SAMUEL RUTHERFORDAND SOME OFHIS CORRESPONDENTS

LECTURES DELIVERED INST. GEORGE'S FREE CHURCHEDINBURGH: BYALEXANDER WHYTE, D. D. 

AUTHOR OF 'BUNYAN CHARACTERS'ETC. 

PUBLISHED BYOLIPHANT ANDERSON AND FERRIER

30 ST. MARY STREET, EDINBURGH, AND24 OLD BAILEY, LONDON1894

I. JOSHUA REDIVIVUS

 'He sent me as a spy to see the land and to try the ford. ' _Rutherford_. 

Samuel Rutherford, the author of the seraphic _Letters_, was born in thesouth of Scotland in the year of our Lord 1600. Thomas Goodwin was bornin England in the same year, Robert Leighton in 1611, Richard Baxter in1615, John Owen in 1616, John Bunyan in 1628, and John Howe in 1630. Alittle vellum-covered volume now lies open before me, the title-page ofwhich runs thus:--'Joshua Redivivus, or Mr. Rutherford's Letters, nowpublished for the use of the people of God: but more particularly forthose who now are, or may afterwards be, put to suffering for Christ andHis cause. By a well-wisher to the work and to the people of God. Printed in the year 1664. ' That is all. It would not have been safe in1664 to say more. There is no editor's name on the title-page, nopublisher's name, and no place of printing or of publication. Only twotexts of forewarning and reassuring Scripture, and then the year of grace1664. 

Joshua Redivivus: That is to say, Moses' spy and pioneer, Moses'successor and the captain of the Lord's covenanted host come back again. A second Joshua sent to Scotland to go before God's people in that landand in that day; a spy who would both by his experience and by histestimony cheer and encourage the suffering people of God. For all thisSamuel Rutherford truly was. As he said of himself in one of his lettersto Hugh Mackail, he was indeed a spy sent out to make experiment upon thelife of silence and separation, banishment and martyrdom, and to bringback a report of that life for the vindication of Christ and for thesupport and encouragement of His people. It was a happy thought ofRutherford's first editor, Robert M'Ward, his old Westminster Assemblysecretary, to put at the top of his title-page, Joshua risen again fromthe dead, or, Mr. Rutherford's Letters written from his place ofbanishment in Aberdeen. 

In selecting his twelve spies, Moses went on the principle of choosingthe best and the ablest men he could lay hold of in all Israel. And inselecting Samuel Rutherford to be the first sufferer for His covenantedpeople in Scotland, our Lord took a man who was already famous for hischaracter and his services. For no man of his age in broad Scotlandstood higher as a scholar, a theologian, a controversialist, a preacherand a very saint than Samuel Rutherford. He had been settled at Anwothon the Solway in 1627, and for the next nine years he had lived such anoble life among his people as to make Anwoth famous as long as JesusChrist has a Church in Scotland. As we say Bunyan and Bedford, Baxterand Kidderminster, Newton and Olney, Edwards and Northampton, Boston andEttrick, M'Cheyne and St. Peter's, so we say Rutherford and Anwoth. 

His talents, his industry, his scholarship, his preaching power, hispastoral solicitude and his saintly character all combined to makeRutherford a marked man both to the friends and to the enemies of thetruth. His talents and his industry while he was yet a student inEdinburgh had carried him to the top of his classes, and all his days hecould write in Latin better than either in Scotch or English. His habitsof work at Anwoth soon became a very proverb. His people boasted thattheir minister was always at his books, always among his parishioners, always at their sick-beds and their death-beds, always catechising theirchildren and always alone with his God. And then the matchless preachingof the parish church of Anwoth. We can gather what made the Sabbaths ofAnwoth so memorable both to Rutherford and to his people from the bookswe still have from those great Sabbaths: _The Trial and the Triumph ofFaith_; _Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself_; and such like. Rutherford was the 'most moving and the most affectionate of preachers, 'a preacher determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified, but not so much crucified, as crucified and risen again--crucifiedindeed, but now glorified. Rutherford's life for his people at Anwothhas something altogether superhuman and unearthly about it. Hiscorrespondents in his own day and his critics in our day stumble at histoo intense devotion to his charge; he lived for his congregation, theytell us, almost to the neglect of his wife and children. But by the timeof his banishment his home was desolate, his wife and children were inthe grave. And all the time and thought and love they had got from himwhile they were alive had, now that they were dead, returned with new andintensified devotion to his people and his parish. 

 Fair Anwoth by the Solway, To me thou still art dear, E'en from the verge of heaven I drop for thee a tear. 

 Oh! if one soul from Anwoth Meet me at God's right hand, My heaven will be two heavens In Immanuel's Land. 

This then was the spy chosen by Jesus Christ to go out first of all theministers of Scotland into the life of banishment in that day, so as totry its fords and taste its vineyards, and to report to God's straitenedand persecuted people at home. 

To begin with, it must always be remembered that Rutherford was not laidin irons in Aberdeen, or cast into a dungeon. He was simply deprived ofhis pulpit and of his liberty to preach, and was sentenced to live insilence in the town of Aberdeen. Like Dante, another great spy of God'sprovidence and grace, Rutherford was less a prisoner than an exile. Butif any man thinks that simply to be an exile is a small punishment, or alight cross, let him read the psalms and prophecies of Babylon, the_Divine Comedy_, and Rutherford's _Letters_. Yes, banishment wasbanishment; exile was exile; silent Sabbaths were silent Sabbaths; and aborrowed fireside with all its willing heat was still a borrowedfireside; and, spite of all that the best people of Aberdeen could do forSamuel Rutherford, he felt the friendliest stairs of that city to be verysteep to his feet, and its best bread to be very salt in his mouth. 

But, with all that, Samuel Rutherford would have been but a blind andunprofitable spy for the best people of God in Scotland, for MarionM'Naught, and Lady Kenmure, and Lady Culross, for the Cardonesses, father, and mother, and son, and for Hugh Mackail, and such like, if hehad tasted nothing more bitter than borrowed bread in Aberdeen, andclimbed nothing steeper than a granite stair. 'Paul had need, 'Rutherford writes to Lady Kenmure, 'of the devil's service to buffet him, and far more, you and me. ' I am downright afraid to go on to tell youhow Satan was sent to buffet Samuel Rutherford in his banishment, and howhe was sifted as wheat is sifted in his exile. I would not expose such asaint of God to every eye, but I look for fellow-worshippers here onthese Rutherford Sabbath evenings, who know something of the plague oftheir own hearts, and who are comforted in their banishment and battle bynothing more than when they are assured that they are not alone in thedeep darkness. 'When Christian had travelled in this disconsolatecondition for some time he thought he heard the voice of a man as goingbefore him and saying, "_Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadowof Death I will fear no ill, for Thou art with me_. " Then he was glad, and that for these reasons:--Firstly, because he gathered from thencethat some one who feared God was in this valley as well as himself. Secondly, for that he perceived that God was with them though in thatdark and dismal state; and why not, thought he, with me? Thirdly, forthat he hoped, could he overtake them, to have company by and by. ' And, in like manner, I am certain that it will encourage and save from despairsome who now hear me if I just report to them some of the discoveries andexperiences of himself that Samuel Rutherford made among the siftings andbuffetings of his Aberdeen exile. Writing to Lady Culross, he says:--'Omy guiltiness, the follies of my youth and the neglects of my calling, they all do stare me in the face here; . . . The world hath sadlymistaken me: no man knoweth what guiltiness is in me. ' And to Lady Boyd, speaking of some great lessons he had learnt in the school of adversity, he says, 'In the third place, I have seen here my abominable vileness, and it is such that if I were well known no one in all the kingdom wouldask me how I do. . . . I am a deeper hypocrite and a shallower professorthan any one could believe. Madam, pity me, the chief of sinners. ' And, again, to the Laird of Carlton: 'Woe, woe is me, that men should thinkthere is anything in me. The house-devils that keep me company and thissink of corruption make me to carry low sails. . . . But, howbeit I am awretched captive of sin, yet my Lord can hew heaven out of worse timberthan I am, if worse there be. ' And to Lady Kenmure: 'I am somebody inthe books of my friends, . . . But there are armies of thoughts withinme, saying the contrary, and laughing at the mistakes of my many friends. Oh! if my inner side were only seen!' Ah no, my brethren, no land is sofearful to them that are sent to search it out as their own heart. 'Theland, ' said the ten spies, 'is a land that eateth up the inhabitantsthereof; the cities are walled up to heaven, and very great, and thechildren of Anak dwell in them. We were in their sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in our own sight. ' Ah, no! no stair is so steep as thestair of sanctification, no bread is so salt as that which is baked for aman of God out of the wild oats of his past sin and his presentsinfulness. Even Joshua and Caleb, who brought back a good report of theland, did not deny that the children of Anak were there, or that theirwalls went up to heaven, or that they, the spies, were as grasshoppersbefore their foes: Caleb and Joshua only said that, in spite of all that, if the Lord delighted in His people, He both could and would give them aland flowing with milk and honey. And be it recorded and remembered tohis credit and his praise that, with all his self-discoveries and self-accusings, Rutherford did not utter one single word of doubt or despair;so far from that was he, that in one of his letters to Hugh M'Kail hetells us that some of his correspondents have written to him that he ispossibly too joyful under the cross. Blunt old Knockbrex, for one, wroteto his old minister to restrain somewhat his ecstasy. So true was it, what Rutherford said of himself to David Dickson, that he was 'made up ofextremes. ' So he was, for I know no man among all my masters in personalreligion who unites greater extremes in himself than Samuel Rutherford. Who weeps like Rutherford over his banishment from Anwoth, while all thetime who is so feasted in Christ's palace in Aberdeen? Who loatheshimself like Rutherford? Not Bunyan, not Brea, not Boston; and, at thesame time, who is so transported and lost to himself in the beauty andsweetness of Christ? As we read his raptures we almost say with cautiousold Knockbrex, that possibly Rutherford is somewhat too full of ecstasyfor this fallen, still unsanctified, and still so slippery world. 

It took two men to carry back the cluster of grapes the spies cut down atEshcol, and there is sweetness and strength and ecstasy enough for tenmen in any one of Rutherford's inebriated Letters. 'See what the landis, and whether it be fat or lean, and bring back of the fruits of theland. ' This was the order given by Moses to the twelve spies. And, whether the land was fat or lean, Moses and all Israel could judge forthemselves when the spies laid down their load of grapes at Moses' feet. 'I can report nothing but good of the land, ' said Joshua Redivivus, as hesent back such clusters of its vineyards and such pots of its honey toHugh Mackail, to Marion M'Naught, and to Lady Kenmure. And then, whenall his letters were collected and published, never surely, since theEpistles of Paul and the Gospel of John, had such clusters ofencouragement and such intoxicating cordials been laid to the lips of theChurch of Christ. 

Our old authors tell us that after the northern tribes had tasted thewarmth and the sweetness of the wines of Italy they could take no resttill they had conquered and taken possession of that land of sunshinewhere such grapes so plentifully grew. And how many hearts have beencarried captive with the beauty and the grace of Christ, and with theland of Immanuel, where He drinks wine with the saints in His Father'shouse, by the reading of Samuel Rutherford's Letters, the day of the Lordwill alone declare. 

 Oh! Christ He is the Fountain, The deep sweet Well of love! The streams on earth I've tasted, More deep I'll drink above. There to an ocean fulness His mercy doth expand, And glory, glory dwelleth In Immanuel's Land. 

II. SAMUEL RUTHERFORD AND SOME OF HIS EXTREMES

 'I am made of extremes. '--_Rutherford_. 

A story is told in Wodrow of an English merchant who had occasion tovisit Scotland on business about the year 1650. On his return home hisfriends asked him what news he had brought with him from the north. 'Goodnews, ' he said; 'for when I went to St. Andrews I heard a sweet, majestic-looking man, and he showed me the majesty of God. After him I heard alittle fair man, and he showed me the loveliness of Christ. I then wentto Irvine, where I heard a well-favoured, proper old man with a longbeard, and that man showed me all my own heart. ' The little fair man whoshowed this English merchant the loveliness of Christ was SamuelRutherford, and the proper old man who showed him all his own heart wasDavid Dickson. Dr. M'Crie says of David Dickson that he was singularlysuccessful in dissecting the human heart and in winning souls to theRedeemer, and all that we know of Dickson bears out that high estimate. When he was presiding on one occasion at the ordination of a youngminister, whom he had had some hand in bringing up, among the advices theold minister gave the new beginner were these:--That he should remainunmarried for four years, in order to give himself up wholly to his greatwork; and that both in preaching and in prayer he should be as succinctas possible so as not to weary his hearers; and, lastly, 'Oh, study Godwell and your own heart. ' We have five letters of Rutherford's to thismaster of the human heart, and it is in the third of these thatRutherford opens his heart to his father in the Gospel, and tells himthat he is made up of extremes. 

In every way that was so. It is a common remark with all Rutherford'sbiographers and editors and commentators what extremes met in that littlefair man. The finest thing that has ever been written on Rutherford isMr. Taylor Innes's lecture in the Evangelical Succession series. And theintellectual extremes that met in Rutherford are there set forth byRutherford's acute and sympathetic critic at some length. For one thing, the greatest speculative freedom and theological breadth met inRutherford with the greatest ecclesiastical hardness and narrowness. Ido not know any author of that day, either in England or in Scotland, either Prelatist or Puritan, who shows more imaginative freedom andspeculative power than Rutherford does in his _Christ Dying_, unless itis his still greater contemporary, Thomas Goodwin. And it is withcorresponding distress that we read some of Rutherford's polemical works, and even the polemical parts of his heavenly Letters. There is aremarkable passage in one of his controversial books that reminds us ofsome of Shakespeare's own tributes to England: 'I judge that in Englandthe Lord hath many names and a fair company that shall stand at the sideof Christ when He shall render up the kingdom to the Father; and that inthat renowned land there be men of all ranks, wise, valorous, generous, noble, heroic, faithful, religious, gracious, learned. ' Rutherford'swhole passage is worthy to stand beside Shakespeare's great passage on'this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. ' Butpersecution from England and controversy at home so embitteredRutherford's sweet and gracious spirit that passages like that are butfew and far between. But let him away out into pure theology, and, especially, let him get his wings on the person, and the work, and theglory of Christ, and few theologians of any age or any school rise to alarger air, or command a wider scope, or discover a clearer eye ofspeculation than Rutherford, till we feel exactly like the laird ofGlanderston, who, when Rutherford left a controversial passage in asermon and went on to speak of Christ, cried out in the church--'Ay, holdyou there, minister; you are all right there!' A domestic controversythat arose in the Church of Scotland towards the end of Rutherford's lifeso separated Rutherford from Dickson and Blair that Rutherford would nottake part with Blair, the 'sweet, majestic-looking man, ' in the Lord'sSupper. 'Oh, to be above, ' Blair exclaimed, 'where there are nomisunderstandings!' It was this same controversy that made JohnLivingstone say in a letter to Blair that his wife and he had had morebitterness over that dispute than ever they had tasted since they knewwhat bitterness meant. Well might Rutherford say, on another suchoccasion, 'It is hard when saints rejoice in the sufferings of saints, and when the redeemed hurt, and go nigh to hate the redeemed. ' Watch andpray, my brethren, lest in controversy--ephemeral and immaterialcontroversy--you also go near to hate and hurt one another, as Rutherforddid. 

And then, what strength, combined with what tenderness, there is inRutherford! In all my acquaintance with literature I do not know anyauthor who has two books under his name so unlike one another, two booksthat are such a contrast to one another, as _Lex Rex_ and the _Letters_. A more firmly built argument than _Lex Rex_, an argument so clampedtogether with the iron bands of scholastic and legal lore, is not to bemet with in any English book; a more lawyer-looking production is not inall the Advocates' Library than just _Lex Rex_. There is as much emotionin the multiplication table as there is in _Lex Rex_; and then, on theother hand, the _Letters_ have no other fault but this, that they areovercharged with emotion. The _Letters_ would be absolutely perfect ifthey were only a little more restrained and chastened in this onerespect. The pundit and the poet are the opposites and the extremes ofone another; and the pundit and the poet meet, as nowhere else that Iknow of, in the author of _Lex Rex_ and the _Letters_. 

Then, again, what extremes of beauty and sweetness there are inRutherford's style, too often intermingled with what carelessness anddisorder. What flashes of noblest thought, clothed in the most apt andwell-fitting words, on the same page with the most slatternly and down-at-the-heel English. Both Dr. Andrew Bonar and Dr. Andrew Thomson havegiven us selections from Rutherford's _Letters_ that would quite justifyus in claiming Rutherford as one of the best writers of English in hisday; but then we know out of what thickets of careless composition theseflowers have been collected. Both Gillespie and Rutherford ran a tilt atHooker; but alas for the equipment and the manners of our champions whencompared with the shining panoply and the knightly grace of the author ofthe incomparable _Polity_. 

And then, morally, as great extremes met in Rutherford as intellectually. Newman has a fine sermon under a fine title, 'Saintliness not forfeitedby the Penitent. ' 'No degree of sin, ' he says, 'precludes theacquisition of any degree of holiness, however high. No sinner so great, but he may, through God's grace, become a saint ever so great. ' And thenhe goes on to illustrate that, and balance that, and almost to retractand deny all that, in a way that all his admirers only too well know. Butstill it stands true. A friend of mine once told me that it was to himoften the most delightful and profitable of Sabbath evening exercisesjust to take down Newman's sermons and read their titles over again. Andthis mere title, I feel sure, has encouraged and comforted many:'Saintliness not forfeited by the Penitent. ' And Samuel Rutherford's isjust another great name to be added to the noble roll of saintlypenitents we all have in our minds taken out of Scripture and ChurchHistory. Neither great Saintliness nor great service was forfeited bythis penitent; and he is constantly telling us how the extreme of demeritand the extreme of gracious treatment met in him; how he had at one timedestroyed himself, and how God had helped him; how, where sin hadabounded, grace had abounded much more. In one of the very last lettershe ever wrote--his letter to James Guthrie in 166l--he is still amazedthat God has not brought his sin to the Market Cross, to use his ownword. But all through his letters this same note of admiration andwonder runs--that he has been taken from among the pots and his wingscovered with silver and gold. Truly, in his case the most seraphicSaintliness was not forfeited, and we who read his books may well blessGod it was so. 

And then, experimentally also, what extremes met in our author! Pascalin Paris and Rutherford in Anwoth and St. Andrews were at the veryopposite poles ecclesiastically from one another. I do not like to thinkwhat Rutherford would have said of Pascal, but I cannot embody what Ihave to say of Rutherford's experimental extremes better than just bythis passage taken from the _Thoughts_: 'The Christian religion teachesthe righteous man that it lifts him even to a participation in the divinenature; but that, in this exalted state, he still bears within him thefountain of all corruption, which renders him during his whole lifesubject to error and misery, to sin and death, while at the same time itproclaims to the most wicked that they can still receive the grace oftheir Redeemer. ' And again, 'Did we not know ourselves full of pride, ambition, lust, weakness, misery and injustice, we were indeed blind. . .. What then can we feel but a great esteem for a religion that is sowell acquainted with the defects of man, and a great desire for the truthof a religion that promises remedies so precious. ' And yet again, whatothers thought of him, and how they treated him, compared with what heknew himself to be, caused Rutherford many a bitter reflection. Everyletter he got consulting him and appealing to him as if he had been God'sliving oracle made him lie down in the very dust with shame andself-abhorrence. Writing on one occasion to Robert Blair he told himthat his letter consulting him about some matter of Christian experiencehad been like a blow in the face to him; it affects me much, saidRutherford, that a man like you should have any such opinion of me. And, apologising for his delay in replying to a letter of Lady Boyd's, he saysthat he is put out of all love of writing letters because hiscorrespondents think things about him that he himself knows are not true. 'My white side comes out on paper--but at home there is much black work. All the challenges that come to me are true. ' There was no man thenalive on the earth so much looked up to and consulted in the deepestmatters of the soul, in the secrets of the Lord with the soul, asRutherford was, and his letters bear evidence on every page that therewas no man who had a more loathsome and a more hateful experience of hisown heart, not even Taylor, not even Owen, not even Bunyan, not evenBaxter. What a day of extremest men that was, and what an inheritance weextreme men have had left us, in their inward, extreme, and heavenlybooks!

