Rev Neil Cameron
Duncan spent the best part of his life without any concern about his immortal soul’s everlasting destiny. He spent several years in his younger days in the Navy of the United States of America. He told the writer how, on one occasion, he was considered by other sailors of his ship to have been drowned. Being on shore in one of the ports in South America, he was thrown over the pier into the water, and left without any effort made by his drunken comrades to save him. He also was drunk at the time. When the morning light came, he found himself stretched on top of a log of wood beside the pier. How he got there he did not know. It seemed to us to have been one of the proofs, recorded in the history of men who were afterwards saved, of the almost-miraculous intervention of God’s divine providence in their deliverance from immediate death. He had extraordinary escapes from drowning on other occasions, but God preserved him on account of the fact that He had loved him with an everlasting love, and had a fixed purpose of mercy towards him.
The Lord’s time came at last. Duncan went to the communion in Raasay in the summer of 1893, and the Word of God spoke with such authority and power to him that it could neither be disregarded nor resisted. He was then afraid that he had committed sins which the Lord would not and could not forgive, consistently with the glorious majesty of His justice. But by degrees the light of the glorious gospel of Christ began to rise like the morning twilight on his soul, which had been till then in darkness and in the shadow of death. At length the Holy Spirit brought him to the clear light of the gospel by shining into his heart the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. The joy that then filled his soul was comparable to that of the man who has found the treasure hid in a field; he went and sold all he had and bought the field. Duncan’s field ever after was God’s Word, in which he found Christ and in which he was living daily on the true bread which came down from heaven.
After several years had passed by, he became a member in full communion with the Church, and a very faithful and true Free Presbyterian. For the last few years of his earthly pilgrimage he was suffering from anaemia and a weak heart. Owing to his physical condition he was advised to keep to his bed during the winter and early spring, but until the last summer of his life, he was in the habit of attending a few of the communions held in the surrounding districts. At these communions he was always called on Friday to
1Reprinted, with editing, from The Free Presbyterian Magazine for November 1922.
speak at the question meeting. He was not possessed of fluency of speech, but all were bound to feel his absolute sincerity. His presence will be much missed by all of the Lord’s people who had the privilege of knowing him, but especially in the places where he was well known and appreciated.
We desire to express our sincere sympathy with his widow, who was his co-partner in all his spiritual conflicts and his tender nurse during his declining years; and also all who mourn his departure. “All flesh is grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away; but the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.”