BOOKS.
A MODERN SCOTTISH RABBI.*
IN the matriculation-books of the Marischal College and Uni- versity of Aberdeen there occurs the following entry, under the year 1810-11 :—" Joannes Duncan, f. (films) Joannis, calcearii; " and six days before his death, the student whose humble origin is thus laconically chronicled said to a friend:—" I wonder at the goodness of God ; how I have been cared for, provided for,—I, a poor shoemaker's son. Providence has been kind." The shoe- maker's son became ultimately that Free Kirk Professor of Hebrew, whom we had the pleasure of introducing to our readers some months ago under the guidance of Mr. Knight's admirable little volume, Colloquia Peripatetica ; or, Deep-Sea Soundings, of Dr. John Duncan ; and if Mr. Knight has lucidly and dramatically made us acquainted with much of the Professor's thought, thanks to Dr. David Brown's careful, scholarly, and masterly bio- graphy, the world may now learn what manner of man this great philologist and profound metaphysician was. The story of the life of Dr. Duncan was singularly worth telling, and Dr. Brown has told it well. No doubt Dr. Brown's style of writing, like that of many Scotchmen, is hyperfervid and spasmodic. The biographer every now and then gets into the pulpit, and as if he were addressing an audience not of sober-thinking men, but only of adoring females, breaks out into such ejaculations as this one :—" Ah I the haze was dissolving, phantoms were crystallis- ing into concrete realities and the transporting hope of finding solid footing on the rock of positive truth,"—surely language which all modest chemistry would characterise as at once dissolute and precipitate,—and what is of indefinitely greater moment, Dr. Brown fails to perceive that the foetal source of "the mental depression and spiritual darkness," the brooding melan- choly of this great and good man, was simply the grim Calvinism of the Confession of Faith. Nevertheless, here we have the veritable John Duncan, from childhood to old age ; a ragged, venturesome " laddie ;" an idle schoolboy, but always reading ; a riotous, rollicking Aberdeen student, and perilously bibulous, in student days, of strong liquor ; a rationalist, an atheist, a pantheist ; then, after being suddenly converted by Cw..sar Malan, an earnest revivalist parish minister in Glasgow and elsewhere ; a Hebrew of the Hebrews among the Jews in Perth ; and finally, a walking polyglot thesaurus in his class-room in Edinburgh, before the students of which he would, oblivious of the lecture, spend an hour in rapt extem- pore prayer. Always just a trifle queer, but the most guileless of men, grotesquely "absent," prodigious in his consumption of snuff, voracious of books, careless of all order, forgetful of all engagements, always ready to go off into a " colloquy " on metaphysical subjects for hours together, always very lowly in his own eyes, and fired, amid his chaotic habits of life, with the passionate desire to make the Bible and Christ dear to men,—such was our great Hebraist, and we repeat, we owe our beat thanks to Dr. Brown for his vivid presentation of Rabbi Duncan as be went in and out—and how often he indeed seemed to go quite out! —among men.
The perusal of Dr. Brown's narrative, the interest of which never fails for ,a moment, has served only to deepen the convic- tion, to which we ventured to give expression in our former article, that Dr. Duncan's philosophy and theology constituted two incongruous elements in his intellectual life, which he never dis- covered the secret of reconciling. From a terrible attack of small- pox in his childhood Dr. Duncan lost the sight entirely of one eye. He used to say in his playful moods that he had done more with his one eye than most men accomplished with two ; and it was quite true. But mentally he was a one-eyed man. In so far as regards the phenomenal and purely intellectual spheres of perception, he recognised with quite prophetic insight the grounds for our belief in Order and in Law. No one could discourse more subtly, more eloquently, than he did on the objective reality of our sense-perceptions ; on the impossibility of thinking of the cosmical arrangements, with which we seem to be surrounded, except as all results of Thought ; and then no one could better discriminate than he did between the psychologically apprehensible, and the • .14fe of the late Join Duncan, LLD., Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages, Eno College, Edixburgh. By David Brown, D.D. Edinburgh: Edmonaton and Douglas.
logically comprehensible, while he spoke with a marvellous incisiveness, only short of scientific demonstration, of the intrusiow of will and conscience into the domain of the causal and rigidly necessary—an intrusion which carries with it consequences which Pantheism, or the doctrine of Evolution, is alike incompetent to explain or account for, unless we are contented to allot to the same category the glory of a sunset or the perfume of a violet. and an heroic or self-sacrificing moral action ; but when he enters as a theologian on the domain of Biblical exposition, we find that he has lost the blazing torch and subtle clue. He fumbles and stumbles, weak as quite common-place men, amid the platitudes of "assurance," and the Dutch so-called "Federal theology." And that a man of Dr. Duncan's extraordinary endowment should have wearied himself in threshing the chaff of worn-out systems is all the more curious, and a fact to be pondered by all thoughtful minds, seeing that the writer who first as a theologian and exegetist of the New Testament history, really awoke his spiritual faculty was no other than Herder himself.
