BOOKS.
A LATE FREE-KIRK PROFESSOR.*
41 TEAT'S a born-natural, where did you pick him up ?" was the -characteristic exclamation of the late Mrs. Carlyle, the moment a certain gentleman, who had just been introduced to her, was well out of hearing. And certainly the first, perhaps not merely the first, impression produced on the spectator or listener by the distinguished scholar whose conversations are now so admirably reported by Mr. Knight was very much that to which Mrs. Carlyle gave such real utterance. If Crabb Robinson, with all his real humility, was just a trifle obtrusively queer, Dr. John Duncan—" the Rabbi," as be was quite lovingly and loyally desig- nated by all his students—was, we may say, just as queer at the other pole of social deportment. The doctor's bodily presence was not exactly contemptible, but it was homuncular, and you never felt quite sure that he might not suddenly become wholly invisible to the naked eye. A man of whom it used to be said, and with consider- able truth, that he could speak his way to the Wall of China, and who could hold his own, and seize some of his adversaries too, in any intellectual passage of arms which he might encounter on the road with Positivist, Transcendentalist, Greek, Mohammedan, Parsee, Brahmin, or Buddhist, and who had lived, he tells us, in all the heresies except two (Arianism, and perhaps Antinomianiam) seemed habitually able to think his phenomenal personality away, under the domination of an excessive shyness. The most delicious stories are told of his " absence." Of one of them he himself said he had heard it so often that he at last had begun to suspect there must be some truth in it. And the story is this :—The Professor was an apparently inexhaustible receiver of snuff. He snuffed prodigally, and snuffed everywhere. In this habit he was entirely of the mind, pecca fortiter, or not at all. It sometimes occurred to one that, for instance, the very pulpit from which he was improvising—and what marvellous improvisations they were ! — must take to sneezing ere the discourse was over. Well, he had engaged to preach at a parish church some -distance from Aberdeen ; and up betimes the preacher was, -and in truly apostolic mode sallied forth on his pedestrian journey. But the wind was dead ahead,—a sore enemy to comfortable titillation of the olfactory system from the contents of the vade- mecum in the waistcoat pocket. Accordingly, our future Pro- fessor changed front, to enjoy his pinch, but forgot his tergiversa- tion, and halted not in the now homeward direction until he found himself—if, indeed, he did find himself—calmly enjoying the rest of the Sabbath morning in his own bed!
The Scotch have a great saying that " there maun aye ha' been a wee soup o' water when the cauf was drooned," and we are inclined to believe that the proverb had a large fulfilment in the case of our good doctor. Why should it not ? Dr. Duncan— Nathaniel Duncan the present writer is always tempted to call him—lived and moved and had his being in languages and theo- logical speculation. Why should we object to great men as they are? Dr. Duncan was really a great man, and accordingly we earnestly express the hope that when the promised life is published we shall see the doctor as he really was. We wish to see that quaint little figure, the narrow face, the semi-squinting eyes, if we remember aright, the Puritan style of hair, the " absenteeism " -of the personality, represented in their wholeness. What does it matter if in his class-room he freely interchanged the uses of the cloth—for the chalk-board, on which He- brew was written, with its accents and vowel-points, as easily as English,—with his pocket-handkerchief ? His social .seathetics were quite a secondary consideration. The doctor's ethics were wholly sublime. Perhaps his was one of the most uufanatically devout natures which, excepting Chalmers, Scotland has ever evolved. We repeat, let the world see him in the integrity of his manifestation, aminot in the shape of an idol carved and fashioned according to the fairies of a particular school of thought. And while we have no reason to doubt that Dr. Brown, of Aberdeen, will do his work as Dr. Duncan's biographer con- scientiously, we are at the same time of opinion that in no hands would the reputation of Professor Duncan have been so safe as in those of Mr. Knight, to whose volume we now beg to call the attention of our readers.
