The spiritual ancestry of Alexander Duff it is not difficult to trace to Charles Simeon. Heredity, even on its physical side, is a mystery which modern science has as yet failed to explain. Much more difficult is it to discover all that is comprehended in the influences through which the character receives its motive power and peculiar colouring. It was the remark of Duff himself, when, in the fulness of his fame, he solemnly congratulated a young friend on a firstborn son, that in nothing is the sovereignty of God so clearly seen as in the birth of a child; the fact, the sex, the circumstances, the bent. To be at all, is much; to be this rather than that is, to the individual, more: but to be the subject and the channel of a divine force such as has made the men who have reformed the world, in the days from the apostles to the greatest modern missionaries, is so very much more, that we may well look in every case for the signs which lie about their infancy. In this case these signs are near the surface. It was through the prince of the Evangelicals of the Church of England that, unconsciously to both, grace flowed, at one remove, to the distant Highland boy of the Presbyterian kirk, who became the prince of Evangelical missionaries.