The first sermon that Dr. Duncan preached after receiving " licence " from the Presbytery of Aberbeen—perhaps the only sermon the preacher ever wrote—was an elaborate'aud magnificent rendering of the teaching of Herder in his charming little work, "Concerning the Son of God, as the Saviour of the World,. according to the Gospel of St. John." Of this sermon the author said, long years after, to Mr. Taylor Innea, "I wish I had it now." We can only echo the fruitless wish, for no vestige of it remains. But Dr. Brown—himself an Aberdeen student at the time, and Dr. Duncan's greatest friend—was present during its delivery, and has given us a very vivid summary of its contents, while he informs us that "it had a very fascinating effect upon the hearers ; that all was still attention, and a sort of wonder pervaded the audience." This last statement is exceedingly credible. For the discourse in question—an " oration " in the noblest sense of the word, we should think,—full of poetry, philosophy, suggestiveness, and glowing aspiration, must have surprised the old church-goers into a quite new sense of admiration. This impassioned youth was not treating them to a tepid essay on morality, like "the Moderates," nor thundering " the tidings of damnation" in their ears, nor " offering " them a precarious share in the tender mercies of a Sovereign Judge, whose wrath had been propitiated in the interests of a select few. Preaching from the great passage in the Epistle of St John,—" Behold what manner of love the Father halls bestowed on us that we should be called the sons of God," he dis- coursed, we are told, with marvellous power on Christ as "the Flower of Humanity, the Perfection of Human Beauty, the Archetypal Son of God," into whose spirit whosoever drinks, and whose bright example whosoever follows, becomes himself so far forth a son of God." To "preach Christ" from such a height as this must have had the effect of something like a Trans- figuration on the souls of the " unco' guid" Aberdonians.
No doubt, Dr. Duncan's Christology at this date was, as we think, of a seriously defective character. As he himself informed a confidential friend, shortly before his earthly end came, he had "taken licence" to preach in a wildly chaotic condition of con- sciousness, with very considerable reluctance, however, and mainly for very shame, because "people were upon him." He had been,. as we know, "in most of the heresies" about the period in ques- tion; and in addressing his biographer, who had himself at one time caught the Rationalistic fever, and, in fact, first introduced his fellow-student to Herder, said to him, with ludicrous gravity, " We Unitarians." For any Scotchman to feel at liberty to sub- scribe the terribly hard-and-fast chapters of the Confession of Faith in such a mood of theological conception was, to say the least, 1,4 curious psychological phenomenon ; there had never been a com- mon understanding, as in England, that the contents of the Con- fession were to be regarded as articles of peace ; there had never been any judgment of the Assembly, or the civil courts, correspond- ing with the liberal and liberating decisions of the Anglican Privy Council, and though at this time Dr. Duncan had, with apparent satisfaction, applied to his own case and Church the teaching of Paley on Subscription, yet afterwards he bitterly repented himself for what he unsparingly called his "hypocrisy." And we are not quite prepared, as we have implied, to quarrel with his later self-con- demnation. A Christianity which fails in the recognition of the incar- nation as declared-in the noble utterances of the Nicene Creed seems to us altogether inadequate to supply anything like a real revelation of the divine nature and sympathy. Nevertheless, that first sermon of the young licentiate struck a note in developing the harmonies of which the preacher must ultimately have found an accordant music, fraught with glory to God, peace on earth and good-will to men, which we listen for in vain amid his later
teachings. For in any case, here was at least a life subject to all the conditions of our common humanity, yet transcending or transfiguring them all by its disengagement from all merely private aims or interests, its unique aloofness from the "cares," the ambitions, the resentments, the pleasures, so called, of the great world at large ; so excessive in its passionate devotion to the welfare of others, so assured of its sublime trusts, yet so accessible to every touch of genuine human joy or sorrow ; so near to us, yet so far above us, in tone, in truth, in tenderness, that in Scrip- tural phraseology the "following on" to know more of its significance must logically have led to the adoration of a specially divine presence in Christ, with the inevitable sequel, proclaimed with such emphasis by St. Paul, after he had ceased to know his Master according to the flesh, of a self-renouncing recognition of the divine filial nature in every man. Had our great Rabbi been left to himself, had not "people been upon him," we cannot doubt that his fine logical and speculative faculty would have developed out of him, and for the lasting good of his country, a Scotch Neander —he otherwise resembling the " absent " and devout German in so many respects —but in an untoward hour, as we are constrained to write, Cmsar Malan came to Aberdeen and converted John Duncan. Dear, good man, after each individual of a large party convened to meet the foreigner had been separately put through an inquisitorial examina- tion as to his state of mind or feeling by this well-known Genevese pastor, Dr. Duncan's turn came. No Pope could ever claim more authoritative ground for his dogmas than did this representative of Calvin. Tall, handsome, and not a little seductive from his imperfect knowledge of English, combined with his inexorable doctrine of "assurance," Duncan seems to have been wonderfully attracted by him. Malan's pet text was, " He that believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God ;" and quite in the rule-of-three way, he insisted on the necessity of the premiss, he that believeth, and then the immediateness of the conclusion, so believing, you are born of God. At the interview we speak of, our future pro- fessor