The present reviewer has no personal acquaintance with Mr. Knight, but his memorabilia of Dr. Duncan reveal so much reverence, so much discrimination, so much acquaintance with the surround-
• Colloquia Peripatetica (Deep-Sea Soundings): being Notes of Conversations by the .late John Duncan, LL.D„ Professor of Hebrew in the New College, Edinburgh, with the Bev. William Knight. Third Edition. Edinburgh : Edmouaton and Douglas. 1871.
ings and, if we may use the phrase, unsurroundings of Dr. Duncan's conscious thinking, that we may confidently predict that if his friend is to live on amid the suggestive contributors to metaphysical thought, it will be because his Colloquia Peripatetica have been given to the world.
And what, then, did Rabbi Duncan think, or say ?
Dr. Duncan had been, we believe, a pariah minister. Then he was ordained, specially because of his Hebrew scholarship, to be missionary to the Jews in Pesth ; and finally he was recalled, and appointed to the Chair of Hebrew in the New, or Freekirk, College of Edinburgh. Dr. Duncan, as we understand, was fully accredited as orthodox, and he was specially welcomed as a preacher in certain churches which were reckoned rather " high," in the acceptation of the term which the revivalist section of the Kirk endorsed. But how little ordinary " ministers " and congre- gations suspected that this man, as we have said, had not only read of, but had lived in 'all the heresies' except two ! How little they dreamed that he did not quite agree with Jonathan Edwards, whose theory, by the way, is this,—that free-will being impossible, man fell out of an impossible condition into his "present state of sin and misery."
During the summers of 1859 and 1860, Dr. Duncan and Mr. Knight lived under the same roof in a seaside village in Fifeshire ; and by the shore of the far-sounding sea the "colloquies' took place. It says not a little for the compass and methods of the culture which may result from a four years' course of study in the Arts' Classes in Edinburgh that one who, like Mr. Knight, had just finished this curriculum, should find himself so thoroughly familiar with all the many great speculative questions which are discoursed of in the present volume, so capable of talking about them, and of so presenting his own conceptions on some of the most abstruse, ethical, and scientific problems as to draw out the doctor into ampler revealings of his long and deeply pondered conclusions on Nature and God. And here it occurs to us to add : How is it that some of our profoundest thinkers may be almost said to die and make no sign ? It certainly cannot be affirmed of Coleridge that he wholly belonged to this great un writing class. On the contrary, go where you will, to the loneliest heights or the lowermost parts of the earth, in the regions of criticism or pure speculation, you are pretty sure to find carved on the rocks the initials " S. T. C." Yet Coleridge, all the rare, chastened accuracy and resilient vigour and beauty and transparency of his style notwithstanding, could, not write as he spoke. What, again, does the world at large know of the " deep-sea soundings " of the late Professor Scott, of Manchester ? And there are some living extempore preachers known to us who, on occasion, when the full flood of inspiration rises, seem borne aloft into the region of ecstacy and prophecy, who speak as if they were reading off a score of music, in- visible to all but themselves ; but who, at other times, and especially when they take a pen in hand, are scarcely up to the level of ordinary men. Dr. Duncan would not, or could not, at all events did not write. Whether from self-distrust, or the lack of the architectonic faculty, or defective aggressiveness, or unwill- ingness to add one more to our little systems of " broken lights ;" or a certain idiosyncrasy which is never flint and steel to itself in one, but which only kindles by an impulse from without, and requires the consciousness of a surrounding sympathy to keep alive the flame of intellectual luminousness ; or from a curious contemplative lethargy which rejoices in endless acquisition, but shrinks from the labour of communication ; or from the fatal habit of delay, or whether all these causes were more or less co-efficients, so it was, apparently, that Dr. Duncan would willingly, we do not say quite happily (that is altogether another matter), have laid him down to die without the endeavour to let a second generation know what he himself had seen or heard. Or shall we, nay, ought we not to affirm that men, after all, only do what they can, and th at outside prescription or expectation respecting them is arbitrary and purely conjectural ? There is such a noble delight, moreover, in even the attempt to convey to others an authentic record of any special experiences we have had, always excepting those of the private affections, that where, as in the present in- stance, the impulse of imparting was so faint, we must believe that the talent of maintaining sustained written converse with his brethren did not exist.
