CHAPTER XXIX - DYING

Summary

On the 25th April, 1876, Dr. Duff completed the seventieth year of his busy life. The college session was at an end; the Universities had crowned their winter course with the usual ceremonial of graduation; the ecclesiastical and philanthropic societies, of which he was an active member, were preparing for the May meetings. It was the time of that one of the two sacramental “fasts” in Edinburgh, every year, when the rapt stillness of devotion in the churches contrasts strangely with the rush of holiday-makers outside, and still perpetuates amid ever increasing difficulty the old covenanting associations of the time, when the people and their Kirk formed one educated spiritual democracy. Never of late had Dr. Duff felt so well, though always wearied by the attempt to over take the details of his varied and excessive duties, as when, spiritually braced by the exercises of a Scottish communion season, he addressed himself to the task of once more rousing the General Assembly to its duty to Foreign Missions. But the first stage of what was to prove his fatal illness was at hand. When acknowledging the receipt of a sum of money from the widow of Sir Henry Durand, destined as the annual prize for the best “essay on some important subject of Christian bearing and tendency in our Calcutta Institution where the name of the revered departed is still gratefully remembered,” Dr. Duff thus alluded to an accident and an illness which his physician considered far more serious than the sufferer himself.