HE himself said, less than a year before he died, “I took license in unbelief, in ungodliness, and doctrinal unbelief and heresy.” Notwithstanding a godly upbringing, he had entered on his divinity studies an atheist. To such a depth of skepticism had he sunk, that one day, on seeing a horse passing, he said to himself, ‘There is no difference between that horse and me.’ Under a grave and powerful teacher he gave up atheism, although for years afterwards unchanged in heart. As he related, “When I was convinced that there was a God, I danced on the brig o’ Dee with delight, though I had fear that He would damn me.” But the joy was an intellectual emotion. Henceforward, for a period of nine years, he was little troubled with theological difficulties, and concerned himself but little about his spiritual state — indeed, scarcely about his moral reputation. Yet so unsubdued was his intellectual pride, that he resolved to “stand out against all the doctrines.” It was indeed, in the words of his biographer, a “conversion to theism, not to God; to Christianity, not to Christ.” After eight of the nine years had passed, and he was duly licensed as a minister, he preached his first sermon. 1 John 3:1 was the text. It was a fascinating sermon “of the most artful neology that perhaps ever was spoken, explaining away every evangelical doctrine and phrase” —a beautiful picture, without life and void of all moral power; a sermon unavailing for a sin-stricken soul.
Another year rolled away. The well-known Caesar Malan was to visit Aberdeen, and a faithful friend purposed to bring the two together. First of all, however, his friend sought opportunity to visit him and press the all-important question of his soul’s welfare. For hours they walked to and fro in earnest conversation; midnight was reached, and in the early hours of the morning the following conversation took place: “Tell me,” said his friend, “what of natural and revealed religion you hold to, that I may know what coon ground we have.” This appeal had a wonderful effect. He stood stock still. Then turning round to the other with unusual solemnity, he said: “David, I must now be plain with you. I have come to believe in the Jewish religion and in Christianity as the complement of it. But the doctrines I can’t and won’t believe — I mean the divinity and atonement of Christ.” “But what if they are written in that Bible which you say you admit? You’ll have to believe them. Ay, friend, that towering Luciferian pride of yours must come down, and you must become a little child, willing to be taught, else you have no part in the kingdom of heaven, for Christ, your Master, says so. But tell me this: What has your religion done for you? I know what mine has done for me — what has yours done for you?”
“Well, not much, I confess. To tell you the truth, the words heaven ‘and hell’ sound in my ears with as little effect as the words ‘tables’ and ‘chairs.’ And yet I do sometimes feel a little.”
“What you feel is not the question. What I want you to tell me is, Are you holy?” I knew, said his friend, I was here touching a sore place. So, looking him full in the face — the dim light now just sufficient to reveal his cowering look — I awaited his answer. “No,” he replied, “I am not.”
“No, nor ever will be,” I hastily interposed, “so long as God’s way of salvation from sin is to such ‘Greeks’ as you foolishness; but to us who believe it is the power of God.”
“Ah! David, but that’s just what I can’t take in yet. Can’t I be saved without the doctrines?”
“What! are you going to palter at that rate with so solemn a thing as salvation, trying at how cheap a rate — with how small a sacrifice of your own prepossessions―you can be let off? If my apprehensions and experience are worth anything, all that is worth a straw in Christianity lies in the ‘doctrines.’ Not that I under-value its lofty views of God, of morality, of holiness, of a future state, and so on; but take away the great doctrines that you wince at, and you loosen the foundations on which all the other things rest, and shake the whole edifice. But only surrender your soul to Christ in the gospel, and those great powers of yours, now running to waste, will seem as if they were newly imparted, and go to noble effect.”
“Well, David, all I can say is, I can’t take that in just yet.” His tone and whole manner became subdued. He said, “I know that if I were to die before morning I would go to hell. You speak to me about grace: I don’t know what it is. I have resolved a hundred times to be better; if you can do anything for me, I need it much.”
The next day he was taken to Caesar Malan. Malan had at that time one text with which he used to ply everyone — not as a panacea, as some imagined, but simply as a ready way of getting at people’s spiritual state and bringing matters to a point. “Read that,” he would say, holding up a New Testament at 1 John 5:1, “Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God.” “That will do. Now, do you believe that Jesus is the Christ?” “Yes,” would be the usual answer. “Then you are born of God!” Hesitation would now perhaps appear. “You doubt it, I see. Well, just read it again; ‘He,’ etc. Now, don’t the promises and conclusion hang together?” In the present case the accustomed words were read at Malan’s request; but when the question was put, “Do you believe that Jesus is the Christ?” he made no answer. Again it was put, but still no answer. “Why don’t you answer, friend? Be open with me; speak all your mind.”
