Robert Smith Candlish - Life

Life

He was born at Edinburgh, and spent his early years in Glasgow, where he graduated in 1823. During the years 1823-1826 he went through the prescribed course at the divinity hall, then presided over by Dr Stevenson MacGill. On leaving, he accompanied a pupil as private tutor to Eton College, where he stayed two years.

In 1829 Candlish entered upon his life's work, having been licensed to preach during the summer vacation of the previous year. After short assistant pastorates at St Andrews, Glasgow, and Bonhill, Dumbartonshire (now Dunbartonshire), he obtained a settled charge as minister of the parish of St Georges, Edinburgh. He attracted the attention of his audience by his intellectual keenness, emotional fervour, spiritual insight and power of dramatic representation of character and life. His theology was that of the Scottish Calvinistic school, but he gathered round him one of the largest congregations in the city.

Candlish took an interest in ecclesiastical questions, and he soon became involved in the struggle which was then agitating Church of Scotland. His first Assembly speech, delivered in 1839, placed him among the leaders of the party that afterwards formed the Free Church, and his influence in bringing about the Disruption of 1843 was inferior only to that of Thomas Chalmers. He took his stand on two principles: the right of the people to choose their ministers, and the independence of the church in things spiritual. On his advice Hugh Miller was appointed editor of the Witness, the Free Church organ. He was actively engaged at one time or other in nearly all the various schemes of the church, but particularly the education committee, of which he was convener from 1846 to 1863, and in the unsuccessful negotiations for union among the non-established Presbyterian denominations of Scotland, which were carried on during the years 1863-1873. In the Assembly of 1867 he filled the moderator's chair.

In 1841 the government nominated Candlish to the newly founded chair of Biblical criticism in the university of Edinburgh. Owing to the opposition of Lord Aberdeen. however. the presentation was cancelled. In 1847 Candlish, who had received the degree of D.D. from Princeton, New Jersey, in 1841, was chosen by the Assembly of the Free Church to succeed Chalmers in the chair of divinity in the New College, Edinburgh. After partially fulfilling the duties of the office for one session, he was led to resume the charge of St Georges, the clergyman who had been chosen by the congregation as his successor having died before entering on his work. In 1862 he succeeded William Cunningham as principal of New College with the understanding that he should still retain his position as minister of St Georges.

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