Robert Reid Kalley

Robert Reid Kalley, the so-called "Wolf from Scotland", was a pioneer missionary to the Portugese island of Madeira and to the people of Brazil. Kally, however, had wanted to go as a missionary to China. In the 1830's he made preparations to go. He married in 1838, but just before the marriage his soon to be wife developed pneumonia, which proved to be the beginning of tuberculosis. And so the door to missionary service in China was closed to Kalley. However, God is so good to his people that China did in fact benefit greatly from Kalley. W. B. Forsyth comments, "In January 1838 he (Kalley) was invited to speak at a meeting convened by the Church of Scotland Missionary Society, at which he spoke of the urgent need for the gospel to reach the Far East. As he spoke a young man felt the call to offer for missionary service. That young man was William Chalmers Burns who, in 1846, eventually reached China under the auspices of the English Presbyterian Missionary Society and blazed a trail in China for others to follow."

If Burns' name is unfamiliar, he served the church at Dundee in Scotland when Robert Murray McCheyne, the pastor, and Andrew Bonar traveled to Israel to see the state of the Jews there. William Chalmers Burns brought great revivals to that church in Scotland.