Alexander Moody Stuart
John Duncan died when he was 74, after a few weeks’ illness, on 26 February 1870. One Sabbath evening, three years before his death, he broke out into this soliloquy: “There are heaps of things in the past: mercies, sins, forgivenesses; in 70 years and more there is a great deal to look back to. Alas, I have never done a sinless action during it all; I have never done a sinless action during the 70 years. I don’t say but by God’s grace there may have been some holy action done, but never a sinless action during the 70 years. What an awful thing is human life! And what a solemn consideration it should be to us that we have never done a sinless action all our life, that we have never done one act that did not need to be pardoned.”
He added afterwards, with singular self-knowledge, but with a judgement of himself too severe to be just: “I wish I had a little more personal faith. I think with the Psalmist that these things are more precious ‘than gold, yea, than much fine gold’; but I cannot go so well with him in that, that they are ‘sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb’. I stick at that; that has been often a plague with me; the precious things were more as casketed jewels than as meat and drink. They delight the intellect; but O, I wish I had a loving heart! I go mourning all the day for want of it. Hence I think that promise has been sometimes dear to me: ‘The Lord thy God shall circumcise thy heart to love the Lord thy God’.”
The last time that I saw him on his deathbed he said to me: “Pray for me, pray for pardon, and pray for purity, for I am still in the body”. A few days before his end, he said to a friend in the ministry, “I have been at the point of death, the point of death”; and then raising himself, he added, “But I found that the one great mysterious death of Calvary was all I needed at the point of death”. Years before, he had expressed his sense of his great unworthiness in the last of his recorded sayings in the Colloquia: “If there is anything in which I would be inclined to contradict Him, it would be if I heard Him say, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant'”. And, remarkably enough, the moment after the Lord Jesus had received his spirit, his attendant uttered over him those very words, “Well done, good and faithful servant”.
1An extract from Moody Stuart’s The Life of John Duncan (originally published as Recollections). It has been republished by the Banner of Truth and is available from the Free Presbyterian Bookroom. The fuller Life of John Duncan and Rich Gleanings From Rabbi Duncan have been published by Free Presbyterian Publications and are also available from the Bookroom.
The close of Psalm 45 was one of the Bible scenes on which he loved to dwell, not to open it, but to linger over it: “She shall be brought unto the King in raiment of needlework: the virgins her companions that follow her shall be brought unto Thee. With gladness and rejoicing shall they be brought: they shall enter into the King’s palace.”
For the unseen and the future he liked to drink from the well of the pure Word of life, without adding words of others, or of his own, and to draw for himself thoughts sweet and many from a source that might seem, to minds less thoughtful, little more than “a spring shut up [and] a fountain sealed”. These words he interpreted of the disembodied spirit carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom, and he applied them to the spirits of just men who had recently been removed from among ourselves. At the time of his own departure from this world, while remembering his application of this passage to others, and while thinking of it in connection with himself, it seemed to me as if in the company of the blessed receiving him into the everlasting habitations, the inquiry might be made, “Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness leaning on the Beloved?” and that they might be answered with the reply: This is he who, when bidden to the marriage feast, went and sat down in the lowest room.