ROBERT MILLIGAN.

      The life of Robert Milligan is a book of lessons triumphing over disheartening hindrances, of doing thoroughly well whatever one undertakes to do, of self-denying consideration of what is due to others, and of entire consecration of one's self and one's all to the service of God.

      He was born in Tyrone, a county of the most northern province of Ireland, July 25, 1814. In 1818 he was brought to the United States by his parents, John and Margaret Milligan, [418] who settled in Trumbull county, Ohio, which was afterward the native county of the late President McKinley. An injury to his chest, which he received while helping to clear a field of his father's farm, and the mark of which he bore till his death, turned his thoughts toward a professional life. In 1831 he entered Zelienople Academy, in Beaver county, Pa., and, in 1833, a classical academy, conducted by a graduate of the University of Edinburgh at Jamestown in the same State.

      As one of nine children of parents in moderate circumstances, he had to begin life for himself before he had completed his collegiate training, Accordingly, in 1837, he opened a school at Flat Rock, in Bourbon county, Ky., with fifteen pupils. Three months afterward he was refusing to receive more than fifty, the number which he thought that he could not exceed in justice to those already received. When he was twenty-one years of age, he had become a member of the home congregation of the Associate Presbyterian Church, in which his father was a ruling elder. A careful study that he made, during his stay at Flat Rock, of the New Testament in the original Greek, resulted in his immersion on March 11, 1838, by Elder John Irvin, of the Church of Christ at Cane Ridge.

      Earnestly desiring the advantages of a collegiate education, he left Kentucky in 1839, with the intention of entering Yale College. His journey over the National Road brought him to Washington, Pa. A delay, occasioned probably by his unwillingness to travel on the Lord's Day, led to his remaining in Washington, where he could attend what was then called Washington College, and where he could at the same time worship with the small congregation of disciples in the neighboring village of Martinsburg. Graduated in 1840 with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, which had then a very definite meaning, he was at once promoted from the tutorship which he had held in the college before his graduation, to the professorship of the English language and literature. In this chair, which he filled for nearly ten years, he cultivated a careful acquaintance with the masterpieces of English literature, and during a part of that time he gave instruction in Greek and Latin classics also. Meanwhile, in 1842, he married Miss Ellen Blaine Russell, of Washington, whose father at the time, and one of whose brothers afterwards, represented the Bedford (Pa.) district in Congress. Though she was but a few months younger than her husband, she still enjoys a cheerful old age, living with her only son and daughter in Lexington, Ky. In 1843, Professor Milligan received from his alma mater the degree of master of arts, and in 1849 or 1850 he was transferred to the department of chemistry and natural history. When in 1852 the College was placed under the control of the Presbyterian Synod of Wheeling, he insisted on the acceptance of his resignation, that the institution might be wholly in the hands of those who were entitled to guide its fortunes.

      Invited at once to Bloomington, Ind., he had first the chair of mathematics, and then that of chemistry, natural philosophy and astronomy, in Indiana University. The degree of doctor of divinity, which was tendered to him by the University, he declined. Resigning his professorship at Bloomington, because of the ill health of his son, he accepted in 1854 the chair of mathematics and astronomy in Bethany College, in what was then a part of Virginia. Besides the duties of his professorship, he discharged those of an elder of the church at Bethany, and for three years, beginning with 1857, he was a co-editor of the Millennial Harbinger.

      In May of 1857 he was elected president of Bacon College at Harrodsburg, Ky. The name of the institution having in the meantime been changed, he was inaugurated president of Kentucky University on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 1859, which was the third day of the first session under the new name. After the destruction of the college building by fire, in February of 1864, had made the removal of the institution from Harrodsburg necessary, he was a member of the committee that decided in favor of removal to Lexington. When Kentucky University, which had now attained university proportions, was reorganized in 1865, with its founder as the head of the associated colleges, President Milligan was placed at the head of the College of the Bible, a place most congenial to his tastes and purposes, which he filled until his last illness.

      Few educators have had as laborious a preparation for their noble calling as had Robert Milligan. In the interval between the beginning of his life as a teacher in colleges in 1940, and his death thirty-five years [419] afterward, he taught, and that efficiently and acceptably, in four institutions of learning and in all the departments of the curriculum of liberal studies, as that curriculum then was, except that of modern foreign languages. To his assiduous work in colleges and universities he added the labor of preaching often, sometimes regularly, for churches in or near the towns of his residence. He had been ordained in 1844 a minister of the gospel, with imposition of the hands of Elder Thos. Campbell, the venerable father of Alexander Campbell. He addressed educational meetings of different kinds, he lectured in other institutions of learning, he wrote much for religious periodicals. The community, the college, the university, in which he lived and labored always felt that there was present a quiet but active influence which could be counted on in whatever concerned morality or religion. To the Tract on Prayer, which he had written before, he added in the last ten years of his life the volumes entitled Reason and Revelation, The Scheme of Redemption, The Great Commission, Analysis of the Gospels and Acts, and, which was published as a posthumous work, Commentary on Hebrews. And all this was in great physical weakness, the result of the impairment of his constitution first by the accident already mentioned as having befallen him in his youth, and afterward by diseases, none of which ever left him after it had attacked him, and the mere mention of which is sufficient to excite wonder how suffering so much he could do so much, and how doing so much he could suffer so long. His purpose of taking a rest before the last scene should release him from weakness and from suffering was thwarted by an erysipelas which, attacking a body now almost defenseless against disease, left him too feeble to recover. He died peacefully, in full possession of his faculties, and surrounded in his home by his family and by friends, on March 20, 1875. His death was lamented in the communities in which he had lived and was deplored throughout the Christian brotherhood. The Apostolic Times concluded its announcement of his decease with "A prince is this day fallen in Israel;" the American Christian Review declared that he was one of those "of whom the world was not worthy;" and President John W. McGarvey, his friend and co-laborer in the College of the Bible, in the funeral discourse which he pronounced, summed up the general estimate of his character in the words that are repeated on his monument in the Lexington cemetery: "He was a good man, and full of the Holy Spirit and of faith."

[COC 418-420]