AT this period of his life (after his return from Pesth) his great desire was to break up the surface religion both of self-called and of sincere Christians. Some years later he entered with all his might into the awakening of the world out of death; but now his whole heart was set upon the awakening of the Church out of sleep. The “hypocrisy” of the name to live, over the stagnation and all but the corruption of death, which had been so terribly disclosed to him in Aberdeen two years after his conversion, and “the coldish admiration of Christ,” which he felt creeping over him in Glasgow, he also saw prevailing in the Church. This complacent security he denounced as Antinomian; not that it rested on a doctrine verbally Antinomian, or resulted in a walk openly sinful; but it consisted with a conscience very partially alive to the holiness of God, the sinfulness of sin, and the unchangeable demands of the law, “Thou shall love thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself.” There was no depth or duration of doubt that he did not prefer to this carnal confidence, which he set himself most resolutely to dash in pieces; intent only to break down the pretentious evil, and leaving it to the Lord to rebuild the purified truth in the hearts and lives of his people. “A ‘perhaps’ of salvation, he said, “works more in some souls than all the fulness of the gospel in others.” The preaching of “repentance toward God,” as addressed to the Church as well as to the world, he earnestly insisted on; and often repeated the words, “Except ye repent ye shall perish.” “If there were universal salvation,” he said, “there would be universal repentance.” He was jealous of taking one half of a text and leaving out the other, the practical half, as in repeating the words, “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten,” and omitting the rest, “Be zealous therefore and repent.” He was afraid of believers feeding on the promises and neglecting the precepts of the Bible. “Why make a book,” he asked, “out of a collection of the promises? Why not as well make a collection of the precepts into a book?”—Recollections of the late John Duncan, LL.D., pp. 93-95.