Once more, hear him on the tides of feeling that continually rose andfell within his heart. Writing from Aberdeen to Lady Boyd, he says: 'Ihave not now, of a long time, found such high springtides as formerly. The sea is out, and I cannot buy a wind and cause it to flow again; onlyI wait on the shore till the Lord sends a full sea. . . . But even todream of Him is sweet. ' And then, just over the leaf, to MarionM'Naught: 'I am well: honour to God. . . . He hath broken in upon a poorprisoner's soul like the swelling of Jordan. I am bank and brim full: agreat high springtide of the consolations of Christ hath overwhelmed me. '. . . But sweet as it is to read his rapturous expressions when the tideis full, I feel it far more helpful to hear how he still looks and waitsfor the return of the tide when the tide is low, and when the shore isfull, as all left shores are apt to be, of weeds and mire, and allcorrupt and unclean things. Rutherford is never more helpful to hiscorrespondents than when they consult him about their ebb tides, and findthat he himself either has been, or still is, in the same experience. 

But why do we disinter such texts as this out of such an author as SamuelRutherford? Why do we tell to all the world that such an eminent saintwas full of such sad extremes? Well, we surely do so out of obedience tothe divine command to comfort God's people; for, next to their having nosuch extremes in themselves, their next best comfort is to be told thatgreat and eminent saints of God have had the very same besetting sins andstaggering extremes as they still have. If the like of Samuel Rutherfordwas vexed and weakened with such intellectual contradictions andspiritual extremes in his mind, in his heart and in his history, then maywe not hope that some such saintliness, if not some such service as his, may be permitted to us also?

III. MARION M'NAUGHT

 'O woman beloved of God. '--_Rutherford_. 

'The world knows nothing of its greatest men, ' says Sir Henry Taylor inhis _Philip Van Artevelde_; and it knows much less of its greatest women. I have not found Marion M'Naught's name once mentioned outside of SamuelRutherford's Letters. But she holds a great place--indeed, the foremostplace--in that noble book, to be written in which is almost as good as tobe written in heaven. 

Rutherford's first letter to Marion M'Naught was written from the manseof Anwoth on the 6th of June 1627, and out of a close and lifelongcorrespondence we are happy in having had preserved to us some forty-fiveof Rutherford's letters to his first correspondent. But, mostunfortunately, we have none of her letters back again to Anwoth orAberdeen or London or St. Andrews. It is much to be wished we had, forMarion M'Naught was a woman greatly gifted in mind, as well as of quiteexceptional experience even for that day of exceptional experiences inthe divine life. But we can almost construct her letters to Rutherfordfor ourselves, so pointedly and so elaborately and so affectionately doesRutherford reply to them. 

Marion M'Naught is already a married woman, and the mother of three well-grown children, when we make her acquaintance in Rutherford's Letters. She had sprung of an ancient and honourable house in the south ofScotland, and she was now the wife of a well-known man in that day, William Fullarton, the Provost of Kirkcudbright. It is interesting toknow that Marion M'Naught was closely connected with Lady Kenmure, another of Rutherford's chief correspondents. Lord Kenmure was hermother's brother. Kenmure had lived a profligate and popularity-huntinglife till he was laid down on his death-bed, when he underwent one of themost remarkable conversions anywhere to be read of--a conversion that, asit would appear, his niece Marion M'Naught had no little to do with. Aslong as Kenmure was young and well, as long as he was haunting thepurlieus of the Court, and selling his church and his soul for a smilefrom the King, the Provost of Kirkcudbright and his saintly wife weredespised and forgotten; but when he was suddenly brought face to facewith death and judgment, when his ribbons and his titles were now likethe coals of hell in his conscience, nothing would satisfy him but thathis niece must leave her husband and her children and take up her abodein Kenmure Castle. _The Last and Heavenly Speeches of Lord Kenmure_ wasa classic memoir of those days, and in that little book we read of hisniece's constant attendance at his bedside, as good a nurse for his soulas she was for his body. 

Samuel Rutherford's favourite correspondent was, to begin with, a womanof quite remarkable powers of mind. We gather that impression powerfullyas we read deeper and deeper into the remarkable series of letters thatRutherford addressed to her. To no one does he go into deeper mattersboth of Church and State, both of doctrinal and personal religion than toher, and the impression of mental power as well as of personal worth shemade on Rutherford, she must have made on many of the ablest and best menof that day. Robert Blair, for instance, tells us that when he was onhis way home from London to Ireland he visited Scotland chiefly that hemight see Rutherford at Anwoth and Marion M'Naught at Kirkcudbright, andwhen he came to Kirkcudbright he found Rutherford also there. And whenRutherford was in exile in Aberdeen, and in deep anxiety about his peopleat Anwoth, he wrote beseeching Marion M'Naught to go to Anwoth and givehis people her counsel about their congregational and personal affairs. But, above all, it is from the depth and the power of Rutherford'sletters to herself on the inward life that we best gather the depth andthe power of this remarkable woman's mind. 

There is no other subject of thought that gives such scope for thegreatest gifts of the human mind as does the life of God in the soul. There is no book in all the world that demands such a combination ofmental gifts and spiritual graces to understand it aright as the Bible. The history and the biography of the Bible, the experimental parts of theBible, the doctrines of grace deduced by the apostles out of the historyand the experience recorded in the Bible, and then the personal, the mostinward and most spiritual bearing of all that, --what occupation can bepresented to the mind of man or woman to compare with that? Truereligion, really true religion, gives unequalled and ever-increasingscope for the best gifts of mind and for the best graces of heart andcharacter. 'In truth, religious obedience is a very intricate problem, and the more so the farther we proceed in it. ' And he has poor eyes anda poor heart for true religion, and for its best fruits both in the mindand the heart and the character, who does not see those fruits increasingletter by letter as Rutherford writes to Marion M'Naught. 

Her public spirit also made Marion M'Naught to be held in high honour. Her husband was a public man, and his intelligent fidelity to truth andjustice in that day made his name far more public than ever he wished itto be. And in all his services and sufferings for the truth he had asplendid wife in Marion M'Naught. 'Remember me to your husband, 'Rutherford writes; 'tell him that Christ is worthy to be suffered for notonly to blows but to blood. He will find that innocence and uprightnesswill hold his feet firm and make him happy when jouking will not do it. 'And again, 'Encourage your husband and tell him that truth will yet keepthe crown of the causey in Scotland. ' And when the petition is being gotup for his being permitted to return to Anwoth, Rutherford asks hiscorrespondent to procure that three or four hundred noblemen, gentlemen, countrymen and citizens shall be got to subscribe it--a telling tribute, surely, to her public spirit and her great influence. 

But an independent mind and a public spirit like hers could not exist inthose days, or in any day this world has yet seen, without raising upmany and bitter enemies. And both she and her husband suffered heavily, both in name and in estate, from the malice and the hatred that theirfearless devotion to truth and justice stirred up. So much so, that someof the finest passages in Rutherford's early letters to her are those inwhich he counsels her and her husband to patience, and meekness, andforgiveness of injuries. 'Keep God's covenant in all your trials. Holdyou by His blessed word, and sin not; flee anger, wrath, grudging, envying, fretting. Forgive an hundred pence to your fellow-servant, foryour Lord has forgiven you ten thousand talents. ' And again: 'Bepatient; Christ went to heaven with many a wrong. His visage was moremarred than that of any of the sons of men. He was wronged and receivedno reparation, but referred all to that day when all wrongs shall berighted. ' And again: 'You live not upon men's opinion. Happy are youif, when the world trampleth upon you in your credit and good name, youare yet the King's gold and stamped with His image. Pray for the spiritof love, for love beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth allthings, endureth all things. Forgive, therefore, your fellow-servant hisone talent. Always remember what has been forgiven you. ' And on everypage of the Kirkcudbright correspondence we see that, amid all thesetemptations and trials, no man had a better wife than the provost, and nochildren a better mother than Grizel and her two brothers. Her talentssought no nobler sphere for their exercise and increase than her ownfireside; and her public spirit was better seen in her life at home thananywhere out of doors. Hers was truly a public spirit, and like a spiritit inspired and animated both her own and her husband's life withinterest in and with care for the best good, both of the Church and theState. Her public spirit was not incompatible with great personalmodesty and humility, and great attention to her domestic duties, allrooted in a life hid with Christ in God. 

And then, all this--her birth, her station, her talents, and her publicspirit--could not fail to give her a great influence for good. In asingle line of Rutherford's on this subject, we see her whole lifetime:'You are engaged so in God's work in Kirkcudbright that if you remove outof that town all will be undone. ' What a tribute is that to theprovost's wife! And again, far on in the Letters he writes to GrizelFullarton: 'Your dear mother, now blessed and perfected with glory, keptlife in that place, and my desire is that you succeed her in that way. 'What a pride to have such a mother; and what a tradition for a daughterto take up! So have we all known in country towns and villages one manor one woman who kept life in the place. Out of the memories of my ownboyhood there rises up, here a minister and there a farmer, here a cloth-merchant and there a handloom weaver, here a blacksmith's wife and therea working housekeeper, who kept life in the whole place. It is notstation that does it, nor talent, though both station and talent greatlyhelp; it is character, it is true and genuine godliness. True andgenuine godliness--especially when it is purged of pride, and harshjudgment, and too much talk, and is adorned with humility and meekness, and all the other fruits of holy love--true and pure godliness in a mostobscure man or woman will find its way to a thousand consciences, andwill impress and overawe a whole town, as Marion M'Naught's raregodliness impressed and overawed all Kirkcudbright. Just as, on theother hand, the ignorance, the censoriousness, the bitterness, theintolerance, that too often accompany what would otherwise be truegodliness, work as widespread mischief as true godliness works good. 'Onelittle deed done for God's sake, and against our natural inclination, though in itself only of a conceding or passive character, to brook aninsult, to face a danger, or to resign an advantage, has in it a poweroutbalancing all the dust and chaff of mere profession--the professionwhether of enlightened benevolence or candour, or, on the other hand, ofhigh religious faith and fervent zeal;' or, as Rutherford could write toMarion M'Naught's daughter: 'There is a wide and deep difference betweena name of godliness and the power of godliness. ' Even the schoolboys ofKirkcudbright could quite well distinguish the name from the reality; andlong after they were Christian men they would tell with reverence andwith love when, and from whom, they took their first andnever-to-be-forgotten impressions. It was, they would say to theirchildren, from that woman of such rare godliness as well as publicspirit, Marion M'Naught. 

It was all this, and nothing other and nothing less than all this, thatmade Marion M'Naught Rutherford's favourite correspondent. Her mind andher heart together early and often drew her across the country toRutherford's preaching. Marion M'Naught had a good minister of her ownat home; but Rutherford was Rutherford, and he made Anwoth Anwoth. Ithink I can understand something of her delight on Communion forenoons, when his text was Christ Dying, in John xii. 32, or the Syro-Phoenicianwoman, in Matt. Xv. 28. And then the feasts on the fast-days atKirkcudbright, over the cloud of witnesses, in Heb. Xii. 1, and all tearswiped away, in Rev. Xxi. 4, and the marriage of the Lamb, in xix. 7. Andthen, on the other hand, Rutherford is not surely to be blamed for lovingsuch a hearer. His Master loved a Mary also of His day, for that alsoamong other good reasons. If a good hearer likes a good preacher, whyshould a good preacher not like a good hearer? Take a holiday, and giveus another day soon of such and such a preacher, our people sometimes sayto us. And why should that preacher not also say to us, Give me a daysoon again of your good hearers? As a matter of fact, our good preachingfriends do say that to us. And why not? Fine hearers, deep hearers, thoroughly well-prepared hearers, hearers of genius are almost as scarceas fine, deep, thoroughly well-prepared preachers and preachers ofgenius. And who shall blame Rutherford for liking to see Marion M'Naughtcoming into the church on a Sabbath morning as well as she liked to seehim coming into the pulpit? 'I go to Anwoth so often, ' she said, 'because, though other ministers show me the majesty of God and theplague of my own heart, Mr. Samuel does both these things, but he alsoshows me, as no other minister ever does, the loveliness of Christ. ' Itis as great a mistake to think that all our Christian people are able totake in a sermon on the loveliness of Christ as it is that all ordainedmen can preach such a sermon. There are diversities of gifts amonghearers as well as among preachers; and when the gifts of the pulpit meetthe corresponding graces in the pew, you need not wonder that theyrecognise and delight in one another. Jesus Christ was Rutherford'sfavourite subject in the pulpit, and thus it was that he was MarionM'Naught's favourite preacher, as she, again, was his favourite hearer inthe church and his favourite correspondent in the Letters. To how manyin this house to-night could a preacher say that he wished them all to be'over head and ears in love to Christ'? What preacher could say a thinglike that in truth and soberness? And how many could hear it? Only apreacher of the holy passion of Rutherford, and only a hearer of theintellect and heart and rare experience of Marion M'Naught. 'O the fairface of the man Jesus Christ!' he cries out. And again: 'O time, time, why dost thou move so slowly! Come hither, O love of Christ! Whatastonishment will be mine when I first see that fairest and most lovelyface! It would be heaven to me just to look through a hole of heaven'sdoor to see Christ's countenance!' No wonder that the congregations werefew, and the correspondents who could make anything of a man of such a'fanatic humour' as that! But, then, no wonder, on the other hand, that, when two fanatics so full of that humour as Samuel Rutherford and MarionM'Naught met, they corresponded ever after with one another in their ownenraptured language night and day. 

IV. LADY KENMURE

 'Build your nest, Madam, upon no tree here, for God hath sold this whole forest to death. '--_Rutherford_. 

Lady Kenmure was one of the Campbells of Argyll, a family distinguishedfor the depth of their piety, their public spirit, and their love for thePresbyterian polity; and Lady Jane was one of the most richly-giftedmembers of that richly-gifted house. But, with all that, Lady JaneCampbell had her own crosses to carry. She had the sore cross of badhealth to carry all her days. Then she had the sad misfortune to make avery bad marriage in the morning of her days; and, partly as the resultof all that, and partly because of her peculiar mental constitution, herwhole life was drenched with a deep melancholy. But, as we are told inJohn Howie and elsewhere, all these evils and misfortunes were made towork together for good to her through the special grace of God, andthrough the wise and wistful care of her lifelong friend and minister andcorrespondent, Samuel Rutherford. Lady Jane Campbell had very remarkablegifts of mind. We would have expected that from her distinguishedpedigree; and we have abundant proof of that in Rutherford's sheaf ofletters to her. His dedication of that most remarkable piece, _The Trialand Triumph of Faith_, is sufficient of itself to show how highlyRutherford esteemed Lady Kenmure, both as to her head and her heart. Tillour theological students have been led to study _The Trial and Triumph ofFaith: Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself_--which, to my mind, is by far the best of Rutherford's works--_The Covenant of Grace_ and_The Influences of Grace_, they will have no conception of theintellectual rank of Samuel Rutherford himself, or of the intelligenceand the attainments of his hearers and readers and correspondents. ThomasGoodwin was always telling the theological students of Oxford in thosedays to thicken their too thin homilies with more doctrine: Rutherford'svery thinnest books are almost too thick, both with theology and withthought. 

How ever a woman like Jane Campbell came to marry a man like John Gordonwill remain a mystery. It was not that he was a man of no mind; he was aman of no worth or interest of any kind. He was a rake and alick-spittle, the very last man in Scotland for Jane Campbell to throwherself away upon. And she was too clever and too good a woman not tomake a speedy and a heart-breaking discovery of the fatal mistake she hadcommitted. Poor Jane Campbell soon wakened up to the discovery that shehad exchanged the name and the family of a brave and noble house for thename and the house of a poltroon. No wonder that Rutherford's letters toher are so often headed: 'To Lady Kenmure, under illness and depressionof mind. ' Could you have kept quite well had you been a Campbell withJohn Gordon for a husband? Think of having to nurse your humbug of ahusband through a shammed illness. Think of having to take a hand insending in a sham doctor's certificate because your husband was too muchof a time-server to go to Edinburgh to give his vote for a persecutedchurch. Think of having to wear the title and decoration your husbandhad purchased for you at the cost of his truth and honour and manhood. Lady Kenmure needed Samuel Rutherford's very best letters to help to keepher in bare life all the time the county dames were green with envy atthe dear-bought honours. And Kenmure himself had to be brought to hisdeath-bed before he became a husband worthy of his wife. We still readin his _Last Speeches_ how God made Lord Gordon's sins to find him out, and with what firmness and with what tenderness Rutherford handled thesoul of the dying man till all his cowardice, title-hunting, and truth-betraying life came back to his death-bed with a sharper sting in themthan even his grossest sins. Whoredom and wine after all are but thelusts of a man, whereas time-serving and truth-selling are the lusts of adevil. 'Dig deeper, ' said Rutherford to the dying courtier, and Kenmuredid dig deeper, till he came down to the seals and the titles and theribbons for which he had sold his soul. But he that confesses andforsakes his sins even at the eleventh hour shall always find mercy, andso it was with Lord Kenmure. 

 'Between the stirrup and the ground Mercy I sought and mercy found. '

We do not grudge Viscount Kenmure all the grace he got from God; we shallneed as much grace and more ourselves; but we do somewhat grudge such aman a place of honour among the Scots worthies. We are tempted to throwdown the book and to demand what right John Gordon has to stand besidesuch men as Patrick Hamilton, and John Knox, and John Wishart, andArchibald Campbell, and Hugh M'Kail, and Richard Cameron, and AlexanderShields? But Lochgoin answers us that God sometimes accepts the latewill for the whole timeous deed, and the bravery and loyalty of the wifefor the meanness and poltroonery of the husband. 'Have you a presentsense of God's love?' 'I have, I have, ' said the dying Viscount. AsRutherford continued in prayer, Kenmure was observed to smile and lookupwards. About sunset Lord Kenmure died, at the same instant thatRutherford said Amen to his prayer. _The Last and Heavenly Speeches_ isa rare pamphlet that will well repay its price to him who will seek itout and read it. 

