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long arm around his coat-tails, catching and holding them up with the right, leaving the left free to do his pounding, this being his peculiar form of emphasis, or, as has been playfully said, of expounding his theme.

He was a master of climax. His long sentences turned like a corkscrew, boring deeper and deeper at every new turn and twist, until, as when a cork is withdrawn, feeling burst forth in tears, sighs, or shouts of applause.

For hours he held his hearers entranced and enwrapt, while his words flowed as in a torrent of fire, sweeping everything before them like a volcanic flood. His marvelous memory, both ready and retentive, was a field marshal, arranging facts so that, at his command, they stood up in ranks and regiments to obey his will and capture the enemy. His brilliant imagination dared the loftiest flights, while avoiding absurd and fanciful extremes; and a contagious enthusiasm imparted to his whole being an indescribable glow and warmth which spread to his audience as fire kindles fire.

He expended in speaking so vast an amount of vital force that his addresses exhausted him sometimes to the point of peril; and yet he neither roared nor ranted; it was not like the thunder, but like the flash, or a series of flashes, of the lightning.

To take down his speeches was next to impossible: it was like trying to report a sunset, or a display of aurora splendors, or a shower of meteors, or a storm at sea when cyclonic winds lift mountain waves and heave waterspouts. The reporters found themselves resting upon their elbows, their mouths agape, their eyes fixed on

him, oblivious of notes, in the fascination of his eloquence.

His mission tour in the United States in 1854 is still vividly remembered by any survivors who heard him. He swept over the land like a prairie fire, awakening intense and burning enthusiasm for missions. Tho it was still the primitive period of the young republic, when the development of new territory absorbed attention, his addresses widened the horizon of his hearers, and gave such impulse to missions abroad as has since been imparted by no single speaker.

In Scotland the work he did for missions in his home visits in 1834 and 1849, and from 1863, when he was obliged to abandon India altogether, was such as few others have ever done. On Indian affairs and Christian missions he was a first class authority, and the service rendered to the home Church was doubtless fully as great as to the vast Oriental empire beside the Ganges. He shone as an organizer, his immense influence getting the Scotchmen into line and developing praying and giving to new proportions. But especially was the effect felt in self-giving and the consecration of family life, so that children were begotten and bred for a missionary career. In his last address before the assembly in 1850, his thrilling appeal was probably without a parallel, before or since.

As to his methods of preparation, a friend once confessed himself puzzled to understand how such finished and artistic oratory was possible in addresses apparently impromptu. Duff explained that when he had any particular address in view, he first thoroughly studied and mastered all the

details of the subject, leaving to the moment the word-clothing of his thoughts. If, however, any parts required special care and delicacy in handling, he carefully went over them in mind, until even the forms of expression took definite shape.

His election, on two occasions, to the moderator's chair was one sign of his hold upon fellow believers in his native land. No man, since Paul, has done more to kindle and feed the fires of world-wide missions; and as the result of his expressed wish and will, the property left by him was invested so as to maintain the "Duff Missionary Lectureship"-since filled by Dr. Thomas Smith, Sir Monier Williams, Dr. Fleming Stevenson, Dr. Marshall Lang, Dr. Stewart, and others, including the writer.

As a man, Duff blended the fervor of Simeon, the fearlessness of Knox, the force of Chalmers, and the fire of Erskine.

As an educator, he struck out a pioneer path. He found many native Hindus open to instruction, and his aim was, first, to undermine their superstitions by showing them how untenable and unscientific was the teaching inseparable from their religion; and, then, to lead them to adopt Christianity as a substitute for their abandoned faith. He was, therefore, not a teacher of purely religious truth alone, but used the science and learning of the Occident as a forerunner to prepare the way for the Gospel.

New methods, like new coin, are handled with suspicion; and he had to meet not only misrepresentation, but antagonism; but the storm of opposition only rooted the young plant more firmly, as fierce winds do the

cedars of Lebanon. It was scarcely three years after he had begun his work, before even the native princes and scholars gave it support and sanction; and, when the disruption of the Scotch Church threw his college into other hands, identifying himself with the young Free Church, he started. anew, organizing on a larger scale his whole work, educational and missionary.

