[Illustration: REV. J. W. COMPTON, R. M. C. 1867-'68—1868-'69. Removed with College from Boydton to Ashland. Pioneer preacher Pacific Coast for twenty-three years.]
[Illustration: REV. W. WADSWORTH, D. D., Author and Minister
North-Georgia Conference.]
"Tremendous was to be the draft on this superb physique during the ten years that followed the day I first looked on it. The College with its endowment had gone down amid the ruins of the Confederacy. The outlook was gloomy; but it was resolved to remove the tree to Ashland. Here the railway system of the South would renew its roots and make it bud and bloom again. Jefferson Davis was thought of for the presidency, but in a happy hour Dr. Duncan was chosen to lead the forlorn hope in its rebuilding. Without funds, without laboratory, without proper buildings, he addressed himself to the task. Providence came to his rescue. By one of those flashes of common sense, which not always light up church enterprises, a Faculty pre-eminently adapted to the work had been chosen. Professor Thomas R. Price, a name synonymous now with scholarship, was in the chair of Ancient Languages. Harry Estill filled the chair of Mathematics. Professor Richard M. Smith brought the ripe wisdom and experience of his distinguished life to the chair of Natural Sciences. W. W. Valentine held the keys of the Modern Languages.
"It has been said that what a university needs is not so much an endowment as a man. Randolph-Macon had men, and Dr. Duncan, a man among men. The Faculty itself was an endowment. Good material gathered around them as students. 'Facile princeps' among these were Wm. W. Smith, now LL. D., and President of the Randolph-Macon System of Colleges and Schools; Charles Carroll, now a brilliant lawyer of the Crescent city; Rhodes, since a judge in Baltimore; J. F. Twitty, of blessed memory, and a number of others.
"Dr. Duncan, while not technically trained as a teacher, yet showed himself a great teacher. What an inspiration he imparted to the band that gathered around him! How he lit up every dreary field of text! Blessed, yea, thrice blessed, was that school of young prophets. While himself the finest of models, nothing was farther from his thought than to make little 'Duncans' of every student. Bring up a boy in the way he should go, according to his bent, this was his idea. He would never have been guilty of putting the toga of Cicero upon Charles Spurgeon. With him good 'pork and beans' was not to be made into bad 'quail on toast.' 'Sing your own song,' only let that song be the best possible to you. Broad, Catholic-hearted Duncan!
"Making a great teacher did not spoil a great preacher in Duncan's case. On a 'star-map' of the pulpits of that day, the pulpit in the old ball-room chapel at Ashland would shine as a star of 'the first magnitude.' His sermons were not like Robertson's eruptions of internal volcanic fires lifting up new heights of thought; they were not Munsey's great, gorgeous cathedrals of polished words; neither were they Keener's cyclones filling the air with boulders of logic, cutting a pathway through forests of prejudice as old as our being. His eloquence was not the glacial magnificence of Wilson's great icebergs floating in polar seas with grassy shores; it was not Galloway's mountain torrent with 'optimism,' that music of heaven in its splash and the swiftness of redeeming love in its rush to the low places of earth. Very different was it from Sam Jones' wild tanglewood of tropic forest of mingled fruit and flowers and thorns. His sermons were the expression of what Carlyle would style a healthy nature. There was nothing wild or abnormal. They were like landscapes in a civilized land—great, like the movement of the seasons, like the coming of the tides—as the processes of nature are great; great as a summer day is great. The introduction was morning!—sunrise! not striking, not surprising. The thoughts not larks soaring heavenward, were rather sparrows on the sward. But we could see great stretches of thought before us. Now the morning changes into high noon. It is the sermon proper. We are now in the midst of vast grain-fields of ripe thought. Divisions barely visible above the heads of the choicest of the wheat waving now in the zephyrs of pathos. Shouts at times among the listeners, as like reapers they garner ripe sheaves into their bosoms; orchards now growing with ripe fruit.
"The peroration comes naturally, as evening follows noon. We hardly know when it comes. A splendid sunset, often tears like the dewdrops in the flowers of new resolves, now springing in the soul; solemn impressions, like shadows, growing larger; a deep hush upon everything. The sermon closes. It is night. But stars of hope are shining in the sky of the soul.
"At Haslup's Grove, in the seventies, in a great sermon, the rush to the altar was so great that the enclosure had to be torn down. It was pentecostal.
"I heard him on two great occasions. In 1876, along with Dr. Landon C. Garland and Lovick Pierce, he was fraternal delegate from our church to our sister Methodism at the General Conference in Baltimore. After years of estrangement the two Methodisms were meeting again. It was an occasion. You could feel it. The great building was thronged. When the time came for Duncan to speak he threw his soul into the 'God speed you!' of seven hundred thousand Southern Methodists. The audience for awhile it seemed would go wild. The day was a great triumph.
"During that same Conference the princely 'Jeff. Magruder' organized a great mass-meeting of the Sunday-schools of the Southern Methodist churches in Baltimore. Bishop Vincent, Secretary of the Sunday-School Board of the Methodist Episcopal Church, then in the prime of his powers, General Clinton B. Fiske, and Dr. Duncan were to speak. The speeches of Vincent and Fiske had been so superb that a gifted minister remarked to me, 'I am sorry for Duncan.' I responded, 'I am sorry for any man who has to follow two such speeches.' But I found that I did not yet know him. He pulled out new organ stops in his great soul that afternoon. His speech was a brilliant improvisation. The audience was captured. Southern Methodists who gloried in the flesh were radiant.