214 Field Meetings. 



monuments of his steadfastness to principle and his readiness 

 to suffer for conscience sake. In the contest for spiritual inde- 

 pendence which rent the Church of Scotland in twain in 1843 

 he was one of the leaders, with Chalmers, Candlish, Buchanan, 

 Welsh, and Hugh Miller, of the party which withstood the 

 encroachments of the civil courts in the spiritual sphere. In the 

 year when he was Moderator of the General Assembly seven 

 ministers of the Presbytery of Strathbogie were suspended for 

 taking .steps, in defiance of an injunction of the Assembly, to 

 ordain as minister of the parish of Marnock a probationer who 

 had been presented to it by the trustees of the Earl of Fife, but 

 who was so obnoxious to the people that only the village inn- 

 keeper and three non-resident heritors could be got to sign a call 

 to him. Dr Duncan went to preach, with the prestige of Mode- 

 rator, in one of the churches rendered vacant by this sentence 

 of deposition; and he was served with an interdict obtained from 

 the Court of Session — as were other distinguished churchmen 

 who went north on similar errands — forbidding him to preach 

 either in tlie church, the churchyard, or the school, or in any 

 other building, or even in the open-air at any place within the 

 parish, under pain of prosecution and imprisonment. But 'le 

 defied the thunders of the court by preaching to a great gather- 

 ing in a hall where a thousand people gathered to hear him. 

 When the time of separation came the intrepid old man relin- 

 quished his stipend and his glebe, left without a murmur the 

 manse which had been his home for three-and-forty years, and 

 the nursery of his family, and which was with its surroundings 

 a place of beauty largely of his own creation. He went first to 

 share with another tenant a cottage at the east end of Clarence- 

 field, where he did his best to supply deficiencies by turning an 

 old quarry into a rock garden and christening it his open-air 

 drawing-room ; then he had to put up with even more hampered 

 quarters in a roadside cottage at the other end of the village. 

 No site for either church or manse could be got in the parish ; 

 but Dr Duncan had the foresight to arrange in advance with 

 the Rev. Dr Buchanan, proprietor of the Hetland estate, for 

 a piece of ground in a spot which would serve both Ruthwell 

 and Mouswald ; and so promptly and energetically was the work 

 taken in hand that the congregation were able to worship in 

 the new church in the month of October, 1843, just five months 



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