BY THE LATE REV. JAMES S. SINCLAIR.*
THE spiritual firmament of the Free Protestant Church of Scotland at the time of the memorable Disruption in 1843 was, by the gracious blessing of God, adorned with a galaxy of stars of the first magnitude—men of eminent grace, commanding gifts, and untiring energy in the service of Christ. There were burning and shining lights in those days, in the enjoyment of whose bright, warm, and holy radiance thousands of God’s people delighted to walk. Glory then dwelt in marked degree in our land, and not until the Spirit is poured again from on high will the present wilderness blossom anew as the rose. One of these bright, shining stars in the spiritual firmament of the past forms the subject of the present lecture. Not that Dr. Duncan occupied so prominent a place before the eyes of the Church as some other men of renown who might be mentioned—Drs. Chalmers, Cunningham, Candlish, Begg, Macdonald, and others—who were outstanding and active leaders in church courts and on platforms in all practical efforts for the advancement of the evangelical cause. The star to which our attention is presently directed may be said to have been less conspicuous to general view, not because he was of less magnitude, but because he moved, for most part, in a more select and exalted orbit than others—more among the infinities and eternities than among the ordinary things of time and sense. His biographer (Dr. Brown) justly said of him that he was “one of the most remarkable men of this or of any age,” remarkable for profound and varied thoughts, vast learning, deep humility, intense spirituality, and exclusive devotedness to the service of the Lord Jesus. True, he was also remarkable for a certain absence of mind and irregularity in the ordinary habits of life, as well as for an incurable aversion to the pen—(almost all his discourses and striking sayings were taken down by others)—but possibly all this was divinely ordered so as to prevent hero-worship and glorying in men on the part of admiring friends, dispositions to which fallen human nature, even in the best regulated persons, is exceedingly prone. So much, briefly, by a way of introduction; now to the narrative. I shall begin at the beginning of his life’s history.
John Duncan was born of humble and pious parentage in the year 1796 at Gilcomston, in the parish of Old Machar, Aberdeen. His father, whose Christian name also was John, was “a plain working shoemaker” to trade, and a member of the Original Secession Church to religious profession. His mother, Ann Mutch, was the daughter of a well-to-do farmer and blacksmith, who lived in the country outside of Aberdeen. Originally of the Established Church, she became a member of the Secession Church before she married. Being on a visit to some relatives in Aberdeen, she was persuaded by an acquaintance to go to the Secession Church, where she heard the Rev. James Templeton, a worthy minister of the gospel. “From that day,” Dr. Brown tells us, “she worshipped nowhere else; the grace of God took possession of her heart; her whole character was changed. By her Christian influence, a brother and sister joined her; and all three, being received into full communion with the Secession Church, walked every Lord’s Day from Belhelvie (their native place) to Aberdeen and back, a distance of twelve miles, to church.” Mr. Duncan, senior, was a member of this congregation, and it was, to all appearance, here that Ann Mutch and he made their first acquaintance.
There were several children by the marriage, but all died in infancy except John, who was the eldest, and he was at best a weakly boy. It is related that an attack of small-pox at a very early age “brought him to the gates of death.” One of his mother’s sisters came to see him die, but as she stood and looked upon the poor infant, these words from the 118th Psalm (metrical version) strongly entered her mind: “I shall not die but live, and shall the works of God discover.” This, a message of hope concerning the recovery of the apparently dying child, proved also a prediction of future experience and usefulness, as after years verified, to the very full. The terrible disease of small-pox, however, left with him one serious physical defect. It deprived him of the total sight of an eye. In after life he used playfully to boast to his friend, Dr. Brown, that he could see better with his one eye than most people could do with their two—a feature, indeed, in the sphere of mental perception that was abundantly demonstrated.
His mother died when he was five or six years of age. This was to him a great loss. As her only surviving child, he was the subject of many prayers. Her warm, loving, and prayerful breath was withdrawn from him, and he was left to the care of his father, who, though a good man, was exceptionally stern and hard of temperament. His maternal uncle and aunt, who now dwelt in Old Aberdeen, showed him, however, the greatest sympathy and kindness; and a wonderful boy they thought him. From his very earliest years he exhibited a predilection for the work of preaching. He would often mount a chair and imitate the minister, and when sent to school he might be observed getting up on a cart and giving a harangue in preaching fashion to his companions who assembled. Dr. Brown also relates that one day “his aunt went to dig potatoes in a field which they had near the sea, taking John with her on her back. On reaching the spot he descried over her shoulder a ship in the distance, and directing her attention to it, exclaimed, ‘That’s the ship that’s to take me to preach to the heathen.’ ‘But what if they winna hear you?’ ‘Then I’ll gang to some other place,’ cried the quick little fellow. Alongside this desire for the ministry there sprang up an intense passion for learning. Even when very young he longed for the day when he would enter the university. On one occasion, when he was very ill, he was heard to exclaim several times, “O that God would spare me till I get on the red cloakie!” the red gown worn by the Aberdeen University students.
