By Dr. MOODY STUART.
WHILE Dr. Duncan’s direct influence in conversion was limited, few men took so deep an interest in the work of conversion through others, and he was remarkably used and honoured in that relation. William Burns, who was more employed in such work than any other preacher in Scotland, owed to him under God those deep views of divine truth which so fitted him for the evangelistic field, and so moved him to enter into it. With his conversion he had nothing to do, but he was the main instrument in his more special preparation for reaping that great Gospel harvest. “I was not his spiritual father,” he said, “but I think I was his nurse.” It always appeared to me that except for Dr. Duncan’s spiritual influence and teaching, William Burns would never have been the great evangelist he was. Their two minds seemed, indeed, to have nothing in common except a singular aptitude for languages in both; and even in this they were very different, because Burns’ practical turn came out in a fluent use of living tongues, in which the other was quite defective. Before he went to China, Dr. Duncan, who urged and prevailed with him to go, said: “You need not expect ever to acquire Chinese so as to speak it; you must be satisfied with writing it.” Yet in a few years he learned not only to speak the Chinese, but to interpret between Chinamen of different provinces.
While he studied in Glasgow, some years after his conversion, and when the edge of his spirit had been partially blunted, he received under Dr. Duncan’s ministry a new and far deeper baptism of the Spirit than at first, by which he was specially fitted for the work to which he was to be called. At a large meeting of those who had profited by his ministrations in Perth, he said: “If you have got any good from me, you owe it all to that remarkable man of God, Dr. Duncan of Edinburgh. I have just taught you what he has taught me.” He added, “When leaving Edinburgh, I asked him, ‘What advice will you now give me?’ He answered, ‘Take you care of His cause, and He will take care of your interests; look after His glory, and He will look after your comfort.'”
Dr. Duncan’s deep views of Divine realities came out in a practical form in the ministry of William Burns, who was endowed with a strong will, an indomitable energy, an unflinching courage, and an unfailing self-possession and practical shrewdness, which were all of them lacking in his spiritual father.
Perhaps the one spiritual feature that was exactly and conspicuously the same in both was their deep sense of “the exceeding sinfulness of sin”; but the spiritual affinity was very marked in most of their leading characteristics, although modified by their mutual differences. The greatness of God, and the value of his own soul in Dr. Duncan, came out in Burns’ practical mind in the greatness of eternity and the value of the souls of many; but each of these elements was strong in both.
Burns did not question his own conversion like Duncan, but he was quite as sensible of spiritual desertion and darkness, and at some periods of his ministry was quite as frequent with the cry:—”O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” When a good Wesleyan minister said to him in one of these states, “We should let our light shine before men,” he quietly replied, “But what if there’s no light to shine?” This was just Dr. Duncan’s spiritual exercise in a slightly modified form.
On the other hand, Dr. Duncan, though so anxiously occupied with the state of his own soul, was singularly alive to every awakening in the souls of others. When in 1839 there was that great awakening which spread over much of the country, he had no influence at the moment on the beginning of William Burns’ revival power, which he received neither from man, nor by man, but from God by the Spirit. Burns was not living in Glasgow at the time; but while ministering to Mr. McCheyne’s church at Dundee, he visited his father at Kilsyth, and in preaching after the communion the Spirit came with great power on himself and on his hearers. But Dr. Duncan was one of the first to visit the scene, for his heart was absorbed in the work as soon as it commenced. So it was always to the close of his life; he was sensitively alive to every work of the Spirit in the conversion of men to God, and no other interest could turn him aside from entering into such a work with all his heart, as the greatest and most attractive of all interests. However engrossed with other subjects, any spiritual awakening near him would immediately engage his whole heart and mind. At Kilsyth he preached with great power from the words, “Deliver from going down to the pit: I have found a ransom.” He also conversed earnestly with Mr. Burns on bringing out more broadly the sovereignty of God in his preaching, and said to him, “To leave out election is to leave out the keystone of the arch.” In his later years he held the same truth quite as firmly, but did not insist on its having so large a place in the preaching of the Gospel as during his ministry in Glasgow. If it was not denied or set aside, he listened with delight and approval to preaching in which it found less place than at Kilsyth.