This was the correspondent, then, to whom Samuel Rutherford wrote suchcounsels and encouragements as these: 'Therefore, madam, herein havecomfort, that He who seeth perfectly through all your evils, and whoknoweth the frame and constitution of your nature, and what is mosthealthful for your soul, holdeth every cup of affliction to your headwith his own gracious hand. Never believe that your tender-heartedSaviour will mix your cup with one drachm-weight of poison. Drink, then, with the patience of the saints: wrestle, fight, go forward, watch, fear, believe, pray, and then you have all the infallible symptoms of one ofthe elect of Christ within you' (_Letter_ III. ). On the death of herinfant daughter, Rutherford writes to the elect lady: 'She is only senton before, like unto a star, which, going out of our sight, doth not dieand vanish, but still shineth in another hemisphere. What she wanted oftime she hath gotten of eternity, and you have now some plenishing up inheaven. Build your nest upon no tree here, for God hath sold the wholeforest to death' (_Letter_ IV. ). 'Madam, when you are come to the otherside of the water and have set down your foot on the shore of gloriouseternity, and look back to the water and to your wearisome journey, andshall see in that clear glass of endless glory nearer to the bottom ofGod's wisdom, you shall then be forced to say, "If God had done otherwisewith me than He hath done, I had never come to the enjoying of this crownof glory"' (_Letter_ XL). 'Madam, tire not, weary not; for I dare findyou the Son of God caution that when you are got up thither and have castyour eyes to view the golden city and the fair and never-withering Treeof Life that beareth twelve manner of fruits every month, you shall thensay, "Four-and-twenty hours' abode in this place is worth threescore andten years' sorrow upon earth"' (_Letter_ XIX. ). 'Your ladyship goeth onlaughing and putting on a good countenance before the world, and yet youcarry heaviness about with you. You do well, madam, not to make themwitnesses of your grief who cannot be curers of it' (_Letter_ XX. ). 'Those who can take the crabbed tree of the cross handsomely upon theirbacks and fasten it on cannily shall find it such a burden as its wingsare to a bird or its sails to a ship' (_Letter_ LXIX. ). 'I thought ithad been an easy thing to be a Christian, and that to seek God had beenat the next door; but, oh, the windings, the turnings, the ups and downsHe hath led me through!' (_Letter_ CIV. ) 'I may be a book-man and yet bean idiot and a stark fool in Christ's way! The Bible beguiled thePharisees, and so may I be misled' (_Letter_ CVI. ). 'I find youcomplaining of yourself, and it becometh a sinner so to do. I am notagainst you in that. The more sense the more life. The more sense ofsin the less sin' (_Letter_ CVI. ). 'Seeing my sins and the sins of myyouth deserved strokes, how am I obliged to my Lord who hath given me awaled and chosen cross! Since I must have chains, He would put goldenchains on me, watered over with many consolations. Seeing I must havesorrow (for I have sinned, O Preserver of men!), He hath waled out for mejoyful sorrow--honest, spiritual, glorious sorrow' (_Letter_ CCVI. ). There are hundreds of passages as good as these scattered up and down theforty-seven letters we have had preserved to us out of the large andintimate correspondence that passed between Samuel Rutherford and LadyKenmure. 

V. LADY CARDONESS

 'Think it not easy. '--_Rutherford_. 

What a lasting interest Samuel Rutherford's pastoral pen has given to thehoary old castle of Cardoness! Those nine so heart-winning letters thatRutherford wrote from Aberdeen to Cardoness Castle will still keep thememory of that old tower green long after its last stone has crumbledinto dust. Readers of Rutherford's letters will long visit CardonessCastle, and will musingly recall old John Gordon and Lady Cardoness, hiswife, who both worked out each their own salvation in that old fortress, and found it a task far from easy. For nine faithful years Rutherfordhad been the anxious pastor of Cardoness Castle, and then, after he wasbanished from his pulpit and his parish, he only ministered to the Castlethe more powerfully and prevailingly with his pen. After reading theCardoness correspondence, we do not wonder to find the stout oldchieftain heading the hard-fought battles which the people of Anwoth madeboth against Edinburgh and St. Andrews, when those cities and collegesattempted to take away their minister. 

Rough old Cardoness had a warm place in his heart for Samuel Rutherford. The tough old pagan did not know how much he loved the little fair manwith the high-set voice and the unearthly smile till he had lost him; andif force of arms could have kept Rutherford in Anwoth, Cardoness wouldsoon have buckled on his sword. He was ashamed to be seen reading theletters that came to the Castle from Aberdeen; he denied having read themeven after he had them all by heart. The wild old laird was nearer theKingdom of Heaven than any one knew; even his Christian lady did not knowall that Rutherford knew, and it was a frank sentence of Rutherford's inan Aberdeen letter that took lifelong hold of the old laird, and did morefor his conversion and all that followed it than all Rutherford's sermonsand all his other letters. 'I find true religion to be a hard task; Ifind heaven hard to be won, ' wrote Rutherford to the old man; and thatdid more for his hard and late salvation than all the sermons he had everheard. 'A hard task, a hard task!' the serving-men and the serving-womenoften overheard their old master muttering, as he alighted from the huntand as he came home from his monthly visit to Edinburgh. 'A hard task!'he was often heard muttering, but no one to the day of his death everknew all that his muttering meant. 

'Read over your past life often, ' Rutherford wrote to the old man. AndCardoness found that to be one of the hardest tasks he had ever tried. Hehad not forgotten his past life; there were things that came up out ofhis past continually that compelled him to remember it. But whatRutherford meant was that his old parishioner should willingly, deliberately and repeatedly open the stained and torn leaves of his pastlife and read it all over in the light of his old age, approaching death, and late-awakened conscience. Rutherford wished Cardoness to sit down asMatthew Henry says the captives sat down by the rivers of Babylon, andweep 'deliberate tears. ' There were pages in his past life that it wasthe very pains of hell to old Cardoness to read; but he performed thehard task, and thus was brought much nearer salvation than even his oldpastor knew. 'It will take a long lance to go to the bottom of yourheart, my friend, ' wrote Rutherford, faithfully, and, at the same time, most respectfully, to the old man. 'Human nature is lofty andhead-strong in you, and it will cost you far more suffering to bemortified and sanctified than it costs the ordinary run of men. ' And, instead of that plain speech offending or angering the old laird, it hadthe very opposite effect; it softened him, and humbled him, andencouraged him, and gave him new strength for the hard task on which hewas day and night employed. 

Cardoness was a small property, heavily bonded, and some of the leavesthat were hardest to read in the diary of Gordon's early manhood told thebitter history of some added bonds. Sin would need to be sweet, for itis very dear. And then had come years of rack-renting of his tenants;the virtuous tenantry had to pay dearly for the vices of their lord. Rutherford had not been silent to old Cardoness about this matter inconversation, and he was not silent in his letters. 'You are now uponthe very borders of the other life. I told you, when I was with you, thewhole counsel of God in this matter, and I tell it you again. Awake torighteousness. Do not lay the burden of your house on other people; donot compel honest people to pay your old debts. Commit to memory 1 Sam. Xii. 3, and ride out among your tenantry, my dear people, repeating, asyou pass their stables and their cattle-stalls, "Behold, I am old andgrey-headed; behold, here I am: whose ox have I taken? Whose ass have Itaken? Whom have I defrauded? Whom have I oppressed?" I charge you towrite to me here at once, and be plain with me, and tell me whether yoursalvation is sure. I hope for the best; but I know that your reckoningswith the righteous Judge are both many and deep. ' That was a hard taskto set to a tyrannical old landlord who had been used to call no manmaster, or God either, to take such commands from a poor banishedminister! But Cardoness did it. He mastered his rising pride andresentment and did it; and though he found it a hard task to go throughwith his reductions at next rent-day, yet he did it. Such boldness inthe Day of Judgment will a good conscience give a man, as when oldCardoness actually stood up before the parishioners in the kirk of Anwothand read to them, after the elders had conducted the exercises, a letterhe had received last week from their silenced minister. It is one ofRutherford's longest and most passionate letters. Take a sentence or twoout of it: 'My soul longeth exceedingly to hear whether there be any workof Christ in the parish that will bide the trial of fire and water. Ithink of my people in my sleep. You know how that, out of love to yoursouls, and out of the desire I had to make an honest account of you, Ioften testified my dislike of your ways, both in private and in public. Examine yourselves. I never knew so well what sin is as since I came toAberdeen, though I was preaching about it every day to you. It would belife to me if you would read this letter to my people, and if they wouldprofit by it. And now I write to thee, whoever thou art, O poor broken-hearted believer of the free salvation. Let Christ's atoning blood be onthy guilty soul. Christ has His heaven ready for thee, and He will makegood His word before long. The blessing of a poor prisoner be upon you. '

Salvation was all this time proving itself to be a hard and ever hardertask to John Gordon, with his proud neck, with his past life to read, with his debts and bonds and increasing expenditure, and with old ageheavy upon him and death at his door. And Lady Cardoness was not findingher salvation to be easy either in all these untoward circumstances. 'Think it not easy, ' wrote Rutherford to her. And to make her salvationsure, and to lead her to help her burdened husband with his hard task, Rutherford made bold to touch, though always tenderly and scripturally, upon the family cross. Their burdened and crowded estate lay between thewhole Cardoness family and their salvation. Rutherford had seen thatfrom the first day he arrived in Anwoth, and Cardoness and itsdifficulties lay heavy upon his heart in his prison in Aberdeen. And hecould not write consolations and comforts and promises to Lady Cardonesstill he had told her the truth again as he had told her husband. 'Thekingdom of God and His righteousness is the one thing needful for you andfor Cardoness and for your children, ' wrote Rutherford. 'Houses, lands, credit, honour may all be lost if heaven is won. See that Cardoness andyou buy the field where the pearl is. Sell all and buy that field. Ibeseech you to make conscience of your ways. Deal kindly with yourtenants. I have written my mind at length to your husband, and mycounsel to you is that, when his passion overcometh him, a soft answerwill turn away wrath. God casteth your husband often in my mind; Icannot forget him. '

What a power for good is in Samuel Rutherford's pen! At a few touches itcarries us across Scotland to the mouth of the Fleet, and back twohundred and fifty years, and summons up Cardoness Castle, and peoples thehoary old keep again with John Gordon and his wife and children. We seethe castle; we see the rack-rented farms lying around the rock on whichthe castle stands; we see Anwoth manse and pulpit empty and silenced; andthen we see Rutherford dreaming about Cardoness as he sleeps in his far-off prison. The stout old laird rises before our eyes with more than hisproper share of human nature--a mass of sinful manhood, strong in will, hot in temper, burdened with debt--debt in Edinburgh, and a deeper anddarker debt elsewhere. The old lion lay, taken in a net of trouble, andthe more he struggled the more entangled he became. And then herladyship, a religious woman; yes, really a religious woman, only, like somany religious women, more religious than moral; more emotional thanpractically helpful in everyday life. All who have only heard of SamuelRutherford and his letters will feel sure that he was just the effusiveminister, and that his letters were just the soft stuff, to foster apiety that came out in feminine moods and emotions rather than in well-kept accounts and a well-managed kitchen and nursery. But we who haveread Rutherford know better than that. Lady Cardoness is told, inkindest and sweetest but most unmistakable language, that she has to workout a not easy salvation in Cardoness Castle, and that, if her husbandfails in his hard task, no small part of his blood will lie at her door. 

But as we stand and look at Cardoness Castle, with its hard tasks foreternal life, a divine voice says to ourselves, Work out your ownsalvation with fear and trembling; and at that voice the old keep fadesfrom our eyes, and our own house in modern Edinburgh rises up before us. Here, too, are old men with hard tasks between them and their salvation--apast life to read, to repent of, to redress, to reform, to weepdeliberate and bitter tears over. There are debts and many otherdisorders that have to be put right; there are those under us--tenantsand servants and poor relations--whose cases have to be dealt withconsiderately, justly, kindly, affectionately. There are things in thosewe love best--in a father, in a mother, in a husband, in a wife--that wehave to be patient and forbearing with, and to command ourselves in thepresence of Salvation was not easy in Cardoness Castle, with such amaster, and such a mistress, and such children, and such tenants, andwith such debts and straits of all kinds; and Cardoness Castle isrepeated over and over again in hundreds of Edinburgh houses to-night. 

VI. LADY CULROSS

 'Grace groweth best in winter. '--_Rutherford_. 

Elizabeth Melville was one of the ladies of the Covenant. It was aremarkable feature of a remarkable time in Scotland that so many ladiesof birth, intellect and influence were found on the side of thepersecuted Covenanters. I do not remember any other period in thehistory of the Church of Christ, since the day when the women of Galileeministered of their substance to our Lord Himself, in which noble womentook such a noble part as did Lady Culross, Lady Jane Campbell, theDuchess of Hamilton, the Duchess of Athol, and other such ladies in thateventful time. We had something not unlike it again in the ten years'conflict that culminated in the Disruption; and in the social andreligious movements of our own day, women of rank and talent are notfound wanting. At the same time, I do not know where to find such acloud of witnesses for the faith of Christ from among the eminent womenof any one generation as Scotland can show in her ladies of the Covenant. 

Lady Culross's name will always be held in tender honour in the innermostcircles of our best Scottish Christians, for the hand she had in thatwonderful outpouring of God's grace at the kirk of Shotts on thatThanksgiving Monday in 1636. Under God, that Covenanters' Pentecost wasmore due to Lady Culross than to any other human being. True, JohnLivingstone preached the Thanksgiving Sermon, but it was through LadyCulross's influence that he was got to preach it; and he preached itafter a night of prayer spent by Lady Culross and her companions, suchthat we read of next day's sermon and its success as a matter of course. I cannot venture to tell a heterogeneous audience the history of thatnight they spent at Shotts with God. It is so unlike what we have everseen or heard of. There may be one or two of us here who have spentwhole nights in prayer at some crisis in our life, going from one promiseto another, when, in the Psalmist's words, the sorrows of death compassedus, and the pains of hell gat hold upon us. And we, one or two of us, may have had miracles from heaven forthwith performed upon us, fit tomatch in a private way with the hand of God on the kirk of Shotts. Buteven those of us who have such secrets between us and God, we, I fear, never spent a whole Communion night, never shutting our eyes but to prayfor a baptism of spiritual blessing upon to-morrow's congregation. Whata mother in Israel was Lady Culross, with five hundred children born ofher travail in one day!

I have not found any of Lady Culross's letters to Samuel Rutherford, butJohn Livingstone's literary executors have published some eight lettersshe wrote to Livingstone, her close and lifelong friend. And LadyCulross's first letter to John Livingstone is in every point of view, aremarkable piece. It has a strength, an irony, and a tenderness in itthat at once tell the reader that he is in the hands of a very remarkablewriter. But it is not Lady Culross's literature that so much interestsus and holds us, it is her religion; and it is its depth, its intensity, and the way it grows in winter. After a long and racy introduction, sometimes difficult to decipher, from its Fife idioms and obsoletespelling, she goes on thus: 'Did you get any heart to remember me and mybonds? As for me, I never found so great impediment within. Still, itis the Lord with whom we have to do, and He gives and takes, casts downand raises up, kills and makes alive as pleases His Majesty. . . . Mytask at home is augmented and tripled, and yet I fear worse. Sin in meand in mine is my greatest cross. I would, if it were the Lord's will, choose affliction rather than iniquity. --Yours in C. , E. MELVIL. '

It was now winter with John Livingstone. The persecution had overtakenhim, and this is how her ladyship writes to him:--

'My very worthy and dear brother: Courage, dear brother: it is all inlove, all works together for the best. You must be hewn and hammered anddrest and prepared before you can be a _Leiving-ston_ fit for Hisbuilding. And if He is minded to make you meet to help others, you mustlook for another manner of strokes than you have yet felt, . . . But whenyou are laid low, and are vile in your own eyes, then He will raise youup and refresh you with some blinks of His favourable countenance, thatyou may be able to comfort others with those consolations wherewith youhave been comforted of Him. . . . Since God has put His work in yourweak hands, look not for long ease here: you must feel the full weight ofyour calling: a weak man with a strong God. The pain is but a moment, the pleasure is everlasting, . . . Cross upon cross: the end of one withme is but the beginning of another: but guiltiness in me and in mine ismy greatest cross. ' And after midnight one Sabbath she writes again toLivingstone: 'You cannot but say that the Lord was with you to-day;therefore, not only be content, but bless His name who put His word inyour heart and in your mouth, and has overcome you with mercy when youdeserved nothing but wrath, and has not only forgiven your many sins, buthas saved you from breaking out, as it may be better men have done; butHe has covered you and restrained you; has loved you freely and has madeHis saints to love you; who will guide you also with His counsel, andafterwards receive you to His glory. '

It was from his silent prison in Aberdeen that Samuel Rutherford wrote toLady Culross the letter in which this sentence stands: 'I see that gracegroweth best in winter. ' Rutherford had had but a short and unsettledsummer among the birds at Anwoth. His wife and his two children had beentaken from him there, and now that which he loved more than wife or childhad been taken from him too--his pulpit and pastoral work for JesusChrist. He felt his banishment all the more keenly that he was the firstof the evangelical ministers of Scotland to be so silenced. He will haveplenty of companions in tribulation soon, if that will be any comfort tohim; but, as it is, he confesses to Lady Culross that it was a peculiarpang to him to be 'the first in the kingdom put to utter silence. ' Thebitterness of banishment has been sung in immortal strains by Dante, whose grace under banishment also grew to a fruitfulness we still partakeof to this day:--

 'Thou shall leave each thing Beloved most dearly: this is the first shaft Shot from the bow of exile. Thou shall prove How salt the savour is of other's bread, How hard the passage to descend and climb By other's stairs. But that shall gall thee most Will be the worthless and vile company With whom thou must be thrown into these straits. '

But all this, to use a figure familiar among the Puritans of that day, only made Rutherford's true life return, like sap in winter, into itsproper root, till we read in his later Aberdeen letters a rapture and arichness that his remain-at-home correspondents are fain to tone down. 

Not only does true grace grow best in winter, but winter is the bestseason for planting grace. 'I was to be married, and she died, ' was ayoung man's explanation to me the other day for proposing to sit down atthe Lord's Table. The winter cold that carried off his future wife sawplanted in his ploughed-up heart the seeds of divine grace; and, nodoubt, all down the coming winters, with such short interludes of summersas may be before him in this cold climate, the grace that was planted inwinter will grow. It is not a speculation, it is a personal experiencethat hundreds here can testify to, that the Bible, the Sabbath, theSupper, all became so many means of grace to them after some greataffliction greatly sanctified. The death of a bride, the death of awife, the death of a child; some blow from bride or wife or child worsethan death; a lost hope quenched for ever--these, and things like these, are needful, as it would seem, to be suffered by most men before theywill wholly open their hearts to the grace of God. 'Before I wasafflicted I went astray: but now have I kept Thy word. '

At the same time, good and necessary as all such wintry experiences are, their good results on us do not last for ever. In too many cases they donot last long. It is rather a start in grace we take at such seasonsthan a steady and deep growth in it. The growth in grace that comes tous in connection with some sore affliction is apt to be violent andspasmodic; it comes and it goes with the affliction; it is not slow, constant, steady, sure, as all true and natural growth is. If one mightsay so, an unbroken winter in the soul, a continual inward winter, isneeded to keep up a steady, deep and fruitful growth in grace. Now, isthere anything in the spiritual husbandry of God that can be called sucha winter of the soul? I think there is. The winter of our outwardlife--trials, crosses, sickness and death are all the wages of sin; andit is among these things that grace first strikes its roots. And what isthe continual presence of sin in the soul but the true winter of thesoul, amid which the grace that is planted in an outbreak of winter everafter strikes deeper root and grows? Once let a man be awakened of Godto his own great sinfulness; and that not to its fruits in outwardsorrow, but to its malignant roots that are twisted round and round andthrough and through his heart, and that man has thenceforth such a winterwithin him as shall secure to him a lifelong growth in the most inwardgrace. Once let a poor wretch awake to the unbroken winter of his ownsinfulness, a sinfulness that is with him when he lies down and when herises up, when he is abroad among men and when he is at home with himselfalone: an incessant, increasing, agonising, overwhelming sense ofsin, --and how that most miserable of men will grow in grace, and how hewill drink in all the means of grace! How he will hear the word of gracepreached, mixing it no longer with fault-finding, as he used to do, butwith repentance and faith under any and every ministry. How he willexamine himself every day; or, rather, how every day will examine, accuse, expose and condemn him; and how meekly he will accept theexposures and the condemnations! That man will not need you to preach tohim about the sanctifying of the Sabbath, or about waiting on this andthat means of grace. He will grow with or without the means of grace, but he will be of all men the most diligent in his devotion to them. Hewill almost get beyond the Word and within the Sacrament, so close upwill his corruptions drive him to Christ and to God. Till, havingprovided for that man so much grace and so much growth in grace, God willsoon have to give him glory, if only to satisfy him and pacify him andlift him out of the winter of his discontent. And then, 'Thy sun shallno more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw herself; for the Lordshall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall beended. '

VII. LADY BOYD

 'Be sorry at corruption. '--_Rutherford_. 