I cannot omit to notice here that Mr. Duncan, senior, married a second time, when the boy was about eight years of age. His wife, whose name was Sophia Sutherland, was, at the time of their union, an Episcopalian, but she afterwards became a staunch Seceder. Step-mothers have often the reputation of being cold and unsympathetic towards the children who are not their own offspring, but it was far from being so in the present case. She stepped into the relationship in the most affectionate and motherly spirit, and proved a noble substitute for the tender parent he had lost. Dr. Duncan regarded his step-mother to the day of her death with the deepest “gratitude, affection, and reverence.” She was truly an excellent Christian woman, who loved him all the more when he became, in after years, a monument of divine grace and a humble follower of the Lamb. In his boyhood days she perceived that there was something uncommon about him, and that education was the life he was fitted for. His father insisted that he should become a shoemaker like himself, and put him on a stool in their little kitchen, which served as a workshop, but he was a failure in acquiring the art of shoemaking. “In his awkward fingers,” says his biographer, “everything went wrong; threads were badly waxed; soles were spoiled, and patches were botched,” until at length his tears and sobs aroused all the sympathies of his devoted step-mother, and she prevailed upon his father to take him off the working stool. As I have already hinted, his father was severe to a fault, as many parents were in those olden days—in our time the pendulum has largely swung to the opposite pole of indulgence—and the result was that the boyish resentment would sometimes show itself in almost amusing ways. Being displeased with his father’s severity on one occasion, when he was probably learning Latin at the Aberdeen Grammar School, he made his last will and testament in these brief but comprehensive and rhythmical terms: “Omne matri, nihil patri” (to mother all, to father nothing).
The city of Aberdeen is famous for its Grammar School, an educational institution of great value, which has had a succession of distinguished masters from almost time immemorial. John Duncan entered this school in the year 1805-6, when he was nine years old. Here he spent five years, and had the reputation of being a clever scholar. His passion for languages then began to show itself, and also his passion for a subject, at the time apparently beyond his years, metaphysics. Long after he said to Professor Knight, “When at the Grammar School of Aberdeen I got hold of a volume of George Campbell (a Principal and Professor of Divinity at Aberdeen), in which he ridicules as lamentable folly the notion that to God there is no past, present, or future—to Him all are one. I remember well how I abhorred George Campbell for that. I thought it the most magnificent chapter I had ever met with.” It must not be concluded, however, that the budding metaphysician and profound linguist was a mere dreamy bookworm and recluse. He was as full of fun and frolic as any other boy, and went for his holidays to an uncle’s farm some miles north of Aberdeen, where he tended the cattle and played with a cousin during the vacation season. At the age of fourteen he matriculated at the University for the first time, and so at last got on the red cloakie, which had been the object of his earnest longing even on a sick bed years before. One would have naturally expected that a youth of his uncommon ability and passionate devotion to books would have won a brilliant place in his University classes, but the result was not so. The irregularity in study and the absent-mindedness that characterised him all through life began to manifest themselves. He was probably reading far more than any student there in various departments of literature, but to stick to the methodical routine of class study was by no means his forte, and so he failed to take any place of distinction in his classes. Books, however, were his constant companions in all circumstances, whether he was sitting at home or walking by the way, and though mental absent-mindedness was one side of his character, mental absorption was another side. Whatever subject he was interested in at the moment, it absorbed all his attention to the forgetfulness of everything else. On one occasion he was walking along on the south turnpike road of Aberdeen intensely reading a book. He became so absorbed in it that not till “his weary limbs” began to fail did he look up to find himself well-nigh at Stonehaven, a distance of nearly sixteen miles. He finished his course at the University, and took his degree of M.A. in the spring of 1814.
By this time Mr. Duncan had also become a student in divinity. It was customary for young men who were going forward to the ministry in connection with the Constitutional Associate Presbytery (Anti-Burgher) to begin their divinity studies between the third and fourth years of their Arts course. He was admitted as a divinity student by the Presbytery on 27th July, 1813, and attended a short session in divinity, beginning on the 1st of September. He was orthodox in his views at this period, but he was far from being spiritually prepared for the ministerial office. In 1816 he left the Secession and joined the Established Church of Scotland. He became a member in the congregation of the famous Dr. James Kidd, minister of Gilcomston Chapel of Ease, and Professor of Oriental Languages in Marischal College, Aberdeen. Dr. Kidd was a man of marked individuality and a powerful preacher of the gospel, whose wholesome influence was felt over all the city of Aberdeen, but his faithful ministry did not produce any beneficial impression at this stage on the mind of young Duncan, as he himself bore testimony years afterwards. In January, 1817, he presented himself for enrolment as a student of divinity in the Established Church of Scotland. His father, not too pleased already that he had left his own (the Secession) Church, and knowing the spiritual unfitness of his son for the ministry, was nearly distracted, and went to Dr. Brown, the Professor of Divinity, with “heavy complaints” against him, so as, if possible, to prevent his admission. But it would appear that the complaints were not of such a definite nature as could be handled to found proceedings upon in a concrete way, and so Dr. Brown, after consultation with Dr. Kidd, who had given a certificate in Duncan’s favour, could not refuse to enrol him. He was, therefore, enrolled in regular form.
