Duff

Duff, ALEXANDER, a great Indian missionary, was born 26th April 1806, at a farm near Pitlochry, in Perthshire. When a student at St Andrews his character was powerfully influenced by Chalmers, and in 1829 he was ordained the first missionary from the Church of Scotland to India. On the passage out he was twice shipwrecked, and did not reach Calcutta till May 1830. He commenced his work as a missionary on an entirely new plan, freely opening up Western science and learning to the natives of India as well as purely religious teaching—an innovation that marked the beginning of a real era in the social history of that country. In spite of much misapprehension and not a little violent opposition, his English school flourished, and in the course of time its indomitable promoter was cheered by the warm encouragement of some of the highest personages in the government. In 1834 Duff was obliged to return home, already invalidated by his enthusiastic and restless energy; but he returned in 1840 to find his college maintaining its success, with an attendance of between six and seven hundred pupils. At the Disruption within the Church of Scotland in 1843, Duff, with the other missionaries in India, cast in his lot with the seceding body that formed the Free Church, and of course had in consequence to give his college into other hands, and begin his work again from the beginning. But for this the enormous energy of the man was adequate, and ere long his whole educational and missionary work was completely reorganised, and that on a much ampler scale than before. In 1844 Duff helped to start the Calcutta Review, and in 1849 was again obliged by ill-health to return home, traversing India on the journey. He was moderator of the Free Church General Assembly in 1851, and his opinions on Indian matters, especially education, were often solicited by the government in London. His apostolic fervour in his missionary tour through the United States (1854) called forth extraordinary enthusiasm. The university of New York gave him the degree of LL.D.; that of Aberdeen had already made him D.D. In 1856 Duff returned to India, and guided his mission safely through the troublous time of the Mutiny. He was one of the founders of the university of Calcutta, and was for a few years its virtual governor, though he declined the vice-chancellorship in 1863, being obliged by persistent ill-health to leave India permanently. Among the many evidences of general esteem heaped upon him was a gift of £11,000, the capital sum of which he destined as a fund for invalidated missionaries of his church. On his way home Duff visited the mission stations of South Africa, and after his arrival in Scotland laboured much to infuse missionary zeal throughout the community; he raised £10,000 to endow a missionary chair in the New College, Edinburgh, of which he consented to be the first occupier. In 1873, to avert a threatening crisis within the Free Church, he was called a second time to the moderator's chair, and here his elevation of character did much to lift the Assembly above the heated air of an embittered controversy. He died in Edinburgh, 12th February 1878, leaving his money to found a missionary lectureship. His writings were almost all larger or smaller pamphlets devoted to the great interests of his life. See his Life by Dr George Smith (2 vols. 1879; new ed. 1899), and short Life by Prof. Thomas Smith (1883).