Out of various published and unpublished writings of her day we are ableto gather an interesting and impressive picture of Lady Boyd's life andcharacter. But there was a carefully written volume of manuscript, thatI much fear she must have burned when on her death-bed, that would havebeen invaluable to us to-night. Lady Boyd kept a careful diary for manyyears of her later life, and it was not a diary of court scandal or ofsocial gossip or even of family affairs, it was a memoir of herself thatwould have satisfied even John Foster, for in it she tried with allfidelity to 'discriminate the successive states of her mind, and so totrace the progress of her character, a progress that gives its chiefimportance to human life. ' Lady Boyd's diary would, to a certainty, havepleased the austere Essayist, for she was a woman after his own heart, 'grave, diligent, prudent, a rare pattern of Christianity. '

Thomas Hamilton, Lady Boyd's father, was an excellent scholar and a veryable man. He rose from being a simple advocate at the Scottish Bar to beLord President of the Court of Session, after which, for his greatservices, he was created Earl of Haddington. Christina, his eldestdaughter, inherited no small part of her father's talents and strength ofcharacter. By the time we know her she has been some ten years a widow, and all her children are promising to turn out an honour to her name anda blessing to her old age. And, under the Divine promise, we do notwonder at that, when we see what sort of mother they had. For with allsovereign and inscrutable exceptions the rule surely still holds, 'Trainup a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not departfrom it. ' All her days Lady Boyd was on the most intimate terms with themost eminent ministers of the Church of Scotland. We find such men asRobert Bruce, Robert Blair, John Livingstone, and Samuel Rutherfordcontinually referring to her in the loftiest terms. But it was not somuch her high rank, or her great ability, or her fearless devotion to thePresbyterian and Evangelical cause that so drew those men around her; itwas rather the inwardness and the intensity of her personal religion. Youmay be a determined upholder of a Church, of Presbytery against Prelacy, of Protestantism against Popery, or even of Evangelical religion againstErastianism and Moderatism, and yet know nothing of true religion in yourown heart. But men like Livingstone and Rutherford would never havewritten of Lady Boyd as they did had she not been a rare pattern ofinward and spiritual Christianity. 

I have spoken of Lady Boyd's diary. 'She used every night, ' saysLivingstone, 'to write what had been the state of her soul all day, andwhat she had observed of the Lord's doing. ' When all her neighbours werelying down without fear, her candle went not out till she had taken penand ink and had called herself to a strict account for the past day. Herduties and her behaviour to her husband, to her children, to herservants, and to her many dependants; the things that had tried hertemper, her humility, her patience, her power of self-denial; anystrength and wisdom she had attained to in the government of her tongueand in shutting her ears from the hearing of evil; as, also, everyordinary as well as extraordinary providence that had visited her thatday, and how she had been able to recognise it and accept it and takegood out of it. Thus the Lady Boyd prevented the night-watches. Whenthe women of her own rank sat down to write their promised letters ofgossip and scandal and amusement she sat down to write her diary. 'Wesee many things, but we observe nothing, ' said Rutherford in a letter toLady Kenmure. All around her God had been dealing all that day with LadyBoyd's neighbours as well as with her, only they had not observed it. Butshe had not only an eye to see but a mind and a heart to observe also. She had a heart that, like the fabled Philosopher's Stone, turned all ittouched and all that touched it immediately to fine gold. Riding homelate one night from a hunting supper-party, young Lord Boyd saw hismother's candle still burning, and he made bold to knock at her door toask why she was not asleep. Without saying a word, she took her son bythe hand and set him down at her table and pointed him to the wet sheetshe had just written. When he had read it he rose, without speaking aword, and went to his own room, and though that night was never all theirdays spoken of to one another, yet all his days Lord Boyd looked back onthat night of the hunt as being the night when his soul escaped from thesnare of the fowler. I much fear the diary is lost, but it would be wellworth the trouble of the owner of Ardross Castle to cause a carefulsearch to be made for it in the old charter chests of the family. 

Till Lady Boyd's lost diary is recovered to us let us gather a few thingsabout this remarkable woman out of the letters and reminiscences of suchmen as Livingstone and Rutherford and her namesake, Principal Boyd ofTrochrig. Rutherford, especially, was, next to her midnight page, herladyship's confidential and bosom friend. 'Now Madam, ' he writes in aletter from Aberdeen, 'for your ladyship's own case. ' And then headdresses himself in his finest style to console his correspondent, regarding some of the deepest and most painful incidents of her rare andgenuine Christian experience. 'Yes, ' he says, 'be sorry at corruption, and be not secure about yourself as long as any of it is there. 'Corruption, in this connection, is a figure of speech. It is a kind oftechnical term much in vogue with spiritual writers of the profounderkind. It expresses to those unhappy persons who have the thing inthemselves, and who are also familiar with the Scriptural andexperimental use of the word--to them it expresses with fearful truth andpower the sinfulness of their own hearts, as that sinfulness abides andbreaks out continually. Now, how could Lady Boyd, being the woman shewas, but be sorry and inconsolably sorry to find all that in her ownheart every day? No wonder that she and her son never referred to whatshe had written and he had read in his mother's lockfast book that never-to-be-forgotten night. 

'Be sorry at corruption, and be not secure. ' How could she be securewhen she saw and felt every day that deadly disease eating at her ownheart? She could not be secure for an hour; she would have been anythingbut the grave and prudent woman she was--she would have been mad--had shefor a single moment felt secure with such a corrupt heart. You must allhave read a dreadful story that went the round of the newspapers theother day. A prairie hunter came upon a shanty near Winnipeg, andfound--of all things in the world!--a human foot lying on the groundoutside the door. Inside was a young English settler bleeding to death, and almost insane. He had lost himself in the prairie-blizzard till hisfeet were frozen to mortification, and in his desperation he had taken acarving-knife and had hacked off his most corrupt foot and had thrown itout of doors. And then, while the terrified hunter was getting help, thedespairing man cut off the other corrupt foot also. I hope that braveyoung Englishman will live till some Winnipeg minister tells him of a yetmore terrible corruption than ever took hold of a frozen foot, and of aknife that cuts far deeper than the shanty carver, and consoles him indeath with the assurance that it was of him that Jesus Christ spoke inthe Gospel long ago, when He said that it is better to enter into lifehalt and maimed, rather than having two feet to be cast into everlastingfire. There was no knife in Ardross Castle that would reach down to LadyBoyd's corrupt heart; had there been, she would have first cleansed herown heart with it, and would then have shown her son how to cleanse his. But, as Rutherford says, she also had come now to that 'nick' in religionto cut off a right hand and a right foot so as to keep Christ and thelife everlasting, and so had her eldest son, Lord Boyd. As BishopMartensen also says, 'Many a time we cannot avoid feeling a deep sorrowfor ourselves because of the bottomless depth of corruption which lieshidden in our heart--which sorrow, rightly felt and rightly exercised, isa weighty basis of sanctification. '

To an able woman building on such a weighty basis as that on which LadyBoyd had for long been building, Rutherford was quite safe to lay weightyand unusual comforts on her mind and on her heart. 'Christ has a use forall your corruptions, ' he says to her, to her surprise and to hercomfort. 'Beata culpa, ' cried Augustine; and 'Felix culpa, ' criedGregory. 'My sins have in a manner done me more good than my graces, 'said holy Mr. Fox. 'I find advantages of my sins, ' said that mostspiritually-minded of men, James Fraser of Brea. Those who are willingand able to read a splendid passage for themselves on this paradoxical-sounding subject will find it on page xii. Of the Address to the Godlyand Judicious Reader in Samuel Rutherford's _Christ Dying and DrawingSinners to Himself_. 

What Rutherford was bold to say to Lady Boyd about her corruptions shewas able herself to say to Trochrig about her crosses. 'Right HonourableSir, --It is common to God's children and to the wicked to be undercrosses, but their crosses chase God's children to God. O that anythingwould chase me to my God!' There speaks a woman of mind and of heart whoknows what she is speaking about. And, like her and her correspondents, when all our other crosses have chased us to God, then our master cross, the corruption of our heart, will chase us closer up to God than all ourother crosses taken together. We have no cross to be compared with ourcorruptions, and when they have chased us close enough and deep enoughinto the secret place of God, then we will begin to understand and adornthe dangerous doxologies of Augustine and Gregory, Fraser and Fox. Yes;anything and everything is good that chases us up to God: crosses andcorruptions, sin and death and hell. 'O that anything would chase me tomy God!' cried saintly Lady Boyd. And that leads her ladyship in anotherletter to Trochrig to tell him the kind of preaching she needs and thatshe must have at any cost. 'It will not neither be philosophy noreloquence that will draw me from the broad road of perdition: I must havea trumpet to tell me of my sins. ' That was a well-said word to the thenPrincipal of Glasgow University who had so many of the future ministersof Scotland under his hands, all vying with one another as to who shouldbe the best philosopher and the most eloquent preacher. Trochrig wasboth an eloquent preacher and a philosophic principal and a spiritually-minded man, but he was no worse to read Lady Boyd's demand for a trueminister, and I hope he read her letter and gave his students her name inhis pastoral theology class. 'Lady Boyd on the broad road of perdition!'some of his students would exclaim. 'Why, Lady Boyd is the most saintlywoman in all the country. ' And that would only give the learnedPrincipal an opportunity to open up to his class, as he was so wellfitted to do, that saying of Rutherford to Lady Kenmure: that 'sense ofsin is a sib friend to a spiritual man, ' till some, no doubt, went out ofthat class and preached, as Thomas Boston did, to 'terrify the godly. 'Such results, no doubt, came to many from Lady Boyd's letter to thePrincipal as to the preaching she needed and must at any cost have: notphilosophy, nor eloquence, but a voice like a trumpet to tell her of hersin. 

Rutherford was in London attending the sittings of the WestminsterAssembly when his dear friend Lady Boyd died in her daughter's house atArdross. The whole Scottish Parliament, then sitting at St. Andrews, rose out of respect and attended her funeral. Rutherford could not bepresent, but he wrote a characteristically comforting letter to LadyArdross, which has been preserved to us. He reminded her that all hermother's sorrows were comforted now, and all her corruptions healed, andall her much service of Christ and His Church in Scotland far more thanrecompensed. 

Children of God, take comfort, for so it will soon be with you also. Yoursalvation, far off as it looks to you, is far nearer than when youbelieved. You will carry your corruptions with you to your grave; 'theylay with you, ' as Rutherford said to Lady Boyd, 'in your mother's womb, 'and the nearer you come to your grave the stronger and the more loathsomewill you feel your corruptions to be; but what about that, if only theychase you the closer up to God, and make what is beyond the grave themore sure and the more sweet to your heart. Lady Boyd is not sorry forher corruptions now. She is now in that blessed land where theinhabitant shall not say, I am sick. Take comfort, O sure child of God, with the most corrupt heart in all the world; for it is for you and forthe like of you that that inheritance is prepared and kept, thatinheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away. Takecomfort, for they that be whole need not a physician, but they that aresick. 

VIII. LADY ROBERTLAND

 'That famous saint, the Lady Robertland, and the rare outgates she so often got. '--Livingstone's _Characteristics_. 

The Lady Robertland ranks in the Rutherford sisterhood with Lady Kenmure, Lady Culross, Lady Boyd, Lady Cardoness, Lady Earlston, Marion M'Naughtand Grizel Fullarton. Lady Robertland, like so many of the other ladiesof the Covenant, was not only a woman of deep personal piety and greatpatriotism, she was also, like Lady Kenmure, Lady Boyd, and MarionM'Naught, a woman of remarkable powers of mind. For one thing, she had afascinating gift of conversation, and, like John Bunyan, it was her habitto speak of spiritual things with wonderful power under the similitudeand parable of outward and worldly things. At the time of the famous'Stewarton sickness' Lady Robertland was of immense service, both to theministers and to the people. Robert Fleming tells us that the profanerabble of that time gave the nickname of the Stewarton sickness to that'extraordinary outletting of the Spirit' that was experienced in thosedays over the whole of the west of Scotland, but which fell in perfectPentecostal power on both sides of the Stewarton Water. 'I preachedoften to them in the time of the College vacation, ' says Robert Blair, 'residing at the house of that famous saint, the Lady Robertland, and Ihad much conference with the people, and profited more by them than Ithink they did by me; though ignorant people and proud and secure liverscalled them "the daft people of Stewarton. "' The Stewarton sickness wasas like as possible, both in its manifestations and in its results, tothe Irish Revival of 1859, in which, when it came over and awakenedScotland, the Duchess of Gordon, another lady of the Covenant, acted muchthe same part in the North that Lady Robertland acted in her day in theWest. Many of our ministers still living can say of Huntly Lodge, 'Iresided often there, and preached to the people, profiting more by themthan they could have done by me. '

_Outgate_ is an old and an almost obsolete word, but it is a word ofgreat expressiveness and point. It bears on the face of it what itmeans. An outgate is just a _gate out_, a way of redemption, deliveranceand escape. And her _rare_ outgates does not imply that LadyRobertland's outgates were few, but that they were extraordinary, seldommatched, and above all expectation and praise. Lady Robertland'soutgates were not rare in the sense of coming seldom and being few; for, the fact is, they filled her remarkable life full; but they were rare inthe sense that she, like the Psalmist in Mr. James Guthrie's psalm, was awonder unto many, and most of all unto herself. But a gate out, andespecially such a gate as the Lady Robertland so often came out at, needsa key, needs many keys, and many keys of no common kind, and it needs ajanitor also, or rather a redeemer and a deliverer of a kindcorresponding to the kind of gate and the kind of confinement on whichthe gate shuts and opens. And when Lady Robertland thought of her rareoutgates--and she thought more about them than about anything else thatever happened to her--and as often as she could get an ear and a heartinto which to tell them, she always pictured to her audience and toherself the majestic Figure of the first chapter of the Revelation. Sheoften spoke of her rare outgates to David Dickson, and Robert Blair, andJohn Livingstone, and to her own Stewarton minister, Mr. Castlelaw, whosename written in water on earth is written in letters of gold in heaven. 'Not much of a preacher himself, he encouraged his people to attend Mr. Dickson's sermons, and he often employed Mr. Blair to preach atStewarton, and accompanied him back and forward, singing psalms all theway. ' Her ladyship often told saintly Mr. Castlelaw of her rareoutgates, and always so spoke to him of the Amen, who has the keys ofhell and of death, that he never could read that chapter all his dayswithout praising God that he had had the Lady Robertland and her rareoutgates in his sin-sick parish. 

But it is time to turn to some of those special and rare outgates thatthe Amen with the keys gave to His favoured handmaiden, the LadyRobertland; and the first kind of outgate, on account of which she wasalways such an astonishment to herself, was what she would call heroutgate from providential disabilities, entanglements, andembarrassments. She was wont to say to William Guthrie, who bestunderstood her witty words and her wonderful history, that the wickedfairies had handicapped her infant feet in her very cradle. She coulduse a freedom of speech with Guthrie, and he with her, such as neither ofthem could use with Livingstone or with Rutherford. Rutherford could notlaugh when his heart was breaking, as Lady Robertland and the wittyminister of Fenwick were often overheard laughing. 'Yes, but yourLadyship has won the race with all your weights, ' Guthrie would laugh andsay. 'One of my many races, ' she would answer, with half a smile andhalf a sigh; 'but I have a long race, many long races, still before me. It seemed _conclamatum est_ with me, ' she would then say, quoting a well-known expression of Samuel Rutherford's, which is, being interpreted, It's all over and gone with me, 'but Providence, since the Amen took itin hand, has a thousand and more keys wherewith to give poor creatureslike me our rare outgates. ' There were few alive by that time who hadknown Lady Robertland in her early days, and she seldom spoke of thosedays; only, on the anniversary of her early marriage, she never forgother feelings when her life as a Fleming came to an end and her new lifeas a Robertland began. There was a famous preacher of her day whosometimes spoke familiarly of the 'keys of the cupboard, that the Mastercarried at His girdle, ' and she used sometimes to take up his homelywords and say that she had had all the sweetest morsels and most delicatedainties of earth's cupboard taken out from under lock and key and putinto her mouth. 'He ties terrible knots, ' she would say, 'just to havethe pleasure of loosing them off from those He loves. He lays nets andsets traps only that He may get a chance of healing broken bones andsetting the terrified free. ' No wonder that Wodrow calls her 'a much-exercised woman, ' with such ingates and outgates, and with such miraclesof an interposing Providence filling her childhood, her youth, hermarried and her widowed life. The _Analecta_ is full of remarkableprovidences, but Lady Robertland's exercises and outgates are toowonderful even for the pages of that always wonderful and sometimes tooawful book. 

'My Master hath outgates of His own which are beyond the wisdom of man, 'writes Rutherford, in her own language, to Lady Robertland from 'Christ'sprison in Aberdeen. ' Rutherford's letters are full of more or lessmysterious allusions to the rare outgates that God in Christ had givenhim also from the snares and traps into which he had fallen by the sinsand follies of his unregenerate youth. Whatever trouble came onRutherford all his days--the persecution of the bishop, his banishment toAberdeen, the shutting of his mouth from preaching Christ, the loss ofwife and child, and the poignant pains of sanctification--he gatheredthem all up under the familiar figure of a waled and chosen cross. 'Seeing that the sins of my youth deserved strokes, how am I obliged tomy Lord, who, out of many possible crosses, hath given me this waled andchosen cross to suffer for the name of Jesus Christ. Since I must havechains, He has put golden chains on me. Seeing I must have sorrow, for Ihave sinned, O Preserver of mankind, Thou hast waled and selected out forme a joyful sorrow--an honest, spiritual, glorious sorrow. Oh, what amI, such a rotten mass of sin, to be counted worthy of the most honourablerod in my Father's house, even the golden rod wherewith the Lord the Heirwas Himself stricken. Thou wast a God that forgavest them, though Thoutookest vengeance of their inventions. ' Rutherford also was forgiven, and the only vengeance that God took of his inventions, theirregularities of his youth, was taken in the form of a 'waled cross. ' 'Imight have been proclaimed on the crown of the causey, ' says Rutherford, 'but He has so waled my cross and His vengeance that I am suffering notfor my sin but for His name. ' What a life hid with Christ in God he mustlive, who, like Rutherford, takes all his trials on earth as a transmutedand substituted cross for his sins: and who is able to take all hisdeserved and demanded chastisements in the shape of inward and spiritualand sanctifying pain. O sweet vengeance of grace on our sinfulinventions! O most intimate and most awful of all our secrets, thesecrets of a love-waled, love-substituted cross! O rare outgate from thescorn of the causeway to the smelting-house of 'Him who hath His fire inZion!'

