History of Randolph-Macon College, Virginia / The Oldest Incorporated Methodist College in America

by Richard Irby

[Illustration: WILBUR F. TILLETT, A. B., D. D., Sutherlin Medalist, 1877; Dean Theological Faculty, Vanderbilt University.]

But others have written tributes so much better and worthier of the subject that he will let them speak. The first tribute to him was given by Prof. Thos. R. Price, LL. D., who has more than once expressed to this writer the great remissness of the Methodist Church in not having had prepared a memoir of one of its greatest preachers and wisest men.

The following is Prof. Price's sketch of Dr. James A. Duncan:

"THE GREAT PREACHER."

"The bitterest hour for them that mourn their dead is not when the breath rattles in the throat nor when the clod rattles on the coffin. It comes when, after all the stir and turmoil of death and funeral are over, the family go back to the ravaged home, and grope their ways, blinded with tears, through the rooms that the dead man has left forever empty. Not even the sudden jar of the final separation strikes so deep a wound as the growing sense of loss, as the accumulating despair of unsatisfied longing. So, in all the many regions where Dr. Duncan, the great apostle of Virginia, was known and loved, the deepest grief was not felt when all those thousands followed the hearse and sobbed around the open grave under the stars at Hollywood. A deeper sorrow comes to us now, after taking up again the task of life, when we feel, amid our pleasures and our business, that the great advocate of God, who lived Christ among us as sublimely as he preached him, has been withdrawn forever from among the potencies of our time; when we remember that, in evil days, when many bad men are seeking to break down the honesty and to dull the moral sense of the Virginia people, we are left without the mighty aid of that one man who knew best of all how to stir the hearts and to guide the acts of our people to good. Yet with the calmness of the deeper sorrow comes, too, the calmness to think out the secret of the dead man's power over the great masses of the Southern people, for that power was one that reached far outside of his church and of all churches deep down into the moral life of Virginia. Thus even for us laymen, for us that have no right to preach and no theology to teach, the character of this wonderful man has an abiding interest. It is worth while for us all to know what were the means by which he worked. As his life did such immense good to so many thousands of our people, the contemplation, and, if possible, the understanding, of that life, can hardly fail to do good to the great communities that are now mourning for him.

"On the first meeting with Dr. Duncan, were it only a hurried talk at a street-corner or a few minutes' conversation on a railway train, the first impression that came to the stranger from his sweet eyes and tender lips was the sense of a strange and overpowering love and loveableness in the man. The face and voice stole their way to the heart and mastered the affections. All the children were drawn to his caressing hands by a charm that their little hearts could not withstand. The negro servants in the houses that he visited could be seen to hang upon his words and to strive to catch his smile. The belle of the springs, on her way to the ball-room; the roughest mountaineer loafing on the skirts of a camp-meeting; boys and old men, the ignorant and the educated, had to yield themselves to the fascination of the fresh and guileless love that emanated from his beaming eyes and tender, penetrating voice. Whether he was moving with his exquisite grace, smiling and talking, through a parlor, or standing all aglow in his passionate eloquence beside his pulpit; whether he spoke to one man, soul to soul, in the quiet of his study, or faced the thousands of eyes that looked up to him from a great city church, or from the green hillsides of a rustic amphitheatre, the power that went forth from him, winning all hearts and softening all hardness, was the power of an exquisitely loveable nature, giving love richly and pleading for love in return. But as you listened to him, as you watched the play of his mobile features, and took in the rich, sweet tones of his voice, this first impression of the man's intense loveableness was deepened by the impression of his marvellous intellectual power. The shrewdness of his observation, the penetrating keenness of his intelligence, the splendid precision of his thought and of his utterance, took instantaneous possession of the hearer's mind. His knowledge of human character as men moved before him, his ready insight into the tangled web of human motives, was almost infallible. In spite of his boundless charity and graciousness, he was a man that could not be deceived or cheated. He took men in at a glance. The smile that curled around his lips, the light that sparkled in his eyes, showed to the dullest, as to the wiliest, that the secrets of their character were seen, that the very depths of their soul lay unveiled before him. Thus, when you talked with him, you were sure to feel that, while his love opened his heart to you, his intellect opened yours to him. In managing men, above all, in wielding the discipline of a college, the amazing quickness and penetration of his intellect made him the fittest of all men to control both character and conduct. The offender who came to hide his sin beneath a lie, found the lie impossible, and flung himself with passionate tears upon the love of the man that both understood and pitied his weakness. Even in great audiences, when he spoke to thousands of God and goodness, the veils of self-deception fell away before the glances that he shot into the souls of men. In all the history of Christianity no man ever pleaded for Christ before men with a mightier control over the secrets of human hearts, with a sharper penetration into the weakness and badness of each human soul. It was this union of moral with intellectual force, this union of the attractive power of love with the penetrative power of understanding, that gave to Dr. Duncan his unrivalled and irresistible control over the heart and intellect of the Virginia people. The world is so bad that we are apt to confuse amiability with silliness, and to see a sign of intellectual weakness in a good man's love and care for his fellow-men. But here, at least, it was one man as strong as he was good, a man that joined to the charm of a tenderly loving heart the power of a splendid genius and of an incisive intelligence. Thus he rose on the hearts of men to be a living power in our State and time. Thus to each man that saw much of him, to every human being that was exposed for long to the influence of his words and actions, the man, simple and kindly, and great in all his deeds, shone forth as the revelation of a higher life, as the proof and example of what Christ's teaching meant.

