Excerpted from a letter by Rev. Alexander Duff on the Death of his Father.
Next to the Bible, my father’s chief delight was in studying the works of the old divines, of which, in time-worn editions, he has succeeded in accumulating a goodly number. These, he was wont to say, contained more of the “sap and marrow of the gospel,” and had about them more of the “fragrance and flavour of Paradise, than aught more recently produced.” Halyburton’s “Memoirs” was a prime favourite. But of all mere human productions, no one seemed to stir and animate his whole soul like the “Cloud of Witnesses.” And he took special pains to saturate the minds of his children with its contents. His habit was orally to tell us of the manner in which Papacy corrupted God’s word, and persecuted God’s people. He would show us pictures of the enginery and processes of cruel torture. He would then give some short biographical notice of one or other of the suffering worthies; and, last of all, conclude with reading some of the more striking passages in their “Last Words and Dying Testimonies.” To this early training do I mainly owe my “heart-hatred” of Popery, with any spiritual insight which I possess into its subtle and malignant genius, its unchanged and unchangeable anti-Christian virulence. And from the deep and ineradicable impressions thus produced in my own mind, I have often longed to see a greatly abbreviated edition of the “Cloud of Witnesses” for the use of the young – an edition containing pictures of the instrumentality of torture, graphic sketches of some of the leading martyrs, with extracts from their own heroic answers before persecuting tyrants, and still more heroic utterances in the prospect of an appalling death.
To know Popery aright, its awful character ought to be laboriously spelt out of the emphatic signs and symbols of Jehovah’s holy oracles, and its fearful effects traced, not in cold and sweeping generalities, but in the lives and sufferings of individual saints. It was in this way that my late revered father acquired his own horror of Popery, and so felt it to be a matter of conscience towards the truth of God, to instil a like horror of it into the minds of his children. Oh, that every Christian parent in Scotland would adopt a similar plan, and prosecute it with similar faithfulness and earnestness of prayer! Then might her candle continue to shine brightly amid the spiritual gloom that is fast thickening over the nations.