'The sorrows of death compassed me, ' sings the Psalmist, and 'the painsof hell gat hold upon me; I found trouble and sorrow. ' What, you maywell ask, were those pains of hell that gat such hold of David while yethe was a living and unreprobated man? Was it not too strong language touse about any earthly experience, however terrible, to call it the painsof hell? Ask that man whose sin has found him out what he thinks thepains of hell were in David's case, and he will tell you thatremorse--unsoftened, unsweetened, unquenchable remorse--is hell; at anyrate, it is hell upon earth; and till he confessed his sin it was David'shell. Sin taken up and laid by God's hand on the sinner's conscience, that makes that sinner's conscience hell. And, then, do we not read thatJehovah laid on our Surety the sin of us all till He was three hours inhell for us, and came out of it, as Rutherford says, with the keys ofhell at His proud girdle? And it is with those captured keys that He nowunlocks the true hell-gate in every guilty sinner's conscience. 

 'He comes the prisoners to relieve In Satan's bondage held; The gates of brass before Him burst, The iron fetters yield. 

 . . . . . . 

 We may not know, we cannot tell What pains He had to bear, But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered there. 

 There was no other good enough To pay the price of sin; He only could unlock the gate Of heaven, and let us in. '

'Myself am hell, ' cried out Satan, in his agony of pride and rage andremorse. 

 'Divines and dying men may talk of hell, But in my heart her several torments dwell. '

So you say of yourself, as you well may, after such a life as yours hasbeen. The Judge of all the earth would not be a just judge unless hellwere already kindled in your heart. But He who is a just God is also aSaviour, and He has with His own hand hung the key of hell and of yourself-made bed in it at the girdle of Jesus Christ. Go to Him to-night, and tell Him that you are in hell. Tell Him that, like David, and verymuch, so far as you can understand, for David's sins, you, too, are inthe pains of very hell. Cast yourself, like John in the Revelation, atHis feet, and see if He does not say to you what He said through Nathanto David, and what He said Himself to John, and what He said to LadyRobertland, and what He said to Samuel Rutherford. Cast yourself at Hisfeet, and see if you do not get at His hands as rare an outgate and aswonderfully waled a cross as the very best of them got. 

Then all the rest of your life on this prison-house of an earth will be ahistory in you and to you of all kinds of rare outgates. For, once Hewho has the keys has taken your case in hand, He will not let either rustor dust gather on His keys till He has opened every door for you and setyou free from every snare. There are many evil affections, evil habits, and evil practices that are still closely padlocked both on your outwardand your inward life that you must be wholly delivered from. And He whohas all the keys of your body and your soul too at His girdle, will notconsider that you have got your full outgate, or that He has at alldischarged His duty by you, till, as Rutherford says, your sinful habitsand practices are all loosened off from your life and are driven backinto the inner world of your inclinations; and then, after that, He willonly take up still more skilful and still more intricate keys wherewithto turn the locks of delight, desire, and inclination. O blessed keys ofhell and of death, of habit and inclination and evil affection! Oblessed people who are under such a Redeemer from sin and death and hell!O truly famous saint, the Lady Robertland, who got so many and so rareoutgates from the Amen with the keys! Who shall give me an outgate fromthis body? cries the great apostle, not chafing in his chains for death, but for the true life that lies beyond death. Paul, with all his intenselove of life and service--nay, because of that intense love--feltsometimes that this present life at its very best was but a life ofrelaxed imprisonment rather than of true liberty. Paul was, as we say, akind of first-class misdemeanant, as Samuel Rutherford also was in hisprison-palace in Aberdeen, and the Lady Robertland in Stewarton House;they had a liberty that was not to be despised; they had light and airand exercise; they were not in chains in the dungeon; they had pen andink; they had books and papers, and their friends might on occasion visitthem. They might have better food also if they paid for it; and, best ofall, they could, till their full release came, beguile and occupy thetime in work for Christ and His Church. But still they were present inthis body of sin and death, and absent from the Lord, and they pined, and, I fear, sinfully murmured sometimes, for the last and the greatestand the best outgate of all. 'As for myself, ' writes Rutherford, 'Ithink that if a poor, weak, dying sheep seeks for an old dyke, and thelee-side of a hill in a storm, I surely may be allowed to long forheaven. I see little in this life but sin, and the sour fruits of sin;and oh! what a burden and what a bitterness is sin! What a miserablebondage it is to be at the nod of such a master as Sin! But He who haththe keys hath sworn that our sin shall not loose the covenant bond, andtherefore I wait in hope and in patience till His time shall come to takeoff all my fetters and make a hole in this cage of death that theimprisoned bird may find its long-promised liberty. '

 'I would not live alway, thus fettered with sin, Temptation without and corruption within; In a moment of strength, if I sever the chain, Scarce the victory is mine ere I'm captive again; E'en the rapture of pardon is mingled with fears, And the cup of thanksgiving with penitent tears; The festival trump calls for jubilant songs, But my spirit her own _miserere_ prolongs. 

 'Who, who would live always away from his God! Away from yon heaven, that blissful abode Where the rivers of pleasures flow o'er the bright plains, And the noon-tide of glory eternally reigns; Where the saints of all ages in harmony meet, Their Saviour and brethren transported to greet; While the songs of salvation exultingly roll, And the love of the Lord is the bliss of the soul. '

IX. JEAN BROWN

 'Sin poisons all our enjoyments. '--_Rutherford_. 

Jean Brown was one of the selectest associates of the famous Rutherfordcircle. We do not know so much of Jean Brown outside of the RutherfordLetters as we would like to know, but her son, John Brown of Wamphray, isvery well known to every student of the theology and ecclesiasticalhistory of Scotland in the second half of the seventeenth century. 'Irejoice to hear about your son John. I had always a great love to dearJohn Brown. Remember my love to John Brown. I never could get my loveoff that man. ' And all Rutherford's esteem and affection for JeanBrown's gifted and amiable son was fully justified in the subsequenthistory of the hard-working and well-persecuted parish minister ofWamphray. Letter 84 is a very remarkable piece of writing even inRutherford, and the readers of this letter would gladly learn more thaneven its eloquent pages tell them about the woman who could draw such aletter out of Samuel Rutherford's mind and heart, the woman who was alsothe honoured mother of such a student and such a minister as John Brownof Wamphray. This letter has a _bite_ in it--to use one of Rutherford'sown words in the course of it--all its own. And it is just that profoundand pungent element in this letter, that bite in it, that has led me totake this remarkable letter for my topic to-night. 

There had been some sin in Samuel Rutherford's student days, or somestumble sufficiently of the nature of sin, to secretly poison the wholeof his subsequent life. Sin is such a poisonous thing that even amustard-seed of it planted in a man's youth will sometimes spring up intoa thicket of terrible trouble both to himself and to many other peopleall his and all their days. An almost invisible drop of sin let fallinto the wellhead of life will sometimes poison the whole broad stream oflife, as well as all the houses and fields and gardens, with all theirflowers and fruits, that are watered out of it. When any misfortunefalls upon a Hebrew household, when any Jewish man or woman's sin findsthem out, they say that there is an ounce of the golden calf on it. Theyopen their Exodus and they read there in their bitterness of how Moses inhis hot anger took the calf, which the children of Israel had pollutedthemselves with, and burned it in the fire, and ground it to powder, andstrewed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel to drink ofit. And, though God turned the poisoned, dust-laden waters of SamuelRutherford's life into very milk and wine, yet to Rutherford's subtle anddetective taste there was always a certain tang of the unclean andaccursed thing in it. The best waled and most tenderly substituted crossin Rutherford's chastised life had always a certain galling corner in itthat recalled to him, as he bled inwardly under it, the lack of completepurity and strict regularity in his youth. And it is to be feared thatthere are but too few men or women either who have not some Rutherford-like memory behind them that still clouds their now sheltered life andsecretly poisons their good conscience. Some disingenuity, somesimulation or dissimulation of affection, some downright or constructivedishonesty, some lack towards some one of open and entire integrity, somebreach of good faith in spirit if not in letter, some still stingingtresspass of the golden rule, some horn or hoof of the golden calf, thebitter dust of which they taste to this day in their sweetest cup and attheir most grace-spread table. There are more men and women in theChurch of Christ than any one would believe who sing with a broken heartat every communion table: 'He hath not dealt with us after our sins, norrewarded us according to our iniquities. As far as the east is from thewest, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us. '

And even after such men and women might have learned a lesson, how soonwe see all that lesson forgotten. Even after God's own hand has soconspicuously cut the bars of iron in sunder; after He has made thesolitary to dwell in families; we still see sin continuing in new shapesand in other forms to poison the sweetest things in human life. Whatselfishness we see in family life, and that, too, after the vow and theintention of what self-suppression and self-denial. What impatience withone another, what bad temper, what cruel and cutting words, what coldnessand rudeness and neglect, in how many ways our abiding sinfulnesscontinues to poison the sweetest springs of life! And, then, how soonsuch unhappy men begin to see themselves reproduced and multiplied intheir children. How many fathers see, with a secret bitterness of spiritthat never can be told, their own worst vices of character and conductreproduced and perpetuated in their children! One father sees hisconstitutional and unextirpated sensuality coming out in the gluttony, the drunkenness, and the lust of his son; while another sees his pride, his moroseness, his kept-up anger and his cruelty all coming out in onewho is his very image. While many a mother sees her own youthfulshallowness, frivolity, untruthfulness, deceit and parsimony in herdaughter, for whose morality and religion she would willingly give up herown soul. And then our children, who were to be our staff and our crown, so early take their own so wilful and so unfilial way in life. Theybetake themselves, for no reason so much as just for intendeddisobedience and impudent independence, to other pursuits and pleasures, to other political and ecclesiastical parties than we have ever gonewith. And when it is too late we see how we have again mishandled andmismanaged our families as we had mishandled and mismanaged our ownyouth, till it is only one grey head here and another there that does notgo down to the grave under a crushing load of domestic sorrow. When thebest things in life are so poisoned by sin, how bitter is that poison!

If an unpoisoned youth and an unembittered family life are some of thesweetest things this earth can taste, then a circle of close and true anddear friendships does not come very far behind them. Rutherford hadplenty of trouble in his family life that he used to set down to the sinsof his youth; and then the way he poisoned so many of his bestfriendships by his so poisonous party spirit is a humbling history toread. He quarrelled irreconcilably with his very best friends overmatters that were soon to be as dead as Aaron's golden calf, and whichnever had much more life or decency in them. The matters were so smalland miserable over which Rutherford quarrelled with such men as DavidDickson and Robert Blair that I could not interest you in them at thistime of day even if I tried. They were as parochial, as unsubstantial, and as much made up of prejudice and ill-will as were some of thosematters that have served under Satan to poison so often our own privateand public and religious life. Rutherford actually refused to assistRobert Blair at the Lord's Supper, so embittered and so black was hismind against his dearest friend. 'I would rather, ' said sweet-temperedRobert Blair, 'have had my right hand hacked off at the cross ofEdinburgh than have written such things. ' 'My wife and I, ' wrote dearJohn Livingstone, 'have had more bitterness together over these mattersthan we have ever had since we knew what bitterness was. ' And no one inthat day had a deeper hand in spreading that bitterness than just thehand that wrote Rutherford's letters. There is no fear of our callingany man master if we once look facts fair in the face. 

The precariousness of our best friendships, the brittle substance out ofwhich they are all composed and constructed, and the daily accidents andinjuries to which they are all exposed--all this is the daily distress ofall true and loving hearts. What a little thing will sometimes embitterand poison what promised to be a loyal and lifelong friendship! Apassing misunderstanding about some matter that will soon be as dead tous both as the Resolutions and Protestations of Rutherford's day now areto all men; an accidental oversight; our simple indolence in letting anabsent friendship go too much out of repair for want of a call, or awritten message, or a timeous gift: a thing that only a too-scrupulousmind would go the length of calling sin, will yet poison an oldfriendship and embitter it beyond all our power again to sweeten it. And, then, how party spirit poisons our best enjoyments as it didRutherford's. How all our minds are poisoned against all the writers andthe speakers, the statesmen and the journalists of the opposite camp, andeven against the theologians and preachers of the opposite church. And, then, inside our own camp and church how new and still more malignantkinds of poison begin to distil out of our incurably wicked hearts to eatout the heart of our own nearest and dearest friendships. Envy, for onething, which no preacher, not even Pascal or Newman, no moralist, nosatirist, no cynic has yet dared to tell the half of the horrible truthabout: drip, drip, drip, its hell-sprung venom soaks secretly into theoldest, the dearest and the truest friendship. Yes, let it be for oncesaid, the viper-like venom of envy--the most loyal, the most honourable, the most self-forgetting and self-obliterating friendship is never inthis life for one moment proof against it. We live by admiration; yes, but even where we admire our most and live our best this mildew stillfalls with its deadly damp. What did you suppose Rutherford meant whenhe wrote as he did write about himself and about herself to that socapable and so saintly woman, Jean Brown? Do you accuse SamuelRutherford of unmeaning cant? Was he mouthing big Bible words withoutany meaning? Or, was he not drinking at that moment of the poison-filledcup of his own youthful, family, and friendship sins? Nobody willpersuade me that Rutherford was a canting hypocrite when he wrote thoseterrible and still unparaphrased words: 'Sin, sin, this body of sin andcorruption embittereth and poisoneth all our enjoyments. Oh that I werehome where I shall sin no more!'

Puritan was an English nickname rather than a Scottish, but our ScotsPresbyterians were Puritans at bottom like their English brethren both intheir statesmanship and in their churchmanship, as well as in theirfamily and personal religion. And they held the same protest as theEnglish Puritans held against the way in which the scandalous corruptionsof the secular court, and the equally scandalous corruptions of thesacred bench, were together fast poisoning the public enjoyments ofEngland and of Scotland. You will hear cheap, shallow, vinous speechesat public dinners and suchlike resorts about the Puritans, and about howthey denounced so much of the literature and the art of that day. When, if those who so find fault had but the intelligence and the honesty tolook an inch beneath the surface of things they would see that it was notthe Puritans but their persecutors who really took away from the serious-minded people of Scotland and England both the dance and the drama, aswell as so many far more important things in that day. Had the Puritansand their fathers always had their own way, especially in England, thosesources of public and private enjoyment would never have been poisoned tothe people as they were and are, and that cleft would never have been cutbetween the conscience and some kinds of culture and delight which stillexists for so many of the best of our people. Charles Kingsley was noascetic, and his famous _North British_ article, 'Plays and Puritans, 'was but a popular admission of what a free and religious-minded Englandowes on one side of their many-sided service to the Puritans of thatimpure day. Christina Rossetti is no Calvinist, but she puts theCalvinistic and Puritan position about the sin-poisoned enjoyments ofthis life in her own beautiful way: 'Yes, all our life long we shall bebound to refrain our soul, and keep it low; but what then? For the bookswe now forbear to read we shall one day be endued with wisdom andknowledge. For the music we will not now listen to we shall join in thesong of the redeemed. For the pictures from which we turn we shall gazeunabashed on the beatific vision. For the companionship we shun we shallbe welcomed into angelic society and the companionship of triumphantsaints. For the amusements we avoid we shall keep the supreme jubilee. For all the pleasure we miss we shall abide, and for ever abide, in therapture of heaven. '

All through Rutherford's lifetime preaching was his chiefest enjoymentand his most exquisite delight. He was a born preacher, and hisenjoyment of preaching was correspondingly great. Even when he wasremoved from Anwoth to St. Andrews, where, what with his professorshipand principalship together, one would have thought that he had his handsfull enough, he yet stipulated with the Assembly that he should beallowed to preach regularly every Sabbath-day. But sin, again, thatdreadful, and, to Rutherford, omnipresent evil, poisoned all hispreaching also and made it one of the heaviest burdens of his conscienceand his heart and his life. There is a proverb to the effect that whenthe best things become corrupt then that is corruption indeed. And soRutherford discovered it to be in the matter of his preaching. Do whathe would, Rutherford, like Shepard, could not keep the thought of whatmen would think out of his weak and evil mind, both before, and during, but more especially after his preaching. And that poisoned and corruptedand filled the pulpit with death to Rutherford, in a way and to a degreethat nobody but a self-seeking preacher will believe or understand. Rutherford often wondered that he had not been eaten up of worms in hispulpit like King Herod on his throne, and that for the very sameatheistical and blasphemous reason. 

Those in this house who have followed all this with that intense andintelligent sympathy that a somewhat similar experience alone will give, will not be stumbled to read what Rutherford says in his letter to hisnear neighbour, William Glendinning: 'I see nothing in this life but sin, sin and the sour fruits of sin. O what a miserable bondage it is to beat the nod and beck of Sin!' Nor will they wonder to read in his letterto Lady Boyd, that she is to be sorry all her days on account of herinborn and abiding corruptions. Nor, again, that he himself was sick athis heart, and at the very yolk of his heart, at sin, dead-sick withhatred and disgust at sin, and correspondingly sick with love and longingafter Jesus Christ. Nor, again, that he awoke ill every morning todiscover that he had not yet awakened in his Saviour's sinless likeness. Nor will you wonder, again, at the seraphic flights of love and worshipthat Samuel Rutherford, who was so poisoned with sin, takes at the nameand the thought of his divine Physician. For to Rutherford that divinePhysician has promised to come 'the second time without sin untosalvation. ' The first time He came He sucked the poison of sin out ofthe souls of sinners with His own lips, and out of all the enjoymentsthat He had sanctified and prepared for them in heaven. And He is comingback--He has now for a long time come back and taken Rutherford home tothat sanctification that seemed to go further and further away fromRutherford the longer he lived in this sin-poisoned world. And, amongstall those who are now home in heaven, I cannot think there can be manywho are enjoying heaven with a deeper joy than Samuel Rutherford's sheer, solid, uninterrupted, unadulterated, and unmitigated joy. 

X. JOHN GORDON OF CARDONESS, THE YOUNGER

 'Put off a sin or a piece of a sin every day. '--_Rutherford_. 

If that gaunt old tower of Cardoness Castle could speak, and would tellus all that went on within its walls, what a treasure to us that storywould be! Even the sighs and the meanings that visit us from among itsmouldering stones tell us things that we shall not soon forget. Theytell us how hard a task old John Gordon found salvation to be in that oldhouse; and they tell us still, to deep sobs, how hard it was to him tosee the sins and faults of his own youth back upon him again in the sinsand faults of his son and heir. Old John Gordon's once so wild heart wasnow somewhat tamed by the trials of life, by the wisdom and the goodnessof his saintly wife, and not least by his close acquaintance with SamuelRutherford; but the comfort of all that was dashed from his lips by thelife his eldest son was now living. Cardoness had always liked a goodproverb, and there was a proverb in the Bible he often repeated tohimself in those days as he went about his grounds: 'The fathers haveeaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge. ' Themiserable old man was up to the neck in debt to the Edinburgh lawyers;but he was fast discovering that there are other and worse things that abad man entails on his eldest son than a burdened estate. There was noAmerican wheat or Australian wool to reduce the rents of Cardoness inthat day; but he had learnt, as he rode in to Edinburgh again and againto raise yet another loan for pocket-money to his eldest son, that thereare far more fatal things to a small estate than the fluctuations anddepressions of the corn and cattle markets. Gordon's own so expensiveyouth was now past, as he had hoped: but no, there it was, back upon himagain in a most unlooked-for and bitter shape. 'The fathers have eatensour grapes' was all he used to say as he rose to let in his drunken sonat midnight; he scarcely blamed him; he could only blame himself, as hisbeloved boy reeled in and cursed his father, not knowing what he did. 