was candid enough to say that he did not understand who Christ was; but Malan, bearing down all his difficulties, replied, "Do you believe what is here written, that he is the Christ, on the testimony of God ?" To this question Duncan answered, "Yes." However, the doctor said to his biographer two days afterwards, "It was a trying question to me, for 1 was all at sea about Inspiration. But, man, a strange feeling came over me at that moment. Apart from all questions of inspiration, I felt certain that what was there written was God's truth." A very "strange feeling" indeed it must have been which the Rabbi then experi- enced, for from that time he became " Siamese" in soul,—the one half of him large, liberal, quite bountiful in toleration, all- daring in speculation, this being his philosophic side ; the other half an "inflamed conscience "—his own striking de- scription of himself—which presented to him an "almost hell-like view of things"—this is Dr. Brown's expression—. and so far as we can gather, rendered his whole life subject to bondage, darkening, save in exceptionally lucid intervals, all vision of the countenance of a Heavenly Father. We do not forget, as we write, that immediately after his conversion by Malan, Dr. Duncan began to preach "high assurance ;" that he even "danced for joy" as he thought of the treasures of grace which now seemed his by rightful possession, and that the gloom which shrouded his soul for nearly half a century is attributed to what he called his "second conversion," when he found out that he was preaching the beatitudes of "immediate peace in believing" after he himself had quite ceased to be certain of the reliability of his own faith. For his first conversion led him to what Bunsen would call a metastasis, or entire change of the centre of gravity. The very "strange feeling " was just this—that mere passing emotion was constituted into the ground of hope for a human soul, instead of a permanent divine foundation; and of all men in tne world, Dr. Duncan was, perhaps, the last to rely on his physical sensations. For a couple of seconds, after what in Homeric language we might term a "shameless" pinch of snuff, the good doctor might feel that all, even the hardest, precipitates of dogma or providential fact had become suddenly fluent, and that in the elastic element now surrounding him he could spread forth his hands as a swimmer to disport him. Immediately after, and as the chronic sequence supervened collapse, "inflammation of conscience "—the liver, rather than the intellectual " lights" being now, however, at fault---and then there came fears and fight- jugs, the suffering soul of the man struggling with the questions whether his faith, his sense of sin, his acquiescence in the ascription of glory to God in his possible damnation, were sufficiently genuine to entitle him to hope that he had laid hold of the overtures of reconciliation." Surely all this is sad, but it all comes as the inevitable result of his acceptation of the gospel according to Malan. In his speculative moods Dr. Duncan denounced " Malanism," as, in fact, he did every other Ism. How rich, for instance, was his saying, "Hyper-Calvinism is all house and no door; hyper-Arminianism is all door and no house." Again, how beautiful, how suggestive of the poet Cowper, who, while proclaiming the blessings of the Cross for others, yet felt himself excluded from them, is this maxim of his,—" Every man should have a wide creed for others, but a very straight one for him- self"! Once more, he tells us that "he could not preach about hell without turning sick, that discussions about faith were like discussions about digestion, a theory, in either case, being a very barren substitute for actual assimilation of the divinely provided nutriment." How like, indeed, in his two-sided development he was to that Hebrew prophet who had his own inner convictions as to the imperative duties of his mission, yet in an evil hour listened to a voice from without which, in the end, slew the true maa, and left a lion and an ass standing by his carcase ! It was even thus with Rabbi Duncan. The voices from without killed what his biographer terms his "pride of intellect," but that which we would call by a more reverent name. For it seems to us that he turned, with conscious humility, no doubt, but to the sorrow of his heart, and to the saddening of the thousands whom his words might have gladdened, from the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, into the pedan- try of a system which is founded, at its best, only on a precarious peradventure.
Dr. Duncan's learning was prodigious; the work he inaugurated at Perth was prolific of results both among Jews and Gentiles, the Scotch Church Mission to the Jews in that city and neighbourhood being emphatically worthy of a prominent place in general ecclesiastical history ; his personal piety and charity, and the humanities of his domestic life, are almost too pathetic, notwith- standing the irregularity of his habits, for any commentary of ours. The story of his childhood—he alone surviving of many brothers and sisters, his mother dying while he was comparatively an infant, and his father being savagely cruel to him—supplies all too sufficient materials -for his saying in his old age, "Pro- vidence has been kind." It will be a very remote day before any Scotchtnan will visit the Grange Cemetery without reverently standing before the granite obelisk which is erected over the grave—close to that of Thomas Chalmers—in which were laid to their final rest the mortal remains of John Duncan, "born 1796, died 1870." Nevertheless, we close this volume with pro- found sorrow. Calvinism, in the case of this great and godly man, perverted the Gospel into a message of doom, causing "almost hell-like" anguish in his soul. And we ask, when will Scotland accept the first words of the Lord's Prayer as her own, build her faith on the foundation laid by God, instead of her own feeling, and believe, with Frederick Maurice—whose teaching Dr. Duncan so fatally, and at the same time, if not bitterly, grotesquely caricatured—in the Fatherhood of God, the Kingdom of Christ, the reign of law, and the supremacy of love ?
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