Rare Book Monthly
Articles - October - 2003 Issue
The obituary of the Rev. Doctor David Murdoch
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This church was about erecting a new house of worship, and had just completed for their much loved pastor a beautiful parsonage with energetic and loving hands, on the “Sunnyside.” To-day it awaits his coming.
Dr. Murdoch was emphatically a man of the people. He was always overworked. In the pulpit, in the lecture room, on the platform, he was always in demand. The people, the “publicans and sinners,” respected him and loved him. He was the pastor of those who had no church. He was always at the bed-side of the dying pauper. He was a companion, cheering the social party by his unrivaled wit – winning by his intelligence, powers of conversation and address a way to the hearts of all – and readiest of all men to weep with those that wept.
He was blest with a ready and most tenacious memory, was a great reader, a profound scholar in the sciences – always surprising his hearers by the resources of his learning – and always grandly leading and not lagging in the progress of the age. In addition to the work published last fall, he has in a finished condition, it is said, a work on the “Diversions of Ministers, by the Clerk of a Ministers Club.” It is known that the clergymen of Elmira held weekly meetings on Monday mornings for consultation, mutual criticism and social intercourse. These meetings suggested the book. It is to be hoped that it may be soon given to the public. Dr. Murdoch was eminently successful as an essayist. His magazine articles display a high degree of literary talent. Who that has read it can [not] forget the power and beauty of the article in the Presbyterian Review on Canning and Chalmers.
As a preacher, Dr. Murdoch had few equals. He was logical, appealing to the reason of his hearer, inviting him to a manly and fair argument, with a peculiar tact in getting an opponent or doubter to listen, and then overwhelming him with hard arguments and acknowledged truths and all the power of effective eloquence, but his lectures to his church upon Wednesday evenings, always delivered extempor, were so full of religious experience, illustrated with such power and impressed with such irresistible but simple eloquence, that in the lecture room he was without a peer.