The shrinking income of the small estate could ill afford to support twoidle and expensive families, but when young Cardoness broke it to hismother that he wished to marry, she and her husband were only too glad tohear it. To meet the outlay connected with the marriage, and to providean income for the new family, there was nothing for it but to raise therents of the farms and cottages that stood on the estate. Anxious asRutherford was to see young Cardoness settled in life, he could not standby in silence and see honest and hard-working people saddled with thedebts and expenses of the Castle; and he took repeated opportunities oftelling the Castle people his mind; till old Cardoness in a passionchased him out of the house, and rode next Sabbath-day over to Kirkdaleand worshipped in the parish church of William Dalgleish. The insolentyoung laird continued, at least during the time of his courtship, to goto church with his mother, but Rutherford could not shut his eyes to thefact that he studied all the time how he could best and most openlyinsult his minister. He used to come to church late on the Sabbathmorning; and he never remained till the service was over, but would riseand stride out in his spurs in the noisiest way and at the most unseemlytimes. Rutherford's nest at Anwoth was not without its thorns. And thatsuch a crop of thorns should spring up to him and to his people from LadyCardoness's house, was one of Rutherford's sorest trials. The marriage-day, from which so much was expected, came and passed away; but what itdid for young Cardoness may be judged from such expressions inRutherford's Aberdeen letters as these: 'Be not rough with your wife. Godhath given you a wife, love her; drink out of your own fountain, and sitat your own fireside. Make conscience of cherishing your wife. ' Hismarriage did not sanctify young Cardoness; it did not even civilise him;for, long years after, when he was an officer in the Covenanters' army, he writes from Newcastle, apologising to his ill-used wife for the way heleft her when he went to join his regiment: 'We are still ruffians andchurls at home long after we are counted saints abroad. '

One day when Rutherford was in the Spirit in his silent prison, whetherin the body or out of the body, he was caught up into Paradise to see thebeauty of his Lord, and to hear his little daughter singing Glory. Andamong the thousands of children that sang around the throne he told youngCardoness that he saw and heard little Barbara Gordon, whose death hadbroken every heart in Cardoness Castle. 'I give you my word for it, 'wrote Rutherford to her broken-hearted father, 'I saw two Anwoth childrenthere, and one of them was your child and one of them was mine. ' Andwhen another little voice was silenced in the Castle to sing Glory inheaven, Rutherford could then write to young Cardoness all that was inhis heart; he could not write too plainly now or too often. Not that youare to suppose that they were all saints now at Cardoness Castle, or thatall their old and inherited vices of heart and character were rooted out:no number of deaths will do that to the best of us till our own deathcomes; but it was no little gain towards godliness when Rutherford couldwrite to young Gordon, now old with sorrow, saying, 'Honoured and dearbrother, I am refreshed with your letter, and I exhort you by the love ofChrist to set to work upon your own soul. Read this to your wife, andtell her that I am witness for Barbara's glory in heaven. '

We would gladly shut the book here, and bring the Cardonesscorrespondence to a close, but that would not be true to the wholeCardoness history, nor profitable for ourselves. We have buriedchildren, like John Gordon; and, like him, we have said that it was goodfor us to be sore afflicted; but not even the assurance that we havechildren in heaven has, all at once, set our affections there, or made usmeet for entrance there. We feel it like a heavy blow on the heart, itmakes us reel as if we had been struck in the face, to come upon apassage like this in a not-long-after letter to little Barbara Gordon'sfather: 'Ask yourself when next setting out to a night's drinking: Whatif my doom came to-night? What if I were given over to God's sergeantsto-night, to the devil and to the second death?' And with the same postRutherford wrote to William Dalgleish telling him that if young Cardonesscame to see him he was to do his very best to direct and guide him in hisnew religious life. But Rutherford could not roll the care of youngCardoness over upon any other minister's shoulders; and thus it is thatwe have the long practical and powerful letter from which the text istaken: 'Put off a sin or a piece of a sin every day. '

Old Cardoness had been a passionate man all his days; he was an old manbefore he began to curb his passionate heart; and long after he wasreally a man of God, the devil easily carried him captive with hisbesetting sin. He bit his tongue till it bled as often as he recollectedthe shameful day when he swore at his minister in the rack-rentingdispute. And he never rode past Kirkdale Church without sinning again ashe plunged the rowels into his mare's unoffending sides. Cardoness didnot read Dante, else he would have said to himself that his anger oftenfilled his heart with hell's dunnest gloom. The old Castle was neverwell lighted; but, with a father and a son in it like Cardoness and hisheir, it was sometimes like the Stygian pool itself. Rutherford had needto write to her ladyship to have a soft answer always ready between sucha father and such a son. If you have the Inferno at hand, and will readwhat it says about the Fifth Circle, you will see what went on sometimesin that debt-drained and exasperated house. Rutherford was far away fromCardoness Castle, but he had memory enough and imagination enough to seewhat went on there as often as fresh provocation arose; and therefore hewrites to young Gordon to put off a piece of his fiery anger every day. 'Let no complaining tenants, let no insulting letter, let no stupid ordisobedient servant, let no sudden outburst of your father, let nopeevish complaint of your wife make you angry. Remember every day thatsudden and savage anger is one of your besetting sins: and watch againstit, and put a piece of it off every day. Determine not to speak back toyour father even if he is wrong and is doing a wrong to you and to yourmother; your anger will not make matters better: hold your peace, tillyou can with decency leave the house, and go out to your horses and dogstill your heart is again quiet. '

Rutherford was not writing religious commonplaces when he wrote toCardoness Castle; if he had, we would not have been reading his lettershere to-night. He wrote with his eye and his heart set on hiscorrespondents. And thus it is that 'night-drinking' occurs again andagain in his letters to young Gordon. The Cardoness bill to Dumfries fordrink was a heavy one; but it seems never to have occurred, even to theotherwise good people of those days, that strong drink was such a costlyas well as such a dangerous luxury. It distresses and shocks us to readabout 'midnight drinking' in Cardoness Castle, and in the houses roundabout, after all they had come through, but there it is, and we must noteviscerate Rutherford's outspoken letters. The time is not so far pastyet with ourselves when we still went on drinking, though we were in debtfor the necessaries of life, and though our sons reeled home from companywe had made them early acquainted with. If you will not even yet passthe wine altogether, take a little less every day, and the goodconscience it will give you will make up for the forbidden bouquet; till, as Rutherford said to Gordon, 'You will more easily master the remainderof your corruptions. '

Let us all try Samuel Rutherford's piecemeal way of reformation with ourown anger; let us put a bridle on our mouths part of every day. Let usdo this if we can as yet go no further; let us bridle our mouths oncertain subjects, and about certain people, and in certain companies. Ifyou have some one you dislike, some one who has injured or offended you, some rival or some enemy, whom to meet, to see, to read or to hear thename of, always brings hell's dunnest gloom into your heart--well, putoff this piece of your sin concerning him; do not speak about him. I donot say you can put the poison wholly out of your heart; you cannot: butyou can and you must hold your peace about him. And if that beatsyou--if, instead of all that making you more easily master of yourcorruption, it helps you somewhat to discover how deep and how deadly itis--then Samuel Rutherford will not have written this old letter in vainfor you. 

XI. ALEXANDER GORDON OF EARLSTON

 'A man of great spirit, but much subdued by inward exercise. ' Livingstone's _Characteristics_. 

The Gordons of Airds and Earlston could set their family seal to thetruth of the promise that the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting toeverlasting upon them that fear Him, and His righteousness to children'schildren. For the life of grace entered the Gordon house three longgenerations before it came to our Alexander of to-night, and it stilldescended upon his son and his son's son. His great-grandfather, Alexander Gordon also, was early nicknamed 'Strong Sandy, ' on account ofhis gigantic size and his Samson-like strength. While yet a young man, happily for himself and for all his future children, as well as for thewhole of Galloway, Gordon had occasion to cross the English border onsome family business, to buy cattle or cutlery or what not, when he madea purchase he had not intended to make when he set out. He brought homewith him a copy of Wycliffe's contraband New Testament, and from the dayhe bought that interdicted book till the day of his death, Strong SandyGordon never let his purchase out of his own hands. He carried hisWycliffe about with him wherever he went, to kirk and to market; he wouldas soon have thought of leaving his purse or his dirk behind him as hisWycliffe, his bosom friend. And many were the Sabbath-days that thelaird of Earlston read his New Testament in the woods of Earlston to histenants and neighbours, the Testament in the one hand and the dirk in theother. Tamed and softened as old Sandy Gordon became by that taming andsoftening book, yet there were times when the old Samson still came tothe surface. As the Sabbath became more and more sanctified in ReformedScotland, the Saints' days of the Romish Calendar fell more and more intoopen neglect, till the Romish clergy got an Act passed for the enforcedobservance of all the fasts and festivals of the Romish Communion. Oneof the enacted clauses forbade a plough to be yoked on Christmas Day, onpain of the forfeiture and public sale of the cattle that drew theplough. Old Earlston, at once to protest against the persecution, and atthe same time to save his draught-oxen, yoked ten of his stalwart sons tothe mid-winter plough, and, after ploughing the whole of Christmas Day, openly defied both priest and bishop to distrain his team. ChristmasDay, whatever its claims and privileges might be, had no chance inScotland till it came with better reasons than the threat of a Popishking and Parliament. The Patriarch of Galloway, as the south of Scotlandcombined to call old Alexander Gordon of Earlston, lived to the ripe ageof over a hundred years, and we are told that he kept family worshiphimself to the day of his death, holding his Wycliffe in his own hand, and yielding it and his place at the family altar over to none. 

But it is with the name-son and great-grandson of this sturdy old saintthat we have chiefly to do to-night. And I may say of him, to beginwith, that he was altogether worthy to inherit and to hand on thetradition of family grace and truth that had begun so early and soconspicuously with the head of the Earlston house. 'Alexander Gordon ofEarlston, ' says John Livingstone, in one of his priceless littleetchings, 'was a man of great spirit, but much subdued by inwardexercise, and who attained the most rare experiences of downcasting anduplifting. ' And in Rutherford's first letter to this Earlston, writtenfrom Anwoth in 1636, he says, in that lofty oracular way of his, 'JesusChrist has said that Alexander Gordon must lead the ring in Galloway inwitnessing a good conscience. ' This, no doubt, refers to the prosecutionthat Gordon was at that moment undergoing at the hands of the Bishop ofGlasgow for refusing to admit a nominee of the Bishop into the pulpit ofa reclaiming parish. It would have gone still worse with Earlston thanit did had not Lord Lorne, the true patron of the parish, taken his placebeside Earlston at the Bishop's bar, and testified his entire approval ofall that Earlston had done. With all that, the case did not end tillEarlston was banished beyond the Tay for his resistance to the will ofthe Bishop of Glasgow. This all took place in the early half of theseventeenth century, so that Dr. Robert Buchanan might with morecorrectness have entitled his able book 'The Two Hundred Years' Conflict'than 'The Ten, ' so early was the battle for Non-Intrusion begun inGalloway. Alexander Gordon was a Free Churchman 200 years before theDisruption, and Lord Lorne was the forerunner of those evangelical andconstitutional noblemen and gentlemen in Scotland who helped so much tocarry through the Disruption of 1843. We find both Lord Lorne, andEarlston his factor, sitting as elders beside one another in the GlasgowAssembly of 1638, and then we find Earlston the member for Galloway inthe Parliament of 1641. 

We do not know exactly on what occasion it was that Earlston refused toaccept the knighthood that was offered him by the Crown; but we seem tohear the old Wycliffite come back again in his great-grandson as he said, 'No, your Majesty, excuse and pardon me; but no. ' Alexander Gordon feltthat it would be an everlasting dishonour to him and to his house to lethis shoulder be touched in knighthood by a sword that was wet, and thatwould soon be still more wet, with the best blood in Scotland. 'No, yourMajesty, no. '

Almost all that we are told about Earlston in the histories of his timebears out the greatness of his spirit; that, and the stories that givesrise to, take the eye of the ordinary historian; but good JohnLivingstone, though not a great historian in other respects, is by farthe best historian of that day for our purpose. John Livingstone's_Characteristics_ is a perfect gallery of spiritual portraits, and thetwo or three strokes he gives to Alexander Gordon make him stand outimpressively and memorably to all who understand and care for the thingsof the Spirit. 

'A man of great spirit, but much subdued by inward exercise. ' I do notneed to tell you what exercise is--at least bodily exercise. All that aman does to draw out, develop, and healthfully occupy his bodily powersin walking, riding, running, wrestling, carrying burdens, and leapingover obstacles--all that is called bodily exercise, and some part of thatis absolutely necessary every day for the health of the body and for thecontinuance and the increase of its strength. But we are not all body;we are soul as well, and much more soul than body. Bodily exerciseprofiteth little, says the Apostle, --compared, that is, with the exerciseof the soul, of the mind, and of the heart. Now, Alexander Gordon wassuch an athlete of the heart that all who knew him saw well what exercisehe must have gone through before he was subdued in his high mind andproud spirit to be so humble, so meek, so silent, so unselfish, and sofull of godliness and brotherly kindness--what a world of inward exerciseall that bespoke! Alexander Gordon's patience under wrong, his lowesteem of himself and of all he did, his miraculous power over himself inthe forgiveness of enemies and in the forgetfulness of injuries, hiscontentment amid losses and disappointments, his silence when other menwere bursting to speak, and his openness to be told that when he didspeak he had spoken rashly, unadvisedly, and offensively--in all thatEarlston was a conspicuous example of what inward exercise carried onwith sufficient depth and through a sufficiently long life will do evenfor a man of a hot temper and a proud heart. Alexander Gordon had, tobegin with, a large heart. A large heart was a family possession of theGordons; the fathers had it and the mothers had it; and whatever came andwent in the family estate, the Gordon heart was always entailedunimpaired--increased indeed--upon the children. And after somegenerations of true religion, inwardly and deeply exercising the Gordonheart, it almost came as a second nature to our Gordon to take to heartall that happened to him, and to exercise his large and deep heart yetmore thoroughly with it. The affairs of the family, the affairs of theestate, the affairs of the Church, his duties as a landlord, a farmer, aheritor, and a factor, and the persecutions and sufferings that all thesethings brought upon him, some of which we know--all that found its wayinto Earlston's wide and deep and still unsanctified heart. And then, there is a law and a provision in the life of grace that all those mencome to discover who live before God as Earlston lived, a provision thatsecures to such men's souls a depth, and an inwardness, and an increasingexercise that carries them on to reaches of inward sanctification thatthe ruck and run of so-called Christians know nothing about, and areincapable of knowing. 

Such men as Earlston, while the daily rush of outward things is let indeeply into their hearts, are not restricted to these things for thefulness of their inward exercise; their own hearts, though there were nooutward world at all, would sufficiently exercise them to all the giftsand graces and attainments of the profoundest spiritual life. For onething, when once Earlston had begun to keep watch over his own heart inthe matter of its motives--it was David Dickson, one fast-day at Irvine, on 1 Sam. Ii. , who first taught Gordon to watch his motives--from thatday Rutherford and Livingstone, and all his family, and all his fellow-elders saw a change in their friend that almost frightened them. Therewas after that such a far-off tone in his letters, and such a far-offlook in his eyes, and such a far-off sound in his voice as they all feltmust have come from some great, and, to them, mysterious advance in hisspiritual life; but he never told even his son William what it was thathad of late so softened and quieted his proud and stormy heart. But, allthe time, it was his motives. The baseness of his motives even when hedid what it was but his duty and his praise to do, that quite killedEarlston every day. The loathsomeness of a heart that hid such motivesin its unguessed depths made him often weep in the woods which hisgrandfather had sanctified by his Bible readings a century before. Rutherford saw with the glance of genius what was going on in hisfriend's heart, when, in one letter, not referring to himself at all, Earlston suddenly said, 'If Lucifer himself would but look deep enoughand long enough into his own heart, the sight of it would make him alittle child. ' 'Did not I say, ' burst out Rutherford, as he read, 'thatAlexander Gordon would lead the ring in Galloway?'

Earlston frightened into silence the Presbytery of Kirkcudbright on oneoccasion also, when at their first meeting after he had spoken out sobravely before the king and the Parliament, and they were to move him avote of thanks, he cried out: 'Fathers and brethren, the heart isdeceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, and you do not knowit. For I had a deep, malicious, revengeful motive in my heart behindall my fine and patriotic speeches in Parliament. I hated Montrose morethan I loved the freedom of the Kirk. Spare me, therefore, the sentenceof putting that act of shame on your books!' It was discoveries likethis that accumulated in John Livingstone's note-book till he blotted outall his instances and left only the blessed result, 'Alexander Gordon, aman of great spirit, but much subdued by inward exercise, and who wasvisited with most rare experiences of downcasting and uplifting. ' Nodoubt, dear John Livingstone; we can well believe it. Too rare with us, alas! but every day with your noble friend; every day and every night, when he lay down and when he rose up. His very dreams often cast himdown all day after them; for he said, If my heart were not one of thechambers of hell itself, such hateful things would not stalk about in itwhen the watchman is asleep. Downcastings! downcastings! Yes, down tosuch depths of self-discovery and self-detestation and self-despair ascompelled his Heavenly Master to give commandment that His prostrateservant should be lifted up as few men on the earth have ever been liftedup, or could bear to be. Yes; they were rare experiences both ofdowncastings and of upliftings; when such downcastings and upliftingsbecome common the end of this world will have come, and with it the veryKingdom of Heaven. 

The last sight we see of Alexander Gordon in this world is after hisMaster has given commandment that the last touch be put to His servant'ssubdued and childlike humility. The old saint is sitting in hisgrandfather's chair and his wife is feeding him like a weaned child. JohnLivingstone tells that Mr. John Smith, a minister in Teviotdale, had allthe Psalms of David by heart, and that instead of a curtailed, monotonous, and mechanical grace before meat he always repeated a wholePsalm. Earlston must have remembered once dining in the Manse of Maxtonat a Communion time; for, as his tender-handed wife took her place besidehis chair to feed her helpless husband, he always lifted up his palsiedhand and always said to himself, to her, and above all, to God, the 131stPsalm--

 'As child of mother weaned; my soul Is like a weaned child;'

till all the godly households in Galloway knew the 131st Psalm asAlexander Gordon of Earlston's grace before meat. 

XII. EARLSTON THE YOUNGER

 'A renowned Gordon, a patriot, a good Christian, a confessor, and, I may add, a martyr of Jesus Christ. '--Livingstone's _Characteristics_. 

Thomas Boston in his most interesting autobiography tells us about one ofhis elders who, though a poor man, had always 'a brow for a good cause. 'Now nothing could better describe the Gordons of Earlston than just thatsaying. For old Alexander Gordon, the founder of the family, lifted uphis brow for the cause of the Bible and the Sabbath-day when his brow wasas yet alone in the whole of Galloway; his great-grandson Alexander alsolifted up his brow in his day for the liberty of public worship and thefreedom of the courts and congregations of the Church of Scotland, andpaid heavily for his courage; and his son William, of whom we are tospeak to-night, showed the same brow to the end. The Gordons, as JohnHowie says, have all along made no small figure in our best Scottishhistory, and that because they had always a brow for the best causes oftheir respective days. As Rutherford also says, the truth kept thecausey in the south-west of Scotland largely through the intelligence, the courage, and the true piety of the Gordon house. 

