CHAPTER XVI - MISSIONARY OF THE FREE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND

Summary

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 system, 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 Ireland—and 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.