Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 8.djvu/82

30 from which it was deemed imprudent to attempt to remove him. The symptoms were found to be those of apoplexy. He continued in a state of insensibility till the evening of the next day, the 14th, when he expired. He died in the seventy-first year of his age and forty-fifth year of his ministry. Of his whole family, only two daughters survived him: by his first marriage, Isabella, married to John Duncan Esq., merchant, Glasgow, son of his old friend, the Rev. Mr. Duncan of Alva; and Margaret, by his second marriage. We cannot better conclude our brief sketch of the life of this estimable man and eminent minister, than by the following tribute to his memory by Dr. Chalmers, who, when settled in Glasgow, ever found a true friend in Dr. Balfour, one perfectly free from all professional jealousy, and who rejoiced at the progress and success of that great man's peculiar parochial labonrslabours [sic]:—

"The pulpit is not the place for panegyric, but surely it is the place for demonstrating the power of Christianity, and pointing the eye of hearers to its actual operation; and without laying open the solitude of his religious exercises, without attempting to penetrate into the recesses of that spirituality which, on the foundation of a living faith, shed the excellence of virtue over the whole of his character, without breaking in upon the hours of his communion with his God, or marking the progress and the preparation of his inner man for that heaven to which he has been called,—were I called upon to specify the Christian grace which stood most visibly and most attractively out in the person of the departed, I would say that it was a cordiality of love, which, amid all the perversities and all the disappointments of human opposition, was utterly unextinguishable; that over every friend who differed from him in opinion he was sure to gain that most illustrious of all triumphs, the triumph of a charity which no resistance could quell; that from the fulness of his renewed heart there streamed a kindliness of regard, which, whatever the collision of sentiment, or whatever the merits of the contest, always won for him the most Christian and the most honourable of all victories. And thus it was that the same spirit which bore him untainted through the scenes of public controversy, did, when seated in the bosom of his family, or when moving through the circle of his extended acquaintanceship, break out in one increasing overflow of good-will on all around him; so that, perhaps, there is not a man living who, when he comes to die, will be so numerously followed to the grave by our best of all mourners—the mourners of wounded affection, the mourners of the heart, the mourners who weep and are in heaviness under the feeling of a private and a peculiar, and a personal bereavement."

—This profound theologian and valued ornament of the Secession church, was born at Ormiston Mains, in the parish of Eckford, Roxburghshire, on the 22d of November, 1787. His father, who was a land-steward, was a man in comfortable though not affluent circumstances, and Robert's earliest education—besides the ordinary advantages which the peasantry of Scotland possessed—enjoyed the inestimable benefit of a careful religious superintendence, both of his parents being distinguished for piety and intelligence. The result of such training was quickly conspicuous in the boy, who, as soon as he could read, was an earnest and constant reader of the Bible, while his questions and remarks showed that he studied its meaning beyond most persons of his age. His thirst for general knowledge was also evinced by a practice sometimes manifested by promising intellectual boyhood—this was the arresting of every stray-leaf that fell in his way, and making himself master of its contents, instead of throwing it carelessly to the winds. On the death of