Born in Ardnamurchan, Argyll, in 1933, Douglas MacMillan was brought up in a Christian family of crofters. At school he rejected Christianity under the influence of communism and worldliness. However, he was destined to become a powerful preacher and professor of church history at the Free Church College. Here is something of his conversion story which he wrote just before his death in 1991.
Something happened one night in the early springtime of the final year of my mother's life. My brother and I had been out at a ceilidh and dance, singing and playing accordions in a village about 35 miles away. We got home in the wee small hours of the morning - just as a new day was beginning to break. I opened the back door of our house and immediately heard a strange, but beautiful sound. It was my mother's voice. She had had some training in voice production when young and here she was now, just months before her death and at a time when her days were often filled with great pain, awake in the middle of the night with the stress of her illness, and my father sitting with her, softly singing a glorious testimony of faith in the verses of one of her favourite Psalms:
I shall not die, but live, and shall