At the same time, it would be too melancholy an instance of waste of power if a mind so subtle, so intense, so unweariedly conversant with all the deeper problems of human life as that of Dr. Duncan, were to pass away from us, and no record whatever exist of its acceptances, its negations, or its doubts. Mr. Knight has come to the rescue, and has told us what, in this nineteenth century, a minister, who still believed himself loyal to the Westminster Confession of Faith felt quite at liberty to think and teach.
Dr. Duncan was, in his own language, " first a Christian, then a Catholic, then a Calvinist, then a Pmdobaptist, and finally, a Presbyterian." On some one suggesting that these were like concentric circles, the first the widest, the doctor replied, " I like better to think of them as towers rising one above the other, though narrowing as they rise. The first is the broadest, and is the foundation laid down by Christ ; but we are to build on that foundation, and as we ascend our outlook widens." And certainly, while we estimate these circles very much as the unnamed respondent did in the preceding sentence, while it is notorious that with many the Calvinistic one, as perhaps, each in turn alike, has become an adamant ring-fence rising up in grim exclu- siveness to the firmament, all outsiders being destitute of hope, and all insiders of charity, our dear, good, intuitional Rabbi, perched aloft on his " specular " watch-tower, Presbyterian though he called it, surveyed a vast and varied territory with wonderfully catholic and Christian heart and eyes. He saw, for instance, a "progressive element in all things, and therefore in religion ;" he saw that Calvinism was no new thing on the earth, though the superficial Mr. Baring-Gould says so, but was a thing of shreds and patches, made up of the respective isms of "Augustine, Anselm, Remigius, and Luther," and with awfully coherent sartorial power stitched and fashioned, we must add, as a coat of imputed invincibility for all genuine Christianity to wear against the cold, by the typical Frenchman whose name it bears ; he thought, like some of the best of the Schoolmen, that sin is not an entity, but a thing of " naught "—and naughty exceedingly in all its priva tive workings it was to him—be saw that the primitive Christians who sang their simple hymns to Christ, and went bravely to death for His sake, were mere babes in theology compared with the men of later ages, but that there is a secret in the universe that belongeth unto God, un- fathomed and fathomless by men,—a secret, however, which was one of light rather than darkness, for this is what he says :- " Reverently," yet, " without hesitation," " it is a good thing that Adam fell, because what he lost is much more than found, or rather, something superlatively better has been found." But although a believer in progressive theology, though he abjured with great emphasis the " total-depravity theory " of human nature and the Magee doctrine of the atonement, though he hits straight out at both Romish and Protestant exaggerations of justi- fication, we greatly prefer his metaphysics to his divinity, in fact, what was wanting in the latter was that it should become transfigured by his speculations. He is righteously dissen- tient from the nescience of Mansel, and he evolves a lenient quid out of Berkeley and Hamilton in the respective spheres of the phenomenal and the unconditioned which, to the present writer's mind, is entirely satisfactory and true to consciousness. For that look-out which Dr. Duncan had erected for himself was not intended as a ladder to reach to the Infinite. He felt that if the Infinite is not given a priori, no addition of finites could ever possibly result in the Idea of it. God for him did not lie beyond the phenomenal, but in God's own light he surveyed the magni- ficent symbolism of concrete realities which we apprehend, but do not know.
Two words more, and we must take leave of this most delight- ful volume :-1. Mr. Maurice could have taught Dr. Duncan to harmonize the universalism of his metaphysical postulates with a sublimer theology, but he failed to recognize that this profoundest of all modern theologians proclaimed a deeper law than his own " legalism." 2. There could be no better proof than that sup- plied by these conversations that, along with other influences, the inspiration of the humanities of Robert Burns and Walter Scott is silently but persistently thawing down the old icy vault of Calvinistic dogmatism. There is the sign of the Son of Man in the Scottish Church.
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