Hume was born at Byculla, India, where his parents were missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He was the son of Robert Wilson and Hannah Derby (Sackett) Hume. He was a grandson of Robert Hume of Berwickshire, Scotland, who emigrated to America and settled in Galway, N. Y. , in 1795. On the death of his father in 1854, young Robert went with his mother, a brother, and five sisters to Springfield, Massachussets.
He prepared for college at the Springfield high school and at Williston Academy, and entered Yale in 1864. During his college course he won prizes in English composition and took high rank as a scholar.
After graduation in 1868 he spent the ensuing year as a teacher in General Russell's Collegiate and Commercial Institute, New Haven. He was a student in Yale Divinity School during the next two years and received from the College the degree of M. A. in 1871. He then taught one year in the Edwards School, Stockbridge, Massachussets, and entered Andover Theological Seminary, from which he received the degree of B. D. in 1873. He was ordained to the Congregational ministry on May 10, 1874, in New Haven.
Hume and his wife sailed in August 1874, from New York for Mumbai, via Glasgow, under appointment as missionaries of the American Board. Being assigned on his arrival to Ahmednagar, he began his service there in October. That city was his headquarters during his entire missionary career. He founded there in 1878 a theological seminary, known as United Divinity College since 1921 when the United Free Church of Scotland joined in the work, and remained its head until 1926. This was his chief, although by no means his only, work.
For forty years he was superintendent of the Parner district, west of Ahmednagar, in which over a thousand conversions occurred and eighteen churches and schools were built during his administration. He served at various times as principal of the Ahmednagar high school, opened in 1882, and the Ahmednagar girls' school; as secretary of the Mumbai branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society; as English editor of the Dnyanodaya, an Anglo-Marathi periodical; and he was for a time a member of the Ahmednagar Municipality, and was chosen a delegate to the unofficial Indian National Congress of 1907.
He served by appointment of the Governor of Mumbai on the Presidency Committee on Problems of Religious Mendicancy, and was the only American called to testify before the Montague-Chelmsford commission on reform in Indian government. In 1925 he was chosen the first moderator of the United Church of Northern India, and in 1927 represented the United Church at the World Conference on Faith and Order, held in Lausanne, Switzerland. During his periods of furlough in America, he engaged in various activities, including instruction during 1904-05 in Andover Theological Seminary and the publication of the substance of his course as Missions from the Modern View (1905); the delivery of lectures at the University of Chicago, Oberlin College, Union Seminary, and elsewhere, and their publication as An Interpretation of India's Religious History (1911). In 1919-20 he acted as a professor in the Kennedy School of Missions, Hartford, Connecticut, and served as vice-moderator of the National Council of Congregational Churches.
A prolific writer, in addition to the works already cited he was the author of many translations, articles and pamphlets, including a Marathi version of Ecclesiastical Polity of the New Testament, Christianity Tested by Reason (Mumbai, 1893), A High Emprise (Calcutta, 1916), and an autobiography, "Hume of Ahmednagar". His articles appeared frequently in such periodicals as the Missionary Herald, the Indian Review, the Modern Review, the Indian Interpreter, Young Men of India, and the Missionary Review of the World.
He spent his last days, after retirement from the India service in 1926, at Auburndale, Massachussets, and died in Brookline, Massachussets. His body was cremated at his own request, and his ashes lie in Ahmednagar in the Memorial Church which bears his name.
He was president of the All-India Christian Endeavor Union for the year 1902-03, president in 1914 of the Christian Endeavor Union of the Mumbai Presidency, and president in 1916 of the Mumbai Representative Council of Missions.
On July 7 was married to Abbie Lyon Burgess, daughter of the Rev. Ebenezer Burgess, of New Haven. Hume was twice married. His first wife died at Panchganj, India, July 25, 1881. Two sons and two daughters were born of this union. On September 7, 1887, he was married in Ahmednagar to Katie Fairbank, a missionary in Ahmednagar since 1882, and the daughter of the Rev. Samuel Bacon Fairbank of the Marathi Mission. Three sons and one daughter were born to them.
