HALDANE, James Alexander (1768-1851), whose disinterested labours in the cause of religion have secured for his name an honourable place in the ecclesiastical history of Scotland, was the younger son of Captain James Haldane of Gleneagles, Perthshire, and was born at Dundee on July 14, 1768. Educated first at Dundee and afterwards at the High School and university of Edinburgh, he shortly after the completion of his sixteenth year entered the service for which he had been from his childhood destined, by joining the “Duke of Montrose” East Indiaman as a midshipman. After four voyages to India he in the summer of 1793 was nominated to the command of the “Melville Castle”; but having, during a Jong and unexpected detention of his ship, begun a careful study of the Bible, he came under deep religious impressions and, somewhat abruptly resolving to quit the naval profession, returned to Scotland before his ship had sailed. About the year 1796 he became acquainted with the celebrated evangelical divine, Simeon of Cambridge, in whose society he made through Scotland more than one tour, in the course of which he endeavoured by tract-distribution and other means to awaken others to somewhat of that interest in religious subjects which he himself so strongly felt. In May 1797 he preached, at Gilmerton near Edinburgh, his first sermon with a success which was considered to be very encouraging; and during the next few years he made repeated missionary journeys, preaching wherever he could obtain hearers, and generally in the open air. Not originally disloyal to the Church of Scotland, he w as gradually driven by the hostility of the Assembly and the exigencies of his position into a separatistic attitude; in 1799 he was ordained on the principles of Independency as pastor ...of a large congregation in Edinburgh, to which he continued gratuitously to minister for more than fifty years; and in 1808 he made public avowal of his conversion to Baptist views. As advancing years compelled him to withdraw from the more exhausting labours of itineracy and open-air preaching, he sought more and more to influence the discussion of current religious and theological questions by means of the press, and by numerous pamphlets took part in the controversies connected with the names of Edward Irving, Erskine of Linlathen, Campbell of Row, and others. His latest works were a treatise on the Doctrine of the Atonement (1845) and an Exposition of the Epistle to the Galatians (1848). He died on the 8th of February 1851.
HALDANE, Robert (1764-1842), elder brother of the preceding, and intimately associated with him in many of his labours, was born in London on February 28, 1764. After attending classes in the Dundee grammar school and in the High School and university of Edinburgh he in 1780 joined H.M.S. “Monarch,” of which his uncle Lord Duncan was at that time in command, and in the following year was transferred to the “Foudroyant,” on board of which, during the night engagement with the “Pegase,” he distinguished himself so much that Captain Jervis (afterwards Lord St Vincent) wrote to Admiral Duncan predicting a brilliant future for his nephew. Haldane was afterwards present at the relief of Gibraltar, but at the peace of 1783 he finally left the navy, and soon afterwards settled on his estate of Airthrey, near Stirling. The earlier phases of the French Revolution as they occurred attracted his attention and at first excited his deepest sympathy, a sympathy which induced him, at the cost of making many enemies, to avow his 8trong disapproval of the war with France. As his bright and oversanguine visions of a new order of things to be ushered in by political change disappeared, he, unlike Wordsworth’s “Solitary,” began to direct his thoughts to religious subjects, and underwent a spiritual change which, while neither sudden nor violent, was decisive and complete. Resolving to devote himself and his means wholly to the advancement of Christianity, his first proposal for that end, made in 1796, was to organize a vast mission to Bengal, of which he was to provide the entire expense; with this view the greater part of his estate was sold, but after every arrangement had been well nigh completed, the East India Company refused to sanction the scheme, which therefore had to be reluctantly abandoned. In December 1797 he joined his brother and some others in the formation of the “Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home”; and in building chapels or “tabernacles” for its congregations, in supporting its missionaries, and in maintaining institutions for the education of young men to carry on its work, he in the course of the twelve years which followed is stated on good authority to have expended upwards of £70,000. In 1816 he visited the Continent, and first at Geneva and afterwards in Montauban (1817) occupied himself in lecturing with surprising success to theological students, among whom were Malan, Monod, and Merle D’Aubigné. Returning to Scotland in 1819, he lived partly on his estate of Auchengray and partly in Edinburgh, and like his brother took an active part, chiefly through the press, in many of the religious controversies of the time. He died on the 12th of December 1842.
In 1816 he published a work on the Evidences and Authority of Divine Revelation, and in 1819 the substance of his theological prelections in a Commentaire stir l’Épître aux Romains. Among his later writings, besides numerous pamphlets on what was known as “the Apocrypha controversy” and on the Sabbatarian question, are a treatise On the Inspiration of Scripture (1828), which has passed through seven editions, and a later Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans (1835), which has been frequently reprinted, and has been translated into French and German. See Memoirs of R. and J. A. Haldane, by Alexander Haldane (1852).
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