The Scottish Reformation | Page 5

to enter the service of the Committee. With many
other claims on his attention, he ungrudgingly gave up a great part of
his time to the administration of the affairs of the Mission, over which
for nineteen years he continued to preside with great zeal and wisdom,
pressing its claims on the members of the Church, and guiding and
encouraging the missionaries by an intelligent and sympathetic interest
in their arduous work. When in 1875 he retired from the Convenership,
the General Assembly expressed its sense of the value of the
distinguished services which he had rendered to the Church in this
department of her work in the following terms: "The Assembly are
satisfied that the present prosperity of the Jewish Mission, and the
remarkable progress which it has made, has been mainly owing to the
great labour, the learning, enthusiasm, and warm and intelligent
Christian interest which Dr Mitchell has devoted during these years to
the cause of Jewish conversion in connection with the Church of
Scotland." After his retirement from the Convenership he but seldom
attended the meetings of the Committee, for the reason, as he was once
heard to say, that he did not wish to appear to hamper his successors;
but he never ceased to take a deep interest in the Mission, and none
rejoiced more than he in its growing prosperity.
While the Professor still occupied the Hebrew Chair, he had shown a
special aptitude for another branch of learning, in which he was yet to
make a reputation for himself in the Churches not only of Britain but of

America. In 1866 he published a lecture, primarily addressed to his
students, on 'The Westminster Confession of Faith: A Contribution to
the Study of its Historical Relations and to the Defence of its Teaching,'
which, as a reply to views then current in certain quarters, attracted no
little notice at the time of its publication, and which is not only of
special interest as illustrating his theological standpoint, and the calm
and temperate, yet earnest and vigorous, manner in which he could
defend it, but is of permanent value as a contribution to the literature of
the subject with which it deals. In the following year he published 'The
Wedderburns and their Work, or the Sacred Poetry of the Scottish
Reformation in its Relation to that of Germany'--a subject which was
treated by him much more fully in one of his most recent works.
The Professor was known to possess a most extensive and accurate
knowledge of Church History in general, and of Scottish Church
History in particular; and when in 1868 he was called to occupy the
Chair of Ecclesiastical History in St Mary's College, the appointment
was hailed with satisfaction alike by the University and the Church.
With an absorbing interest in his subject, and with the true instinct of
the historian, he was most painstaking in ascertaining historical facts,
never reaching his conclusions but as the result of patient and careful
investigation; and those who knew him intimately can tell how little he
grudged the trouble of a journey to Edinburgh or London, or even of an
occasional excursion to the Continent, in order to prosecute his
researches in libraries there with the view of verifying a statement, or
of obtaining indubitable evidence on some controverted point. Besides
those who had the privilege of listening to his prelections from the
professorial chair, there are many in the Churches on both sides of the
Atlantic who have profited by his great erudition; and his published
writings, which all bear the impress of a master-hand, will always be
reckoned standard works in Ecclesiastical History.
It is no part of the purpose of this notice to describe his various works
in detail, but the mere enumeration of them will show what a life of
unremitting study he lived. Besides those already referred to, he edited,
along with the late Dr Struthers, in 1874, 'The Minutes of the
Westminster Assembly from November 1644 to March 1649,' to which

is prefixed an elaborate Historical Introduction written by himself; in
1882 he wrote a 'Historical Notice of Archbishop Hamilton's
Catechism' (first printed at St Andrews in 1551), prefixed to Paterson's
black-letter reprint of the same; in 1883 he published his Baird Lecture,
'The Westminster Assembly: Its History and Standards'; in 1886 he
published 'The Catechisms of the Second Reformation'; in 1888 he
edited, for the Scottish Text Society, 'The Richt Vay to the Kingdome
of Heuine,' by John Gau, the earliest known prose-treatise in the
Scottish dialect setting forth the doctrines of the Reformers; and in
1897, for the same Society, 'The Gude and Godlie Ballads,' reprinted
from the edition of 1567, with a full and most interesting Introduction.
For the Scottish History Society he also edited in 1892 and