 McCosh was in a good position to make this assessment. As a student at the University of Glasgow he acquired a wide knowledge of the tradition (though this seems to have been due more to the library than the lecture hall), and later while a divinity student at Edinburgh he attended Hamilton's lectures. Ordained to the ministry of the Church of Scotland in 1834, McCosh got caught up in the conflicts that eventually led to the great Disruption of 1843, and split the national church for almost 100 years. Though he ministered faithfully for the Free church side, he also found time to continue with his philosophical studies and in 1850 published The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral, a work that eventually ran to thirteen editions. On the strength of this book, McCosh was offered the Professorship of Logic and Metaphysics at the Queen's College Belfast, part of the newly created National University of Ireland. Eighteen years later he accepted the Presidency of the College of New Jersey (subsequently Princeton University) where he also taught moral philosophy, even after his retirement from the Presidency in 1888.