So early as the beginning of the year 1832, while Mr. Duff was steering his apparently frail boat in the very trough of the sea of Hindoo society, with no assistance and little sympathy from his own countrymen, he was called to minister in St. Andrew's kirk to the Scottish residents, and to help the Eurasians and the native Christians in their earnest struggles after toleration for themselves in the eye of the law and a good education for their children. Thus early he began the afterwards lifelong labours which ended in the establishment of the Anglo-Indian Christian Union, and in the creation of the Doveton Colleges of Calcutta and Madras.

St. Andrew's kirk—in 1813 the fruit, like its fellows in Bombay and Madras, of much talking in obscure Scottish presbyteries, and much petitioning of Parliament by synods and general assemblies since 1793—had never justified its existence. How Dr. Bryce, its first chaplain, went out to Calcutta in the same ship with Bishop Middleton we have told. A bishop must have his cathedral; so St. John's church, consecrated by the ministrations of Claudius Buchanan and Henry Martyn, to which Warren Hastings, his council and all the “factors” in the settlement used to walk to morning service, was enlarged and dubbed by the necessary name, until Bishop Wilson built St. Paul's Cathedral.