Glasgow's School of the Prophets: The Free Church College VIII

In our last few posts on this topic we looked at the 'Glasgow Heresy Case'. We hope that we have made it quite clear that our sympathies are with Gibson. But Gibson was standing against the flow of the Free Church of Scotland; in a church where Robertson Smith was removed from his post not for his views on the Old Testament but because he was impolitic in stating them, it was certain that Gibson would not win the case. Indeed, soon after a great change was to pass over the Glasgow College.
When the Free Church Colleges were first founded there was a serious possibility that the Church of Scotland would use laws that were all but obsolete to exclude Free Church men not only from the professorships of the Scottish universities but also from taking courses. It was therefore felt necessary to provide not only for a theological course but also for arts and science subjects. While Edinburgh was equipped with various arts lecturers, Glasgow only had a Science lecturer. The threatened exclusion from the universities was abortive, but the science lecturer at Glasgow was kept on as part of the theological course. The lecturer appointed was Mr. William Keddie F.R.S.E. His course covered, he said, "the main topics included under the heads of zoology, geology and botany, with a special view to their bearings on the great truths of Natural and Revealed Religion." After Darwin's Origin of Species was published Keddie advertised as a portion of his course "Darwin's theory of the origin of species by natural selection shown to be untenable on scientific grounds." This was not the statement of a Bible-pounding fundamentalist, but of a knowledgeable scientist.
But in 1879 Keddie was succeeded by Henry Drummond - a well-known popularizer of Darwinism and a man whose preaching, according to Robertson Nicoll, did without any of the usual doctrines of Christianity - most worryingly the Cross.

But this was part of a larger trend - of which more, God willing, next time.