HALDANE, ROBERT (1764-1842), elder brother of the preceding, and intimately associated with him in many of his labours, was born in London on February 28, 1764. After attending classes in the Dundee grammar school and in the High School and university of Edinburgh he in 1780 joined H.M.S. " Monarch, " of which his uncle Lord Duncan was at that time in command, and in the following year was transferred to the "Foudroyant," on board of which, during the night engagement with the " Pegase," he distinguished himself so much that Captain Jervis (afterwards Lord St Vincent) wrote to Admiral Duncan predicting a brilliant future for his nephew. Haldane was afterwards present at the relief of Gibraltar, but at the peace of 1783 he finally left the navy, and soon afterwards settled on his estate of Airthrey, near Stirling. The earlier phases of the French Revolution as they occurred attracted his attention and at first excited his deepest sympathy, a sympathy which induced him, at the cost of making many enemies, to avow his strong disapproval of the war with France. As his bright and oversanguine visions of a new order of things to be ushered in by political change disappeared, he, unlike Wordsworth's "Solitary," began to direct his thoughts to religious subjects, and underwent a spiritual change which, while neither sudden nor violent, was decisive and complete. Resolving to devote himself and his means wholly to the advancement of Christianity, his first proposal for that end, made in 1796, was to organize a vast mission to Bengal, of which he was to provide the entire expense ; with this view the greater part of his estate was sold, but after every arrangement had been well nigh completed, the East India Company refused to sanction the scheme, which therefore had to bo reluctantly abandoned. In December 1797 he joined his brother and some others in the formation of the " Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home"; and in building chapels or "tabernacles" for its congregations, in supporting its missionaries, and in maintaining institutions for the education of young men to carry on its work, he in the course of the twelve years which followed is stated on good authority to have expended upwards of £70,000. In 1816 he visited the Continent, and first at Geneva and afterwards in Montauban (1817) occupied himself in lecturing with surprising success to theological students, among whom were Malan, Monod, and Merle D'Aubigne. Returning to Scotland in 1819, he lived partly on his estate of Auchengray and partly in Edinburgh, and like his brother took an active part, chiefly through the press, in many of the religious controversies of the time. He died on the 12th of December 1842.

In 1816 he published a work on the Evidences and Authority of Dirine Revelation, and in 1819 the substance of his theological prelections in a Contmentaire cur l'Eyitre asix Romaine. Among his later writings, besides numerous pamphlets on what was known as " the Apocrypha controversy " and on the sabbatariau question, are a treatise On the Inspiration of Scripture (1828), which has passed through seven editions, and a later Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans (1835), which has been frequently reprinted, and has been translated into French and German. See Memoirs of it. and J. A. Haldane, by Alexander Haldane (1852).