"The mystery both of the moral power and of the intellectual power of this great man lay in his astounding unselfishness; for the egoistic habit of mind is a hindrance not only to the moral but also to the intellectual progress of the man. A selfish regard for one's own interests, the bad trait of regarding all things and all men as subordinate to one's own designs, not only deadens the moral sensibility, but it even distorts and discolors all intellectual insight into the world. If we fail to care for other men's good by being so busy about our own, we fail equally to penetrate into their characters and to see the good and evil that is in them by being unable to remove from our intellectual vision the beam of our own desires and designs. From all these obstacles, to noble acting and to accurate thinking, Dr. Duncan was sublimely free. He had resigned himself so fully into the hands of God that he had ceased absolutely to care for his own advantage or to be perplexed by the contemplation of his own aims. Thus he moved through the annual courses of his serene and glorious activity, preaching and teaching and helping all good causes, with a mind unperverted from great things by any care for little ones, with a soul ready for any sacrifice, and, what is harder still, ready to throw itself into full and instantaneous sympathy with any soul that opened to his approach. In all his dealings with men, as friend with his friends, as preacher with his congregations, as teacher with his pupils, the loveliness and warmth of his affections were equalled only by the pliability and penetration of his intellect, by his wisdom in advising, by his discretion in helping.

"All the ordinary temptations to self-seeking fell off powerless from the supreme unselfishness of his nature. When the fame of his eloquence spread over many States; when he was acknowledged as the greatest orator of his church, and, perhaps, of his country; when the richest churches of the greatest cities offered him vast salaries to leave the struggling people and the impoverished college that he loved, he clung fast to poverty, and put aside, without a struggle, the temptations of ease and wealth. Even when temptation assailed him in craftier forms; when men told him of the mighty congregations that New York or St. Louis or San Francisco would pour forth to catch from him the words of life, he said that 'he loved his own people best, and must stay to help Virginia along.' Like his Master, he chose poverty rather than riches; like his Master, he chose to work in a little village, among a small band of disciples, rather than among the splendors and plaudits of cities; like his Master, he made of life one long series of sweetly-borne self-sacrifices. Before the spectacle of such sublime self-depression all words of common praise are unseemly. But to them that lived with him, who saw the great soul take up so bravely and bear so lovingly the burthen of poverty, trouble, and suffering, the life he led was a miracle of beauty and holiness, making the world brighter and nobler by even the remembrance of him.

"In his preaching, as in his life, the same blending of love with wisdom, of childlike simplicity with manly power, was revealed. There was no fierceness, no affectation, no struggling after oratorical effects; but, as the powers of his mind got into motion, as the thoughts rolled on, clear and massive, the words and sentences grew rich and lofty, the sweet voice swelled out into organ tones, the small and graceful figure swayed to the pulsations of his thought, and the beautiful face glowed with all the illumination of love. There was no theology in his sermons, no polemical divinity in his conception of divine truth. To love God, and to love men was for him, as Christ taught him, the sum of all righteousness. This power of love was the agency through which he did his work in the world. As the warmth of the sun controls all the processes of nature and commands all the movements of the universe, so warmth of love, as the central fact of God's moral government, was for him the source of all power, the means of subduing all wrong, and of bringing the world back into harmony with God's laws.

"No human life ever lived in this world of ours was attuned more fully to a loftier harmony. As we think of all the good deeds he did, of all the wise words he spoke, of his solemn yet tender warnings against evil, of the love that charmed so many souls to do right, of the sublime unselfishness that made his life a sacrifice to other men's good, we can feel that to us, in our own State, born of our own stock, in full sight of us all, a man has been given to live for our good, as nearly as man may, up to the life-story of the Christ himself.