Robert Smith Candlish
1806-1873. Scottish minister. Educated at Glasgow University, he became minister of St. George's, Edinburgh (1834), and was one of the most prominent of those who at the Disruption* of 1843 left the establishment to form the Free Church of Scotland. In 1862 he became principal of his church's New College in Edinburgh, which post he exercised concurrently with his ministry at Free St. George's. In his 1861 Cunningham Lectures, Candlish disagreed with the F.D. Maurice* view of the universal fatherhood of God; he denied that unfallen Adam was the possessor of true sonship and argued that in adoption the sonship received by believers is an entirely new relationship. While contemporaries applauded his attempts to widen the scope of systematic theology, some scholars particularly in his own denomination criticized his reasoning. Candlish was one of the founders of the Evangelical Alliance (1845) and in 1861 was moderator of his church's general assembly.