Next to William Burns, there was perhaps scarcely any man in our church who surpassed Dr. Duncan in a deep, abiding, life-long interest in the reviving of the work of God in the land; and he entered into it with a fulness of sympathy peculiar to himself. He joined in sympathy with those who waited in prayer for the outpouring of the Spirit, he took part with God’s children in praising the Lord for his goodness, and he dealt individually with inquirers. He was in sympathy with the preachers in yearning with pity for perishing men, and in testifying repentance toward God and faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ and he loved to take part in their preaching. But he was also in sympathy with the awakened hearers in the personal exercise of repentance and faith, and in “desiring as a new-born babe the sincere milk of the word,” and sometimes he seated himself among the inquirers as one of them. He did so afterwards within two years of his death; and he did so at this time on one occasion at Kilsyth, when Mr. Burns had invited inquirers to remain and to take seats set apart for themselves. Some of the assisting ministers were not prepared for this step, and did not enter into it; but to their astonishment Dr. Duncan went forward to one of the separated seats. His friends, supposing that he had made a mistake, went up to him and said, “That seat is for the anxious.” “But I’m anxious,” was his earnest reply. He did not take his place as one out of Christ, but as anxious to know if he was certainly in Christ.
So extreme a step was occasioned by his extreme doubting of his own salvation; yet doubt was not the only nor perhaps the chief ingredient. The only elements he had no sympathy with were pride, hardness of heart, ungodliness, worldliness. Of an orthodox minister he would sometimes say, “He’s too unbroken for me”; but wherever there was spiritual work he would enter into it in all its spheres. For him to seat himself among the inquirers was not going outside the spiritual circle, but was numbering himself with those who were repenting toward God and seeking the Lord Jesus Christ. It arose from a mistaken view of his own relation to God; but his state of mind was not what a stranger would have inferred from his inquiring attitude, which was really not very far from the place of the saint rejoicing in Christ, and of the preacher witnessing to His grace. To him the whole lay within the circle of those whom the Spirit was teaching and leading.
His doubt was a great and evident defect; yet, while the praise cannot be assigned to the doubt, there were spiritual fruits accompanying it which are comparatively rare and which seem to be often hindered by assurance perverted into self-confidence. During forty-five years of a pilgrim life in the wilderness, he preserved his heart in a singular childlike softness, and his conscience most sensitively tender. To a degree far higher than in most believers, he was “kept by the power of God” from all hardness of heart, and throughout his course he “took heed to himself, lest he should be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” From first to last he listened with an open ear to the words, “To-day, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”
In the awakening in Ireland in 1859, and that which followed in Scotland, he took the same interest as in Kilsyth twenty years before. At one season of this latter period of spiritual concern, judging partly from what he saw, and partly from the impression on his own spirit, he said, “We are within a very little of a general awakening among the working classes in Edinburgh”; but the tide receded before reaching its fulness. He thoroughly understood the manifold sifting to which such a work must be subjected in the end; but he was not staggered in rejoicing over the fair blossoms and promises of fruit, although he knew well that much that promised fair would bring forth no fruit to perfection. Regarding the signs of a saving change he exercised a large catholicity of judgment. There was no kind of spiritual exercise to which he was himself a stranger, from the highest to the lowest, from the deepest to the simplest, and he rejoiced in every varied token of spiritual life. But he had himself, after his acceptance of Christ, learned much experimentally in the conviction of sin, in acquiescence in the Divine sovereignty, and in other spiritual teachings which many are taught before obtaining any sense of forgiveness; and when he was asked regarding any particular element of spiritual light being essential to conversion, his answer was, “It is one of the teachings of the Spirit, but a man does not need to learn it before his conversion. If he is a child of God he will be taught it some time, either before or after, sooner or later.”