But the worst has not yet been told. It was his own startling confession, uttered at different times to intimate friends during his future history, with expressions of deep sorrow, that he was an Atheist when he first entered the Divinity Hall of the Established Church. Referring in particular to the class of Dr. Mearns, one of the professors, he said, “I was an Atheist when I entered his class.” Again, “I had a good upbringing, but I broke off from it. I had three years of dreary Atheism, and during the time I made a doctrinal atheist of a pupil of mine who died.” And still again he said, “I was much indebted to Dr. Mearns. . . . It was under him that I gave up Atheism.” To another friend (Mr. Knight) he expressed himself to the effect that he was three years a Spinozist or Pantheist, and to others, still, that he fell into materialistic Atheism, denying the existence of God, of angelic spirit and of human soul.” Putting these testimonies together, he concluded that he fell for a short season, to begin with, into complete materialism, and that he afterwards rose to the slightly more elevated platform of Pantheism, but regarded it as no better than Atheism in effect. Having lost all definite belief in a personal Deity, and esteeming the all of the universe to be God and God to be the all, without conscious existence, there is no doubt he was only a shade in intellectual belief above black and unmitigated Atheism, and he manifestly esteemed himself to be without any God in the strict sense of the word to look to or exercise confidence in. One hopeful sign was that he was not happy in this condition. The years of Pantheistic Atheism were “dreary years,” years of darkness and misery.
Dr. Mearns, the distinguished professor, was, by God’s blessing, his deliverer out of this horrible pit, although for years afterwards he was Christless. Dr. Mearns’ impressive prayers and “severely rational and convincing” lectures combined to produce this favourable result. He came now to a definite belief in a personal God, transcendent above the universe, although immersed in it, and this intellectual conviction (which he never afterwards lost) appears to have been followed and backed by a ray of divine light, for he said in one of his accustomed walks to his friend, Miss Robertson, “When I was convinced that there was a God, I danced on the Brig o’ Dee with delight, though I had a fear that He would damn me. Atheism would have been better than the certainty of damnation, but there was not that (certainty).” Pantheistic Atheism had only been a philosophy of desolation, darkness, and despair, and freedom from its awful bondage was a joyful deliverance.
“But,” as his biographer says, “Mr. Duncan’s joy at this stage was the joy of an intellectual rather than a spiritual repose, a joy chequered by the vivid consciousness that he neither was nor at that time was willing to be at peace with God. . . . Hence he had the fear that God would damn him!” From this time we learn that for a period of nine years he was little troubled with theological difficulties, and concerned himself but little about his spiritual state. As to matters of faith, “he entrenched himself in a loose Sabellianism concerning the Trinity, untroubled by any questions about the Divinity of Christ, the Atonement, and other great doctrines of the Gospel.” The daily “round of teaching, reading, deep thinking, company, and attendance during the session at the Divinity Hall made up his life now for long years.” And yet this period was not unfruitful—very far from it. In fact, it was during those years that he acquired a large measure of that vast knowledge which he afterwards displayed of the classical and Oriental languages, of the literature of philosophy and theology, and of the poetry, history, and general literature of his own country. He became known among his fellow-students as one distinguished for his acquirements in classical literature. During one of the sessions he was prizeman for a Latin essay, and the Professor said that his was the only essay that was thought out in the language in which it was written. He also attached himself to some of the Highland students that he might acquire some knowledge of Gaelic, and this he actually attained.
Dr. Duncan came to the close of his divinity course in 1821, but for four years thereafter he hesitated to take license, unable as he then was honestly to subscribe the Westminster Confession of Faith. At last, in 1825, he presented himself for license, not because he had changed his doctrinal views, but because he had changed his views of subscription to articles of faith, regarding them now only as peace articles, in subscribing which licentiates only pledge themselves not to preach against them. In looking back upon this step he always spoke of it with abhorrence and grief. To Miss Robertson he said, less than a year before he died, “I took license in unbelief, in ungodliness, and, in doctrinal unbelief and heresy.” “How did they let you pass?” she asked. “Because I was a hypocrite,” was his reply, “not willingly, for I kept back for long; but at last people were upon me, and out of very shame I acted the hypocrite; I did not choose to tell others why I was not taking license.” The words contain a solemn message, I fear, to many who are entering the office of the ministry in the several Churches of to-day. He was licensed by the Presbytery to preach the Gospel on the 24th of June, 1825, and his first sermon was preached in the West Church, Aberdeen, from 1 John iii. 1—”Behold what manner of love the father hath bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God.” He called it in later years a tremendously bad sermon—a sermon of the most artful theology that perhaps ever was spoken, explaining away every evangelical doctrine and phrase. Dr. Brown, who was present, reports that “apart from its vital defects, there was a calm, contemplative, high, half-poetic, half-mystic strain about it, which had a most fascinating effect upon the hearer; accordingly, all was still attention, and a sort of wonder pervaded the audience.”
(To be continued.)