By REV. A. MOODY STUART.
THE most marked of all the moral features in Dr. Duncan’s character was humility. He was singularly humble in consideration of his great talents, of his vast treasures of learning, and of his attainments in the divine life. But if we set all these aside, and compare him with other Christian men, we cannot but come to the conclusion that out of all the guests bidden in these days by the King within the circle of our knowledge, it was he that took the lowest room at the feast. It was not that he was unconscious of his talents, or disposed to undervalue his attainments. He knew that he could justify his excessive share of all conversation only on the ground of his thoughts being of more value than most other people’s; and he rather liked to refer to his candidature for the Oriental Chair in the University of Glasgow, when he made an offer for examination in Hebrew Literature in which he knew that no man there was competent to test him. He would quote with a simple pride a sentence in his letter of application, in which in the event of failure he comforted himself with the thought that “Sparta had found a better man”; but with the evident consciousness that for such a position there was no better man to be found in Sparta. But with all his consciousness of intellectual power and literary attainment, the “clothing of humility” covered him from head to foot as it did no other man.
This lowliness was allied to the childlike simplicity which pervaded his whole Christian course, and was made more evident by the helplessness which rendered him so unfit to guide himself in common matters, and so willing to be guided by others. But its root lay in his sense of the majesty of God, which was far more profound than in other men, and humbled him lower in the dust; in his perception and his love of holiness, and the consciousness of his own defect; in his sense of ingratitude for the unparallel love of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in his abiding conviction of past sin and of present sinfulness. This habitual humbling was deepened by the wounding of his very tender conscience, through yielding himself to be carried away by what chanced to take hold of his mind.
These combined elements rendered him an example of an altogether rare and inimitable humility. Men who might be reckoned holier might be named out of those who served the Lord along with him; but among them all it would be hard to find one so humble. The holiness of Rev. Robert Murray McCheyne, if not so deep, was more equal, and more thoroughly leavened the character hour by hour. The holiness of Rev. William Burns was in some respects as deep, and it was singularly constant. They were both more watchful, and therefore more evenly holy. But in the race to stoop down into their Lord’s sepulchre, Dr. John Duncan outran them both; he was the humblest of the three, and all of the men whom most of us have known.
His sitting down among the inquirers at Kilsyth in 1839, and his resuming a similar posture elsewhere at an interval of nearly thirty years, are not to be ascribed to mere anxiety and doubt about his own salvation. Of such doubt he had often more than enough. But the act was also one of simple, childlike, genuine humility, and the fruit of deep self-abasement. When seated at the Lord’s Table with his own intense desire, if there had been a place at once inside and outside of the guests, David’s welcomed place as “a door-keeper in the House of God,” that of all others would have been his chosen seat, the fittest and the happiest place for him as “the chief of sinners,” as “less than the least of all saints.”