He was warmly seconded in effort by Macaulay, and Sir Chas. Trevylyan, who gave as his opinion that the conversion of India will at last take place suddenly and at wholesale.

"The country will have Christian instruction infused into it by direct missionary education, and induced by books of various kinds and in all the conceivable ways in which knowledge is communicated. Then at last, when society is completely saturated with the knowledge, they will come over by thousands. The plan is like undermining a fortress preparing for a collapse."

Bishop Cotton, of Calcutta, in his Metropolitan charge, says:

"It was the special glory of Alexander Duff that, arriving in the midst of a great intellectual movement, of a completely atheistical character, he at once resolved to make that character Christian. When the new generation of Bengalese, and too many, alas! of their European friends and teachers, were talking of Christianity as an obsolete superstition, Duff suddenly burst upon the scene with his unhesitating faith, his indomitable energy, his varied erudition, and his never-failing stream of fervid eloquence, to teach them that the Gospel was not dead or sleeping, not the ally of ignorance or error, not ashamed or

unable to vindicate its claims to universal reverence, but that, then, as always, it was marching forward in the van of civilization, and that the Church of it was still the Light of the World." It is certain that the work which he did in India can never be undone unless those whom he left behind are faithless to his example.

He was another Peter, the Hermit, trumpeting forth the signal of a new crusade, both urging and leading God's people onward in a more heroic campaign. During a whole generation he carried the assault against the citadel of idolatry and superstition in India, not only instituting new methods of education, but founding missions, and not in India only, but in Syria and the New Hebrides; moving hundreds to give themselves as missionaries, and thousands to give, who could not go.

Much of the influence of Chalmers reappears in Duff's career. As early as 1812, before the Dundee Missionary Society, his great teacher had held up the Word of God and the Messenger of Christ as God's double method for spreading the Gospel; and two years after, before the Scottish Propagation Society, had given similar testimony to the value of missions. Duff had heard Chalmers and the impression which could never be effaced, was deepened by closer contact with him as a professor in the university, and as a personal friend and counsellor. When Duff first gave himself to the ministry, at about the age of 21, he had not determined to go abroad. The death of John Urquhart, in 1828, his school-fellow and friend, brought him to the crisis of decision.

He married Miss Annie Scott Drysdale, who proved a great blessing and help. Like many others, they met

trial on the way to the field. Even the winds and waves seemed against them. They were twice wrecked; once near Africa, and once near India, and it is significant that, while he lost his library, he saved his Bible. On disembarking, he took refuge in a village temple with only this Bible and Psalm book, and so began his work.

When he proposed his school in Calcutta, no one among his advisers, but Carey, openly approved; and yet he persisted. He got his inspiration to a missionary life partly, no doubt, from the Students' Society formed at St. Andrews as early as 1824-25, which did for him somewhat what the Haystack Meetings at Williams College did for Mills and Judson and their little band; or the meetings at Lincoln College, three-quarters of a century before for the Wesleys and Whitefield, the "Holy Club."

Here is another pregnant lesson. It is always worth while for even a few who are like-minded, to get together for joint prayer and spiritual culture. The promise is to "two or three," the smallest possible company. The only condition is "gathered together in My Name," and then the divine promise is "there am I, in the midst of them." There is always a Third Person present, even with two thus meeting. All the greatest spiritual movements have had small beginnings! The power of the "Holy Club" and of the "Haystack Meeting" is today not spent, but more pervasive than ever. The "Student Volunteer” movement started with half a dozen in Cambridge in 1884, and with about a score in Mt. Hermon in 1886, yet to-day it is belting the globe!

Dr. Duff's work as an author was

mostly limited by his great life work; he wrote, however, not only on missions, but on germane themes, such as the Jesuits, the Indian Rebellion, etc., and The Calcutta Review was mainly established through his editorial work.