“Sir, I cannot answer your question, for I know not what ‘the Christ’ means: if I should say I believe Jesus to be the Christ, I should be saying what to me has just no meaning at all.”
“No matter, I have been myself in the midst of Socinianism; I know it well, and have had to fight my own way up to a living faith. But the question for you just now is, Do you believe what is here written, that He is the Christ on God’s testimony, leaving it to God Himself to teach you what He means by it.”
“The question, even in that view of it, was a trying one to me,” he said to his friend two days after, “for you know I was all at sea about inspiration. But, man, a strange feeling came over me at that moment. Apart from all questions about inspiration, I felt certain that what was there written was God’s truth, so I answered ‘Yes.’”
“Well then,” rejoined Malan, “just go to God, and say, ‘Lord, Thou tellest me Thy dear Son is the Christ, and I believe Thee; but Thou knowest I have been a poor Socinian, and What “the Christ” means I know not. Yet I want to learn, teach Thou me.’ “Seeing the daze he was still in, Malan said, “Dear not, dear friend, the light will soon come. Plant your foot on those words, ‘He that believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God,’ and before the full meaning of the words has entered your understanding, your childlike faith in it will bring the promised change.”
Later in the evening Malan came and touched him on the shoulder and said, “They tell me you are a very learned man. What do you know?” He answered rather petulantly, “I know nothing.” “Well,” was the reply, “I believe that is not exactly what a Christian says. He does not say absolutely, I know nothing. I know Him that is true.” And so they talked till late in the night and going over many things. Our subject himself related afterwards, “I fought against his syllogism. ‘I believe Jesus is the Christ, but I don’t believe that I am born of God.’ At last in our talk I happened to be quoting a text. He started forward and said, ‘See! you have the Word of God in your mouth!’ It passed through me like electricity — the great thought that God meant man to know His mind: God — His Word―in my very mouth. It was, I believe, the seed of perhaps all I have, if I have anything, to this hour.”
Next day he sought his friend saying, “Oh, David, God’s words are law to me now, and I am a child at His feet, seeking simply to learn of Him.” He wanted to know the truth from God’s Word as to those long resisted doctrines, the atonement, the deity of Christ and election. Thankfully he accepted instruction in simple faith. Then he went home and thus described what followed. “As I sat down to study, and took my pen in my hand, I became suddenly the passive recipient of all the truths which I had heard and been taught in my childhood. I sat there unmoving for hours, and they came and preached themselves to me. There was now no investigation such as I had desired; but presentation of the truth to me passive. And I felt, sitting there, as if in that hour I had got matter for sermons for a lifetime.” Now, he found, the temptation to daily sin was gone. He had no longer even to fight with it. Night after night at that time he laid himself down to rest with the infant’s prayer on his lips: —
This night when I lie down to sleep,
I give my soul to Christ to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
So it came about in the Lord’s mercy to a famous Hebrew professor of the Free Church of Scotland. The key to the real and radical change will be found where he himself placed it — in the new light in which revealed truth flashed upon his soul during his conversation with Malan, and in which he beheld it from that hour to the day of his death. Thenceforward the Scriptures were God’s Voice to his soul as really as though their truths had been addressed to himself by an audible voice from heaven. He came to his Bible in the spirit of the child Samuel, “Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth.” So immense was this transition — from the absence of God and of all certainty in religious truth, notwithstanding his general belief in the Scriptures, to His felt presence and Voice to himself in the Word — that we wonder not at the vivid way in which he describes his emotion, as he grasped for the first time the idea of “God’s Word in his very mouth” — “It passed through me like a flash of electricity.” And certain as it is that this view of the Scriptures remained with him, as a fixed principle and without a moment’s deviation, to the end of his clays, can it be otherwise explained than as a quickening operation from above, a ray of all-transforming light flashing in from heaven upon his dark, disordered, distracted soul?
Pride of intellect received its deathblow. His whole soul rested in that Word of the Lord which endureth forever, in the scale of whose unerring representations every speculation was weighed. Nor was anything more beautiful than that combination in him of unquestioning submission to the testimony of God in His revealed Word with the freest and manliest criticism of all metaphysical and theological theories. ―Extracted in the main from “Life of John Duncan. LL.D.,” by David Brown, D.D.
T. D.
“But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation,” —Rom. 10:8-10.