e illustriously
fulfilled this object, though in another sense than its founders meant,
and handed on the torch of sacred learning from generation to
generation. Bannerman, who succeeded Major, had the honour of
reorganising the old institution and starting it on its new career.
Archibald Hay, who came next, was the child of the Renaissance, and more
in earnest about religion than many of that school; and, had his life
been spared, and the cardinal given heed to his counsels, the old Church
might have been able to make a better fight for privilege or for life in
the struggle which ensued. John Douglas, his successor, bridged the
passage from the old to the new without any violent break, probably
taking part with Wynram in the composition of Archbishop Hamilton's
Catechism, as he did afterwards in the preparation of the Reformed
Confession of Faith and the First Book of Discipline. He was a man of
the ancient academic type, content to live in single blessedness, to
treat his pupils, who also lived in college, with the familiarity and
affection of a father. He had the honour of training the youthful Andrew
Melville, and perhaps it was with some presentiment of his future
eminence that, as he held the precocious youth between his knees at the
college fire, he fondly said, "My sillie fatherless and motherless
chyld, it is ill to wit what God may mak of thee yit."

God watched over that weakly youth, and prospered his studies at Paris,
Poictiers, and Geneva, so that with a mind stored with all the learning
of his time, he returned to his native land to complete the reformation
of its universities, and to delight successive generations of students
by his stores of learning and wit, and by his accessibility and
generosity. It was to meet his ideas of what a theological school should
be that the college was set apart "allenarly" for the study of theology,
and furnished with professors of the Old and the New Testament, who were
to "expone" the various books of Scripture as well as to read them in
the original, comparing the Hebrew of the Old Testament with the
Septuagint and the Chaldee paraphrases, and the Greek of the New
Testament with the old Syriac translation, while the principal was to
teach the _loci communes_ or the systematic theology of the age. The
first assistants in the "wark of theology" were Mr John Robertson, who
acted as _professor Novi Testamenti_, and his own nephew, James
Melville, who taught Hebrew and the