For the Haldanes, as well as for Wordsworth, the democratic heaven soon clouded over; and the brothers turned their zeal to the spread of the gospel, after the model of such Southron preachers as Charles Simeon and Rowland Hill, both of whom carried their awakening into Scotland. Robert sold his estate of Airthrey, beautifully situated on the Ochils, and proposed devoting his life and means to a mission in India, a scheme nipped in the bud by the authorities there. James took to field-preaching, to the scandal of parish ministers and magistrates, itinerating all over Scotland, through the Highlands, and as far as the Orkneys and Shetlands. Robert’s gifts were less in the way of eloquence; he rather gave himself to organisation of the effort, training lay preachers, buying circuses both in Edinburgh and Glasgow as chapels, and issuing the tracts which by his school were held as special means of grace. Such proceedings on the part of laymen did not commend themselves to the clergy; the stern Seceders also looked askance on this new revival. The Haldanes, for their part, had soon drifted away from Presbyterianism; and when the circus-like Tabernacle, still to be seen on the side of the Calton Hill, was built at Robert Haldane’s expense, it opened as a Congregational Chapel, with James Haldane as pastor, who continued his evangelical tours. By and by differences of opinion arose in the new congregation; and both brothers went over to Baptist views. Robert, especially, in his zeal for soundness, was all along much given to controversy--with Zachary Macaulay over a plan for bringing young Africans to be educated in Britain, as later with his famous son anent the ballot; with the Bible Society for its backsliding in publishing the Apocrypha; with the degenerate Socinian Calvinism of Geneva; with the divers errors of Irvingites and Sandemanians; and with the Presbyterian “Voluntaries” as to their refusal to pay the “Annuity Tax,” which was the church rate of Edinburgh. In their old age the Haldanes found more fellowship in the Presbyterian Church, especially when it had been warmed by Free Church enthusiasm. They seem both to have been earnest and sincere in struggling after what they held for purity of saving truth; and when they died in the middle of last century, they could congratulate themselves on having stirred the life of their country in a way that might be better remembered had they not been concerned to leave “their work and not their name.”