By Dr. MOODY STUART.
[It has often been a pleasant and edifying experience of God’s people when they were privileged to be in the company of God’s servants or people to feel the warmth and enlivening that such intercourse brought to them. In the absence of their bodily presence their letters, sermons or biographies are often useful to the same end. In the following extract from Dr. Moody Stuart’s Recollections of Doctor Duncan we are presented with features of the preaching of men whose labours were signally blessed of the Holy Spirit and to the edification of true believers. These were servants of the Most High God and it is with pleasure one reads of the outstanding features of their preaching by one who himself fed the flock of God.]
“McCHEYNE’s mind plays about the lighter aspects of theology,” was an old criticism of Dr. Duncan’s which I have great hesitation in writing down, both because the estimate is not just in itself, and because he would probably have withdrawn it in his riper age, for he survived McCheyne twenty-seven years. McCheyne’s doctrine was not so profound as his own; but with all his gentleness he exceeded Dr. Duncan in a holy severity, and even sternness, and in his teaching he was far from shunning the severer aspects of divine truth. But I have written Dr. Duncan’s words because it may help to bring out some parts of his character more distinctly, if we compare them with corresponding, or rather with contrasted features in the character of Mr. McCheyne.
McCheyne and he both used to assist me at Communions; they met each other, and heard each other preach; they loved and honoured each other in the Lord; but their minds were in many respects unlike, and were not mutually attractive. The genius in Duncan and the poetry in McCheyne were indeed of one family; but these lines so kindred were lost in a general unlikeness, and I question if McCheyne learned almost anything from Dr. Duncan, who was neither lucid enough nor joyful enough for him. He had not the opportunity, like William Burns, of sitting under his ministry; but if he had been in Glasgow he would probably have preferred Dr. John Muir, whose lively exposition of the gospel he enjoyed, and of whom he used to say, “Muir is imputed righteousness to the backbone.” McCheyne with all his meekness had a resolute will; his views of divine truth were clear and determined before he knew Dr. Duncan, and were of a simpler character; and he did not readily yield his matured thoughts to be moulded even by men of the highest intellect.
McCheyne’s strength was in his rare singleness of eye, which kept the whole body full of light, and in which it was hard to name his equal. Duncan with all his abstraction was not always free from self-consciousness; and would occasionally make or repeat his remarks, not from the simple impulse of the moment, and with a mingling of self-satisfaction. The elements of McCheyne’s mind and character were admirably mingled. In his doctrine, in his experience, in his daily walk, he was so free from extremes, that want of variety and tameness might have been anticipated as the result; but on the contrary the Lord had moulded him to fit as great a multitude of minds as if his thoughts had been commonplace, while they were full of strength and beauty. In Duncan, thoughts, experience, and all things about him, not mingled and tempered at all, poured out in large separate masses with which few minds found sympathy. Many of McCheyne’s hearers would have thought that the effect of his preaching was partly owing to a halo of interest attaching to himself, and that his words would lose not a little when committed to print; but they are more powerful when read and when disengaged from all that was adventitious. Duncan was far more dependent on an audience, although a very small one would satisfy him; and his thoughts did not lose but gained immensely by its presence. If it could not be termed his oratory, it was his spirit, his voice, his manner, and his nice balancing of the power of all his words; so that if they had been written down word for word, some of his ideas would seem to have been lost in the transference, and the whole to have been not a little impoverished.
McCheyne, whose writings since his death have been so largely read and with so much profit, was himself disposed in the later years of his brief career to read little except the Bible. Duncan, who wrote nothing for others to read, was an omnivorous reader of other men’s writings. McCheyne was scrupulously methodical; Duncan entirely devoid of method. McCheyne with all his poetry did not care for what was speculative, but liked all that was practical; practical in theology, practical in spiritual exercise, practical in dealing with the conscience, practical in duty. In conversing on our relation to Christ, he said to me in his practical way, “I hold Christ’s work to be mainly a plan of recovery.” “Yes; but through eternity these words will continue true, ‘I am the vine, and ye are the branches.'” “When you put it in that way,” he replied, “I cannot answer you.” But when I made some other statement, the solidity of which he questioned, he closed my lips by asking, “Would you preach that to your people?” These practical habits of mind were the exact antipodes of Dr. Duncan’s; and to know him the picture has only to be reversed. Yet he could speak well on a practical subject, and would say admirably, “Christ does not ask, ‘What think ye more than others,’ but ‘What do ye more than others?'” The one, while no stranger to sorrow, walked in a clear and quiet daylight; the other soared to the home of the lightning and the secret place of thunder, and was apt to sink again into the darkness of chaos. If an intimate friend of both may venture to judge, Duncan had more to contend with in himself, was less watchful, less equal, and less helpful to others in daily intercourse; but had a deeper conviction of sin, higher views of the glory of God, fuller discoveries of Christ, a more inward entrance into the secret of his pavilion, and a holiness more intensely desired, but more intermittently held.