While still living at home and assisting his father in his farms andfactorships, young Earlston was already one of Rutherford's most intimatecorrespondents. In a kind of reflex way we see what kind of head andheart and character young Earlston must already have had from the lettersthat Rutherford wrote to him. If we are to judge of the character andattainments and intelligence of Rutherford's correspondents by theletters he wrote to them, then I should say that William Gordon ofEarlston must have been a remarkable man very early in life, both in theunderstanding and the experience of divine things. One of the Aberdeenletters especially, numbered 181 in Dr. Andrew Bonar's edition, forintellectual power, inwardness, and eloquence stands almost if notaltogether at the head of all the 365 letters we have from Rutherford'spen. He never wrote an abler or a better letter than that he wrote toWilliam Gordon the younger of Earlston on the 16th of June 1637. NotJames Durham, not George Gillespie, not David Dickson themselves ever gota stronger, deeper, or more eloquent letter from Samuel Rutherford thandid young William Gordon of Airds and Earlston. William Gordon was but ayoung country laird, taken up twelve hours every day and six days everyweek with fences and farm-houses, with horses and cattle, but I think anexamination paper on personal religion could be set out of Rutherford'sletters to him that would stagger the candidates and the doctors ofdivinity for this year of grace 1891. 'William Gordon was a gentlemen, 'says John Howie, 'of good parts and endowments; a man devoted to religionand godliness. ' Unfortunately we do not possess any of the letters youngEarlston wrote to Rutherford. I wish we did. I would have liked to haveseen that letter of Gordon's that so 'refreshed' Rutherford's soul; andthat other letter of which Rutherford says that Gordon will be sure to'come speed' with Christ if he writes to heaven as well about histroubles as he had written to Rutherford in Aberdeen. What a detestabletime that was in Scotland when such a man as William Gordon was fined, and fined, and fined; hunted out of his house and banished, till at lasthe was shot by the soldiers of the Crown and thrown into a ditch as if hehad been a highwayman. 

The first thing that strikes me in reading Rutherford's letters to youngEarlston and to several other young men of that day is the extraordinaryfrankness and self-forgetfulness of the writer. He takes his youngcorrespondents into his confidence in a remarkable way. He opens up hiswhole heart to them. He goes back with a startling boldness andunreserve and plainness of speech on his own youth, and he lays himselfalongside of his youthful correspondents in a way that only a strong manand a humble could afford to do. Let young men read Rutherford's lettersto young William Gordon of Earlston, and to young John Gordon ofCardoness, and to young Lord Boyd, and such like, and they will besurprised to find that even Samuel Rutherford was once a young manexactly like themselves, and that he never forgot the days of his youthnor the trials and temptations and transgressions of those perilous days. Let them read his Letters, and they will see that Rutherford could notonly write home to the deepest experiences of Lady Boyd and Lady Kenmureand Marion M'Naught, but that he was quite as much at home with theirsons and daughters also. 

Rutherford told young Earlston how terribly he had 'ravelled his ownhesp' in the days of his youth, and he tells another of hiscorrespondents that after eighteen years he was not sure he had even yetgot his ravelled hesp put wholly right. Young Edinburgh gentlemen whohave been born with the silver spoon in their mouth will not understandwhat a ravelled hesp is. But those who have been brought up at the pirn-wheel in Thrums, and in suchlike handloom towns, have the advantage ofsome of their fellow-worshippers to-night. They do not need to turn toDr. Bonar's Glossary or to Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary to find outwhat a ravelled hesp is. They well remember the stern yoke of theiryouth when they were sent supperless to bed because they had ravelledtheir hesp, and all the old times rush back on them as Rutherfordconfesses to Earlston how recklessly he ravelled his hesp when he was astudent in Edinburgh, and how, twenty times a day, he still ravels itafter he is Christ's prisoner in Aberdeen. 

When the hesp is ravelled the pirn is badly filled, and then the shuttleis choked and arrested in the middle of its flight, the web is broken andknotted and uneven, and the weaver is dismissed, or, at best, he is finedin half his wages. And so, said Rutherford, is it with the weaver andthe web of life, when a man's life-hesp is ravelled in the morning of hisdays. I stood not long ago at the grave's mouth of a dear and intimatefriend of mine who had fatally ravelled both his own hesp and that ofother people, till we had to get the grave-diggers to take a cord andhelp us to bury him. Horace said that in his day most men fled the emptycask; and all but two or three fled my poor friend's ravelled hesp. Hehad recovered the lost thread before he died, but his tangled life waspast unravelling in this world, and we wrapped his ragged hesp around himfor a winding-sheet, and left him with Christ, who so graciously took thecumber of Rutherford's ill-ravelled life also. Young men whose hespstill runs even, and whose web is not yet torn, as Rutherford says toEarlston, 'Make conscience of your thoughts and study in everything tomortify your lusts. Wash your hands in innocency, and God, who knowethwhat you have need of before you ask Him, will Himself lead you toencompass His holy altar, and thus to enter the harbour of a holy homeand an unravelled life. '

Rutherford's Letters are all gleaming with illustrations, some homelyenough, like the ill-ravelled hesp, and some classically beautiful, likethe arrow that has gone beyond the bowman's mastery. Writing to youngLord Boyd about seeking Christ in youth, and about the manifoldadvantages of an early and a complete conversion, Rutherford says: 'It iseasy to set an arrow right before the string is drawn, but when once thearrow is in the air the bowman has lost all power over it. ' Look aroundat the men and women beside you and see how true that is. Look at thosewhose arrow is shot, and see how impossible it is for them, even whenthey wish it, either to call their arrow back or to correct its erringflight. And thank God that you are still in your youth, and that thearrow of your future life is not yet shot. And while your arrow stilllies trembling on the string be sure your face is in the right directionand your aim well taken. Rutherford, with all his experience and all hisfrankness and all his eloquence, could not tell his young correspondentshalf the advantages of an early conversion. Nor can I tell you half ofthe changes for good that would immediately take place in you with anearly, immediate, and complete conversion. Perhaps the very first thingsome of you would do would be to get a new minister and to join a newchurch. Then on the week-day some of you would at once leave yourpresent business, and seek a new means of livelihood in which you couldat least keep your hands and your conscience clean. Then you wouldchoose a new friend and a new lover, or else you would get God to do forthem what He has been so good as to do for you, give them a new heartwith which to weave their hesp and shoot their arrow. You would read newbooks and new journals, or, else, you would read the old books and theold journals in a new way. The Sabbath-day would become a new day toyou, the Bible a new book, and your whole future a new outlook toyou;--but why particularise and specify, when all old things would passaway, and all things would become new? Oh dear young men of Edinburgh, and young men come up to Edinburgh to get your bow well strung and yourarrow well winged, look well before you let go the string, for, once yourarrow is shot, you cannot recall it so as to take a second aim. With anearly and a complete conversion you would have the advantage also ofhaving your whole life for growth in grace and for the knowledge ofyourself, of the word of God and of Jesus Christ; for the formation ofyour character also, and for the service of God and of your generation. And then when your friends met around your grave, instead of hiding youand your ravelled hesp away in shame and silence, they would stand, aworshipping crowd, saying over you: 'Those that be planted in the houseof the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall stillbring forth fruit in old age, they shall be fat and flourishing. '

And then, like the true and sure guide to heaven that Rutherford was, heled his young correspondents on from strength to strength, and from onedegree and one depth of grace to another, as thus, 'Common honesty willnot take a man to heaven. Many are beguiled with this, that they areclear of scandalous sins. But the man that is not born again cannotenter the Kingdom of Heaven. The righteous are scarcely saved. God saveme from a disappointment, and send me salvation. Speer at Christ the wayto heaven, for salvation is not soon found; many miss it. Say, I must besaved, cost me what it will. ' And to a nameless young man, supposed tobe one of his Anwoth parishioners, he writes, 'So my real advice is thatyou acquaint yourself with prayer, and with searching the Scriptures ofGod, so that He may shew you the only true way that will bring rest toyour soul. Ordinary faith and country holiness will not save you. Taketo heart in time the weight and worth of an immortal soul; think ofdeath, and of judgment at the back of death, that you may be saved. --Yoursometime pastor, and still friend in God, S. R. ' The civility of the NewJerusalem, he is continually reminding his genteel and correct-livingcorrespondents, is a very different thing from the civility of Edinburgh, or Aberdeen, or St. Andrews. And so it is, else it would not be worthboth Christ and all Christian men both living and dying for it. 

And this leads Rutherford on, in the last place, to say what Earlston, and Cardoness, and Lord Boyd, while yet in their unconversion and theirearly conversion, would not understand. For, writing to Robert Stuart, the son of the Provost of Ayr, Rutherford says to him, 'Labour constantlyfor a sound and lively sense of sin, ' and to the Laird of Cally, 'Takepains with your salvation, for without much wrestling and sweating it isnot to be won. ' A sound and lively sense of sin. As we read these soundand lively letters, we come to see and understand something of what theirwriter means by that. He means that Stuart and Cally, Cardoness andEarlston, young laymen as they were, were to labour in sin and in theirown hearts till they came to see something of the ungodliness of sin, something of its fiendishness, its malignity, its loathesomeness, itshell-deservingness, its hell-alreadyness. 'All his religiousilluminations, affections, and comforts, ' says Jonathan Edwards of DavidBrainerd, 'were attended with evangelical humiliation, that is to say, with a deep sense of his own despicableness and odiousness, hisignorance, pride, vileness, and pollution. He looked on himself as theleast and the meanest of all saints, yea, very often as the vilest andworst of mankind. ' But let Rutherford and Brainerd and Edwards pour outtheir blackest vocabulary upon sin, and still sin goes and will gowithout its proper name. Only let those Christian noblemen and gentlemento whom Rutherford wrote, labour in their own hearts all their days forsome sound and lively and piercing sense of this unspeakably evil thing, and they will know, as Rutherford wrote to William Gordon, that they havegot to some sound and lively sense of sin when they feel that there is noone on earth or in hell that has such a sinful heart as they have. Thenearer to heaven you get, the nearer will you feel to hell, saidRutherford to young Earlston, till, all at once, the door will open overyou, and, or ever you are aware, you will be for ever with Christ and theblessed; as it indeed was with William Gordon at the end. For as he wason his way to join the Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge, he was shot by agang of English dragoons and flung into a ditch. Jesus Christ, saysRutherford, went suddenly home to His father's house all over with hisown blood, and it was surely enough for William Gordon that he went homelike his Master. 

XIII. ROBERT GORDON OF KNOCKBREX

 'A single-hearted and painful Christian, much employed in parliaments and public meetings after the year 1638. '--_Livingstone_. 

 'Hall-binks are slippery. '--_Gordon to Rutherford_. 

Robert Gordon of Knockbrex, in his religious character, was a combinationof Old Honest and Mr. Fearing in the _Pilgrim's Progress_. He was assingle-hearted and straightforward as that worthy old gentleman was whoearly trysted one Good-Conscience to meet him and give him his hand overthe river which has no bridge; and he was at the same time as troublesometo Samuel Rutherford, his minister and correspondent, as Greatheart'smost troublesome pilgrim was to him. In two well-chosen words JohnLivingstone tells us the deep impression that the laird of Knockbrex madeon the men of his day. With a quite Scriptural insight and terseness ofexpression, Livingstone simply says that Robert Gordon was the most'single-hearted and painful' of all the Christian men known to his widely-acquainted and clear-sighted biographer. 

Now there may possibly be some need that the epithet 'painful' should beexplained, as it is here applied to this good man, but everybody knowswithout any explanation what it is for any man to be 'single-hearted. 'This was the fine character our Lord gave to Nathanael when He salutedhim as an Israelite indeed in whom was no guile. It is singleness ofheart that so clears up the understanding and the judgment that, as ourLord said at another time, it fills a man's whole soul with light. AndPaul gives it as the best character that a servant can bring to or carryaway from his master's house, that he is single-hearted and not an eye-servant in all that he says and does. I keep near me on my desk a bookcalled Roget's _Thesaurus_, which is a rich treasure-house of the Englishlanguage. And though I thought I knew what Livingstone meant when hecalled Robert Gordon a single-hearted man, at the same time I felt surethat Roget would help me to see Gordon better. And so he did. For whenI had opened his book at the word 'single-hearted, ' he at once told methat Knockbrex was an open, frank, natural, straightforward, altogethertrustworthy man. He was above-board, outspoken, downright, blunt even, and bald, always calling a spade a spade. And with each new synonymRobert Gordon's honest portrait stood out clearer and clearer before me, till I thought I saw him, and wished much that we had more single-heartedmen like him in the public and the private life of our day. 

And then, as to his 'painfulness, ' we have that so well expounded andillustrated in John Bunyan's Mr. Fearing, that all I need to do is torecall that inimitable character to your happy memory. 'He was a manthat had the root of the matter in him, but at the same time he was themost troublesome pilgrim that ever I met with in all my days. He layroaring at the Slough of Despond for above a month together. He wouldnot go back neither. The Celestial City, he said he should die if hecame not to it, and yet was dejected at every difficulty and stumbled atevery straw. He had, I think, a Slough of Despond in his mind, a sloughthat he carried everywhere with him, or else he could never have been ashe was. ' Yes, both Mr. Fearing and the laird of Knockbrex were painfulChristians. That is to say, they took pains, special and exceptionalpains, with the salvation of their own souls. They took their religionwith tremendous earnestness. They would have pleased Paul had they livedin his day, for they both worked out their own salvation with fear andtrembling. They looked on sin and death and hell with absorbing andoverwhelming solemnity, and they set themselves with all their might toescape from these direst of evils. Pardon of sin, peace with God, aclean heart and a Christian character, all these things were their dailyprayer; for these things they wrestled many a night like Jacob at theJabbok. The day of death, the day of judgment, heaven and hell--thesethings were more present with them than the things they saw and handledevery day. And this was why they were such troublesome pilgrims. Thiswas why they sometimes stumbled at what their neighbours called a straw;and this was why they feared neither king nor bishop, man nor devil, theyfeared God and sin and death and hell so much. This was why, while allother men were so full of torpid assurance, they still carried, to theannoyance and anger of all their serene-minded neighbours, such a Sloughof Despond in their anxious minds. This was why sin so poisoned alltheir possessions and enjoyments that Greatheart could not get Fearing, any more than Rutherford could get Gordon, out of the Valley ofHumiliation. And this was why Gordon so often turned upon Rutherfordwhen he was exalted above measure, and reminded his minister, in the oldScottish proverb, that 'Hall-binks are slippery. ' Seats of honour, Mr. Samuel, are unsafe seats for unsanctified sinners. Ecstasies do notlast, and they leave the soul weaker and darker than they found it. Itis a comely thing even for a saint to be well-clothed about withhumility, and the deepest valley is safer and seemlier walking for a lameman than the mountain-top; and so on, till Rutherford admitted thatRobert Gordon's warnings were neither impertinent nor untimeous. The sin-stricken laird of Knockbrex was like Mr. Fearing at the House Beautiful. When all the other pilgrims sat down without fear at the table, that sotimid and so troublesome pilgrim, remembering the proverb, stole awaybehind the screen and found his meat and his drink in overhearing thegood conversation that went on in the banquet-hall. Gordon could notunderstand all Rutherford's joy. He did not altogether like it. He didnot answer the ecstatic letters so promptly as he answered those whichwere composed on a soberer key. He was a blunt, plain-spoken, matter-of-fact man; he immensely loved and honoured his minister, but he could nothelp reminding him after one of his specially enraptured letters that'Hall-binks are slippery seats. ' The golden mean lay somewhere betweenthe hall-bink and the ash-pit; somewhere between Rutherford's ecstasy andGordon's depression. But as the Guide said in the exquisiteconversation, the wise God will have it so, some must pipe and some mustweep: and, for my part, I care not for that profession that begins notwith heaviness of mind. Only, here was the imperfection of Mr. Fearingand Robert Gordon, that they would play upon no other music but this totheir latter end. So much so, that the thick woods of Knockbrex are saidto give out to this day the sound of the sackbut to those who have theirears set to such music; there are men in that country who say that theystill hear it when they pass the plantations of Knockbrex alone at night. Knockbrex is now a fine modern mansion that is sometimes let for thesummer to city people seeking solitude and rest. Among these thick woodsand along these silent sands Samuel Rutherford and Robert Gordon werewont to walk and talk together. And here still a man who wishes it maybe free from the noise and the hurrying of this life. Here a man shallnot be let and hindered in his contemplations as in other places he isapt to be. There are woods here that he who loves a pilgrim's life maysafely walk in. The soil also all hereabouts is rich and fruitful, and, under good management, it brings forth by handfuls. The very shepherdboys here live a merry life, and wear more of the herb called heart's-ease in their bosoms than he that is clad in silk and velvet. What arich inheritance to the right heir is the old estate of Knockbrex! Whatan opportunity, and what an education, it must be to tenant Knockbrexwith recollection, with understanding, and with sympathy even for aseason. 

Robert Gordon would very willingly have remained behind the screen allhis days. He would very willingly have given himself up to the care ofhis estate, to the upbringing of his children, and to the working out ofhis own salvation, but such a man as he now was could not be hid. Thestone that is fit for the wall is not let lie in the ditch. We have avaluable letter of Rutherford's addressed to Marion M'Naught about theimpending election of a commissioner for Parliament for the town ofKirkcudbright. In that letter he urges her to try to get her husband, William Fullarton, to stand for the vacant seat. 'It is an honourableand necessary service, ' he says. And speaking of one of the candidates, he further says: 'I fear he has neither the skill nor the authority forthe post. ' Now, it was either at this election, or it was at the nextelection, that an influential deputation of the gentry and burgesses andministers and elders of the district waited on Robert Gordon to get himto stand for one of the vacant seats in Galloway; and once he was chosenand had shown himself to the world he was never let return again to hishome occupations. 'He was much employed in those years, ' saysLivingstone, 'in parliaments and public meetings. '

There are some good men among us who think that the world is so bad thatit is fit for nothing but to be abandoned to the devil and his angelsaltogether, and that a genuine man of God is too good to be made a memberof Parliament or to be much seen on the platforms of public meetings. Such was not Samuel Rutherford's judgment, as will be seen in his 36thLetter. And such was not Robert Gordon's judgment, when he left thewoods and fields of Knockbrex and gave himself wholly up to the politicsof his entangled and distressful day. What he would have said to thesummons had the marches been already redd between Lex and Rex, and hadthe affairs of the Church of Christ not been still too much mixed up withthe affairs of the State, I do not know. Only, as long as the Crown andthe Parliament had their hands so deeply in the things of the Church, Knockbrex was not hard to persuade to go to Parliament to watch overinterests that were dearer to him than life, or family, or estate. RobertGordon carried the old family brow with him into all the debates anddangers of that day; and he added to all that a singleness of heart and apainstaking mind all his own. And it was no wonder that such a man wasmuch in demand at such a time. In our own far happier time what a markdoes a member of Parliament still make, or a speaker at public meetings, who is seen to be single in his heart, and is at constant pains withhimself and with all his duties. It is at bottom our doubleness of heartand our lack of sufficient pains with ourselves and with the things oftruth and righteousness that so divide us up into bitter factions, hateful and hating one another. And when all our public men are likeRobert Gordon in the singleness of their aims and their motives, and whenthey are at their utmost pains to get at the truth about all the subjectsthey are called to deal with, party, if not parliamentary government, with all its vices and mischiefs, will have passed away, and the absoluteMonarchy of the Kingdom of Heaven will have come. 

