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On the 5th September, 1968,
Principal Hugh Watt died at the age of 88. Appointed to the Chair of Church
History in New College in 1919, for 30 years he taught generation after
generation of students, winning their respect and affection, and retaining
both, for they all knew that he followed their careers with unfailing
interest and could always be relied upon for friendly advice and
encouragement. From 1921 to 1945 he served the College as its devoted
Secretary, carrying its load of administration with unflappable cheerfulness
and infallible grasp of detail, writing meantime its Centenary History. In
1946 he was appointed Principal and just before his retirement in 1950 he
was fittingly honoured by being elected Moderator of the General Assembly.
His contribution to scholarship includes his Representative Churchmen of
Twenty Centuries which shows the breadth of his range. But his chief
interest was in Scottish Church History and in this field his knowledge was,
one may say, uncanny! It is illustrated, but only in part, by his Thomas
Chalmers and the Disruption and John Knox in Controversy. A large-scale work
on the Scottish Reformation, on which he had been working for many years, is
unhappily left in an unfinished state. In the affairs of the Scottish Church
History Society, of which he was long a member and to which he contributed a
number of learned papers, he took a deep interest, and was its President
from 1938 to 1941.
It was a happy gesture, and one that gave him much pleasure, when some
members of the Society, many of them his former students, honoured him with
a Festschrift, a volume of essays on Scottish Church History, presented on
the 60th anniversary of his ordination, a testimony to the inspiration
derived from the teaching of their Professor. |