His life story is easily outlined. Born at Pitlockry, in Perthshire, in 1806, he died in 1878, at 72. His university course at St. Andrews was such that he was often referred to as its most illustrious student. His missionary career, begun at the age of 23, fills the rest of his life-nearly forty-nine years. In fact, Duff gave a half century to missions; for, fifty years before his death, his decision in favor of the mission field had

reached its crisis; and, although he finally returned to England in 1863, the last sixteen years were as truly and effectively given to the work of missions as those spent on the field. For convenience sake we may divide his life into three periods:

I. The Preparatory. 1806-1829. 2. The Actual Work Abroad. 18291863.

3. The Church-Educating and Organizing Period. 1863-1878.

God only knows which of the two latter had the most important and permanent bearing on missions. The last fifteen years, he, like Elisha, was casting in salt at the fountain, purifying the mission stream at its source, and turning many little rills of prayer, sympathy and benevolence into one great and deepening bed of missionary interest and activity. God first prepared him to go to India-then made him a mighty power for building up a great educational system there; and finally sent him home, to train the Christians of his own land

in the knowledge of missions, and stimulate their prayers and gifts.

As Convener of the Foreign Missions Committee he was the heart of all the mission work of the Free Church. During the fourteen years he occupied that post, he enlarged all the Church activities, especially in Africa, and established missions already in operation.

He set before him three objects: I. To organize a missionary institution for practical training of candidates.

2. A Quarterly Review, to furnish reliable missionary information.

3. A professorship of evangelical and evangelistic theology.

Ten thousand pounds were promptly raised for the new chair, and he was unanimously elected to fill it, and notwithstanding all his other duties, he could not decline, tho he would not use the salary, except to establish the missionary institute he hoped to found.

When, in 1843, at the disruption of the Scotch Church, the missionaries had to range themselves on one side or the other, he cast in his lot with the Free Church, tho this involved the surrender to other hands of all the work he had so grandly begun in India.

But, entirely undiscouraged and undaunted, he undertook, as has been said, to start anew, and carried his educational work to a greater success than ever before. He might have contended, that, as the work was of his own planting and nourishing, it should remain under his control; but with the spirit of Isaac, at the wells for which others strove, he did not press his rights, but magnaminously surrendered all claims in the spirit of a peace-maker. But the Lord did not

suffer his work to decline in consequence, and the result was, as in Isaac's case, only another and deeper well of learning, digged in India's soil.

Duff was singularly open to the appeal of facts, and oppressed with a

DR. ALEXANDER DUFF AT SEVENTY

world's destitution. The needs of India -a little world itself-grew on his mind and heart. He thought, for instance, of her 130,000,000 women and girls. To give each a Bible at the rate of 24,000 a day, or 1,000 an hour, day and night-16 a minute-would take nearly sixteen years!

Duff lived in an age more fitted to Hawdevelop great missionaries. thorne, in his new dream of the Pilgrim's Progress-his Celestial Railroad-satirically writes: "He found, on visiting the City of Destruction, in a dream, that there was now a railroad between that place and the celestial city, so that a pilgrim's progress was by no means the stern experience it used to be.

The Slough of Despond was converted into firm ground. There was no need of any stopping at the House of the Interpreter. The Hill Diffi

culty had been tunneled through, and the Valley of Humiliation had been leveled up; and, between the townsmen of Vanity Fair and the pilgrims, there was now a very good understanding and considerable traffic.

The silver mine of Demas also was worked by the pilgrims to great advantage; and Doubting Castle was quite an airy-looking edifice, built in the most modern style. There was even a steam ferry-boat over the bridgeless river, to which, however, there was this one drawback-that no one knew whether it ever reached the city on the other side or not; for at that moment the dreamer awoke and had, therefore, no more to relate."

One of the greatest obstacles to all true missionary consecration is the fact that we are living in an age of worldliness. The secular spirit in the Church has almost stifled the simplicity of primitive days. The days of Duff-more than half a century ago, were much more primitive than our own-the habits of the average disciple far more frugal. A household lived on what it now takes to keep one single man or woman. Scotch families of a dozen sometimes lived in comfort on less than £200 a year, and out of such families came educated men and women. Church buildings then were plain, inexpensive, and the ministers lived among the common folk, with modest manses and glebes-cultivating the soil to eke out a subsistence, and the churches had no costly choirs or organs, garniture or furniture, and no ungodly "trustees" cursed the house of God by nourishing a secular spirit.

Still worse, this age is one of doubt and of its bold proclamation by so-called preachers and teach

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