspired a more universal affection, the forcefulness of both personalities ensured that mere neutrality would never be easy.