Donald Duff’s account of being helped by Halyburton’s Memoirs
I MAY tell you that, owing to certain circumstances, I was led of late to examine my own state for eternity, and to endeavour to determine if I was really what I profess to be, or was I a hypocrite? And I came at length to this conclusion, that since the free grace of God, reigning in righteousness through Christ Jesus, can take a sinner out from under condemnation, and can impart to him a nature at variance with sin, I am not altogether without hope of being found right at last.
While I was weighing this matter, a person who knew nothing of the exercise of my mind happened, strange to say, to recommend me to read the “Memoirs of Thomas Halyburton.” The book was in the house, so I took it up partly from curiosity; but on going through it, I found such remarkable likeness in his experience to my own, that I thought there was an over-ruling Providence in being guided to it at that time. And although he is far ahead of me in many things, both before and after his conversion, yet as to the substance of what he relates, I make bold to say that if he was a converted man, I am not a hypocrite; although the Lord knows I would willingly sit at the feet of such a man and count myself less than the very least of such.
But how increasingly few are they becoming with whom we can take counsel as to these things. How few who can give helpful light on the case of a tried soul, or on the case of the Church of God. And even when we meet together in connection with the exercises of religion, how empty is our conversation, and how little savour of godliness is on our speech. Indeed, it is coming to be considered out of place to speak one to another of the hopes and fears, of the trials and deliverances, that attend the poor people of God in their wilderness journey. This cannot but be displeasing to the Lord, and may be one reason why there is so much cause to take up the language of the prophet: “O, the hope of Israel, the saviour thereof in time of trouble, why shouldest thou be as a stranger in the land, as a wayfaring man that turneth aside to tarry for a night?”
From: Letters of the late Donald Duff, Stratherrick, The Free Presbyterian Magazine, Vol. 13.