So much, then, is told us of Robert Gordon in few words: 'Asingle-hearted and painful Christian, much employed in parliaments andpublic meetings. ' To which may be added this extract taken out of theMinute Book of the Covenanters' War Committee: 'The same day there wasdelyverit to the said commissioners by Robert Gordoun of Knockbrax sexsilver spoones Scots worke, weightan vi. Unce xii. Dropes. ' HadKnockbrex also, like the Earlstons, been fined by the bishops and harriedby the dragoons till he had nothing left to deliver to the Commissionersbut six silver spoons and a single heart? It would seem so. Like thewoman in the Gospel, Gordon gave to the Covenant all that he had. HadRobert Gordon been a Highlander instead of a Lowlander; had he been aRoss-shire crofter instead of a small laird in Wigtown, he would havebeen one of the foremost of the well-known 'men. ' His temperament andhis experiences would have made him a prince among the ministers and themen of the far north. Were it nothing else, the pains he spent on thegrowth of the life of grace in his own soul, --that would have canonisedhim among the saintliest of those saintly men. He would have set theQuestion on many a Communion Friday, and the Question in his hands wouldnot have concerned itself with surface matters. Was it becauseRutherford had now gone nearer that great region of experimentalcasuistry that he started that excellent Friday problem in a letter fromAberdeen to Knockbrex in 1637? With Rutherford everything, --the mostdoctrinal, experimental, ecclesiastical, political, all--ran always upinto Christ, His love and His loveableness. 'Is Christ more to be lovedfor gaining for us justification or sanctification?' Such was one of thequestions Rutherford set to his correspondent in the south. Did any ofyou north-country folk ever hear that question debated out before one ofyour Highland communions? If you care to see how Rutherford the ministerand Knockbrex the man debated out their debt to Jesus Christ, read thepriceless correspondence that passed between them, and especially, readthe 170th Letter. But first, and before that, do you either know, orcare to know, what either justification or sanctification is? When youdo know and do care for these supreme things, then you too will in timebecome a single-hearted and painstaking Christian like Robert Gordon, orelse an ecstatic and enraptured Christian like Samuel Rutherford. Andthat again will be very much according to your natural temperament, yourattainments, and your experiences. And nothing in this world willthereafter interest and occupy you half so much as just those questionsthat are connected first with all that Christ is in Himself and all thatHe has done for you, and then with the signs and the fruits of the lifeof grace in your own souls. 

XIV. JOHN GORDON OF RUSCO

 'Remember these seven things. '--_Rutherford_. 

There were plenty of cold Covenanters, as they were called, inKirkcudbright in John Gordon's day, but the laird of Rusco was not one ofthem. Rusco Castle was too near Anwoth Kirk and Anwoth Manse, and itsowner had had Samuel Rutherford too long for his minister and his nearneighbour to make it possible for him to be 'ane cold covenanter quha didnot do his dewtie in everything committed to his charge thankfullie andwillinglie. ' We find Gordon of Rusco giving good reasons indeed, as hethought, why he should not be sent out of the Stewartry on the service ofthe covenant, but the war committee 'expelled his resounes' and instantlycommanded his services. And from all we can gather out of the old MinuteBook, Rusco played all the noble part that Rutherford expected of him inthe making of Scotland and in the salvation of her kirk. 

Like the Psalmist in the hundred and second Psalm, we take pleasure inthe stones of Rusco Castle, and we feel a favour to the very dustthereof. Even in Rutherford's day that rugged old pile was sacred andbeautiful to the eyes of Rutherford and his people, because of what thegrace of God had wrought within its walls; and, both for that, and formuch more like that, both in Rutherford's own day and after it, we alsolook with awe and with desire at the ruined old mansion-house. A hundredyears before John Gordon bade Rusco farewell for heaven, we find a friendof John Knox's on his deathbed there, and having a departure from hisdeathbed administered to him there as confident and as full of a desireto depart as John Knox's own. 'The Last and Heavenly Speeches of John, Viscount Kenmure' also still echo through the deserted rooms of Rusco, and after he had gone up from it we find still another Gordon there withhis wife and children and farm-tenants, all warm Covenanters, and allcontinuing the Rusco tradition of godliness and virtue. At the same timeSamuel Rutherford was not the man to take it for granted that John Gordonand his household were all saved and home in heaven because they livedwithin such sacred walls and were all church members and warmCovenanters. He was only the more anxious about the Gordon familybecause they had such an ancestry and were all bidding so fair to leavebehind them such a posterity. And thus it is that, from his isle ofPatmos, Samuel Rutherford, like the apostle John to his seven churches, sends to John Gordon seven things that are specially to be remembered andlaid to heart by the laird of Rusco. 

1. Remember, in the first place, my dear brother, those most solemn andtoo much forgotten words of our Lord, that there are but few that besaved. Is that really so? said a liberal-minded listener to our Lord oneday. Is that really so, that there are but few that be saved? Mind yourown business, was our Lord's answer. For there are many lost by makingtheir own and other men's salvation a matter of dialectic and debate inthe study and in the workshop rather than of silence, and godly fear, anda holy life. Yes, there are few that be saved, said Samuel Rutherford, writing again the same year to Farmer Henderson, who occupied the home-steading of Rusco. Men go to heaven in ones and twos. And that you maygo there, even if it has to be alone, love your enemies and stand to thetruth I taught you. Fear no man, fear God only. Seek Christ every day. You will find Him alone in the fields of Rusco. Seek a broken heart forsin, for, otherwise, you may seek Him all your days, but you will neverfind Him. And it is not in our New Testament only, and in such books asRutherford's _Letters_ only, that we are reminded of the loneliness ofour road to heaven; in a hundred places in the wisest and deepest booksof the heathen world we read the same warning; notably in the GreekTablet of Cebes, which reads almost as if it had been cut out of theSermon on the Mount. 'Do you not see, ' says the old man, 'a little door, and beyond the door a way which is not much crowded, for very few aregoing along it, it is so difficult of access, so rough, and so stony?''Yes, ' answers the stranger. 'And does there not seem, ' subjoins the oldman, 'to be a high hill and the road up it very narrow, with precipiceson each side? Well, that is the way that leads to the true instruction. ''A cause is not good, ' says Rutherford in another of his pungent books, 'because it is followed by many. Men come to Zion in ones and twos outof a whole tribe, but they go to hell in their thousands. The way toheaven is overgrown with grass; there are the traces of but few feet onthat way, only you may see here and there on it the footprints ofChrist's bloody feet to let you know that you are not gone wrong but arestill on the right way. '

2. Remember also that other word of our Lord, --that heaven is like afortress in this, that it must be taken by force. Only our Lord meansthat the force must not be done to the gates or the walls of heaven, butto our own hard hearts and evil lives. 'I find it hard to be aChristian, ' writes Rutherford to Rusco. 'There is no little thrustingand thringing to get in at heaven's gates. Heaven is a strong castlethat has to be taken by force. ' 'Oh to have one day more in my pulpit inAberdeen!' cried a great preacher of that day when he was dying. 'Whatwould you do?' asked another minister who sat at his bedside. 'I wouldpreach to the people the difficulty of salvation, ' said the dying man. 'Remember, ' wrote Rutherford to Rusco from the same city, 'Remember thatit is violent sweating and striving that alone taketh heaven. '

3. Remember also that there are many who start well at the bottom of thehill who never get to the top. We ministers and elders know that onlytoo well; we do not need to be reminded of that. There are the names ofscores and scores of young communicants on our session books of whom wewell remember how we boasted about them when they took the foot of thehill, but we never mention their names now, or only with a blush and in awhisper. Some take to the hill-foot at one age, and some at another;some for one reason and some for another. A bereavement awakens one, asickness--their own or that of some one dear to them--another; adisappointment in love or in business will sometimes do it; a fall intosin will also do it; a good book, a good sermon, a conversation with afriend who has been some way up the hill; many things may be made use ofto make men and women, and young men and women, take a start toward abetter life and a better world. But for ten, for twenty, who so startnot two ever come to the top. 'Heaven is not next door, ' writesRutherford to Rusco; 'if it were we would all be saved. ' There was awell-known kind of Christians in Rutherford's day that the EnglishPuritans called by the nickname of the Temporaries; and it is to pluckRusco from among them that Rutherford writes to him this admonitoryletter. And there is an equally well-known type of Christian in our day, though I do not know that any one has so happily nicknamed him as yet. 

'The Scriptures beguiled the Pharisees, ' writes Rutherford; and theChristian I refer to is self-beguiled with the very best things in theScriptures. The cross is always in his mouth, but you will never find iton his back. He has got, at least in language, as far as the cross, buthe remains there. He says the burden is off his back, and he takes carethat he shall keep out of that kind of life that would put it on again. He has been once pardoned, and he takes his stand upon that. He strovehard till he was converted, and he sometimes strives hard to get othermen brought to the same conversion. But his conversion has been allexhausted in the mere etymology of the act, for he has only turned roundin his religious life, he has not made one single step of progress. Butlet one of the greatest masters of true religion that ever taught theChurch of Christ speak to us on the subject of this gin-horse Christian. 'The Scriptures, ' says Jonathan Edwards, 'everywhere represent theseeking, the striving, and the labour of a Christian as being chiefly tobe gone through _after_ his conversion, and his conversion as being butthe beginning of the work. And almost all that is said in the NewTestament of men's watching, giving earnest heed to themselves, runningthe race that is set before them, striving and agonising, pressingforward, reaching forth, crying to God night and day; I say, almost allthat is said in the New Testament of these things is spoken of and isdirected to God's saints. Where these things are applied once to sinnersseeking salvation, they are spoken of the saint's prosecution of theirhigh calling ten times. But many have got in these days into a strangeanti-scriptural way of having all their striving and wrestling over_before_ they are converted, and so having an easy time of itafterwards. '

4. Remember, also, wrote Rutherford, to look up the Scriptures and readand lay to heart the lessons of Esau's life and Judas's, of the life ofBalaam, and Saul, and Pharaoh, and Simon Magus, and Caiaphas, and Ahab, and Jehu, and Herod, and the man in Matthew viii. 19, and the apostatesin Hebrews vi. For all these were at best but watered brass andreprobate silver. 'One day, ' writes Mrs. William Veitch of Dumfries inher autobiography, 'having been at prayer, and coming into the room whereone was reading a letter of Mr. Rutherford's directed to one John Gordonof Rusco--giving an account of how far one might go and yet prove ahypocrite and miss heaven--it occasioned great exercise in me. ' Dr. Andrew Bonar is no doubt entirely right when he says that this letter, now open before us, must have been the heart-searching letter that causedthat God-fearing woman, fresh from her knees, so great exercise. Let usshare her great exercise, and in due time we shall share her greatsalvation. Not otherwise. 

5. 'And remember, ' he proceeds, 'what your besetting sin may cost you inthe end. I beseech you therefore and obtest you in the Lord, to makeconscience of all rash and passionate oaths, of raging and avenginganger, of night-drinking, of bad company, of Sabbath-breaking, of hurtingany under you by word or deed, of hurting your very enemies. Except youreceive the Kingdom of God as a little child, you cannot enter it. Thatis a word that should make your great spirit fall. ' 'If men allowthemselves in malice and envy, ' writes Thomas Shepard, a contemporary ofRutherford's, 'or in wanton thoughts, that will condemn them, even thoughtheir corruptions do not break out in any scandalous way. Such thoughtsare quite sufficient evidence of a rotten heart. If a man allows himselfin malice or in envy, though he thinks he does it not, yet he is ahypocrite; if in his heart he allows it he cannot be a saint of God. Ifthere be one evil way, though there have been many reformations, the manis an ungodly man. One way of sin is exception enough against any man'ssalvation. A small shot will kill a man as well as a large bullet, asmall leak let alone will sink a ship, and a small, and especially asecret and spiritual sin, will cost a man his soul. '

6. 'Remember, also, your shortening sand-glass. ' On the day when JohnGordon was born a sand-glass with his name written upon it was filled, and from that moment it began to run down before God in heaven. For howlong it was filled God who filled it alone knew. Whether it was filledto run out in an hour, or to run till Gordon was cut down in mid-time ofhis days, or till he had attained to his threescore years and ten, orwhether it was to run on to the labour and sorrow of four-score years, not even his guardian angel knew, but God only. And then beside thatsand-glass a leaf, taken out of the seven-sealed book, was laid open, onthe top of which was found written the as yet unbaptized name of this new-born child. And under his name was found written all that John Gordonwas appointed and expected to do while his sand-glass was still running. His opening life as child and boy and man in Galloway; his entrance onRusco; his friendship with Samuel Rutherford; his duties to his family, to his tenants, to his Church, and to the Scottish Covenant; the inwardlife he was commanded and expected to live alone with God; the seventhings he was every day to remember; the evangelical graces of heart andlife and character he was to be told and to be enabled to put on; thedeath he was to die, and the 'freehold' he was after all these things toenter on in heaven. And it is of that sand-glass that was at that momentrunning so fast and so low within the veil that Rutherford writes sooften and so earnestly to the so-forgetful laird of Rusco. And howsolemnising it is, if anything would solemnise our hard hearts, that weall have a sand-glass standing before God with our names written upon it, and that it is running out before God day and night unceasingly. Weshall all be too suddenly solemnised when the last grain of our measured-out sand has dropped down, and the blind Fury will come, and without pityand without remorse will slit our thin-spun life with her abhorredshears. And that whether our life-work is finished or no, half-finishedor no, or not even begun. The night cometh, and the shears with it, whenno man can work. Our family must then be left behind us, however theyhave been brought up; our farm also, however it has been worked; ourestate also, however it has been managed; our pulpit, our pew, ourchurch, our character, and even our salvation, and we must, all alonewith God, face and account for the empty sand-glass and the accusingbook. Is it any wonder that John Gordon's minister, when he was in thespirit in Patmos, should write him as we here read? What kind of aminister would he have been, and what a sand-glass, and what a book ofangry account he would have had soon to face himself, if he had let allhis people in Anwoth live on and suddenly die in total forgetfulness ofthe sand and the shears, the book of duty and the book of judgment. 'Remember, ' Rutherford wrote, 'remember and misspend not your short sand-glass, for your forenoon is already spent, your afternoon has come, andyour night will be on you when you will not see to work. Let your heart, therefore, be set upon finishing your journey and summing up and layingout the accounts of your life and the grounds of your death alone beforeGod. '

7. And, above all, remember that after you have done all, it is theblood of Christ alone that will set you down safely as a freeholder inHeaven. But His blood, and your everyday remembrance of His blood, andyour everyday obligation to it, will surely set you, John Gordon of Ruscoon earth, so down a freeholder in heaven. 

 'Soon shall the cup of glory Wash down earth's bitterest woes, Soon shall the desert briar Break into Eden's Rose: I stand upon His merit, I know no other stand, Not e'en where glory dwelleth In Immanuel's land. '

XV. BAILIE JOHN KENNEDY

 'Die well. '--_Rutherford_. 

Bailie John Kennedy, of Ayr, was the remarkable son of a remarkablefather. Old Hugh Kennedy's death-bed was for long a glorious traditionamong the godly in the West of Scotland. The old saint was visited inhis last hours on earth with a joy that was unspeakable and full ofglory: the mere report of it made an immense impression both on theChurch and the world. And his son John, who stood entranced beside hisfather's chariot of fire, never forgot the transporting sight. He didnot need Rutherford's warning never to forget his father's example andhis father's end. For John Kennedy was a 'choice Christian, ' as a well-known writer of that day calls him. And he was not alone. There weremany choice Christians in that day in Scotland. Were there ever more, for its size, in any land or in any church on the face of the earth? Ido not believe there ever were. Next to that favoured land that producedthe Psalmists and the Prophets, I know no land that, for its numbers, possessed so many men and women of a profoundly spiritual experience, andof an adoring and heavenly mind, as Scotland possessed in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries. The Wodrow volumes should be studiedthroughout by every lover of his church and his country, and especiallyby every student of divinity and church history. 

But we need go no further than Samuel Rutherford's letter-bag; for, whenwe open it, what rich treasures of the religious life pour out of it!What minds and what hearts those men and women had! And how they gave uptheir whole mind and heart to the life of godliness in the land, and tothe life of God in their own hearts! How thin and poor our religiouslife appears beside theirs! What minister in Scotland to-day could writesuch letters? And to whom could he address them after they were written?Was it the persecution? Was it the new reformation doctrines? Was itthe masculine and Pauline preaching: preaching, say, like Robert Bruce'sand Rutherford's that did it? What was it that raised up in Scotlandsuch a crop of ripe and rich saints? Who are these, and whence camethey?

Rutherford was always on the outlook for opportunities to employ hisprivate pen for the conversion of sinners, and for the comfort, theupbuilding, and the holiness of God's people. From his manse at Anwoth, from his prison at Aberdeen, from his class-room at St. Andrews, and fromthe Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster, his letter-bag went out full ofthose messages, so warm, so tender, so powerful, to his multitudinouscorrespondents. Public events, domestic joys and sorrows, personalmatters, special providences, --to turn them all to a good resultRutherford was always on the watch. 

News had come to Rutherford's ears of an almost fatal accident thatKennedy had had through his boat being swept out to sea; and that was toogood a chance to lose of trying to touch his correspondent's heart yetmore deeply about death, and the due preparation for it. Read his letterto John Kennedy on his deliverance from shipwreck. See with whatapostolic dignity and sweetness he salutes Kennedy. See how he lifts upKennedy's accident out of the hands of winds and waves, and traces it allup to the immediate hand of God. See how he speaks of Kennedy's reprievefrom death; and how the spared man should make use of his lengtheneddays. Altogether, a noble, powerful, apostolic letter; a letter thatmust have had a great influence in making Bailie Kennedy the choiceChristian that he was and that he became. We have only three letterspreserved of Rutherford's to Kennedy. But we have sufficient evidencethat they were fast and dear friends. Rutherford writes to Kennedy fromAberdeen, upbraiding him for forgetting him; and what a letter that alsois! It stands well out among the foremost of his letters for fulness ofall the great qualities of Rutherford's intellect and heart. 

But it is with the shipwreck letter that we have to do to-night; and withthe expressions in it we have taken for our text: 'Die well, for the lasttide will ebb fast. ' 'It is appointed to all men once to die, ' says theApostle, in a most solemn passage. Think of that, think often of that, think it out, think it through to the end. God has appointed our death. He has our name down in His seven-sealed Book; and when the Lamb opensthe Book, and finds the place, He reads our name, and all that isappointed us till death, and after death. The exact and certain time ofour death is all appointed; the place of it also; and all thecircumstances. Just when it is to happen; to-night, to-morrow, thisyear, next year, perhaps not this dying century; we shall perhaps live towrite A. D. 1901 on our letters. Near or afar off, it is all appointed. And all the circumstances of it also. I don't know why Rutherford shouldsay to Kennedy that it is a terrible thing to 'die in one's day clothes, 'unless he hides a parable under that. But whether in day clothes ornight clothes; whether like Dr. Andrew Thomson, our first minister, inMelville Street, and with his hand on the latchkey of his own door; or, like Dr. Candlish, his successor, in his bed, and repeating, nowShakespeare, and now the Psalmist; by the upsetting of a boat, the shapein which death came near to Kennedy, or by the upsetting of a coach, as Iescaped myself, not being ready. 'The Lord knew, ' writes Rutherford, 'that you had forgotten something that was necessary for your journey, and let you go back for it. You had not all your armour on wherewith tomeet with the last enemy. ' By day or by night; by land or by sea; alone, or surrounded by weeping friends; in rapture like Hugh Kennedy, or inthick darkness like your Lord; all, all is appointed. Just think of it;the types may be cast, the paper may be woven, the ink may be made thatis to announce to the world your death and mine. It is all appointed, and we cannot alter it or postpone it. The only thing we have any handin is this: whether our death, when it comes, is to be a success or afailure; that is to say, whether we shall die well or ill. Since we diebut once, then, and since so much turns upon it, let us take advice howwe are to do it well. We cannot come back to make a second attempt; ifwe do not shoot the gulf successfully, we cannot climb back and try theleap again; we die once, and, after death, the judgment. Now, when wehave any difficult thing before us, how do we prepare ourselves for it?Do we not practise it as often as we possibly can? If it is running in arace, or wrestling in a match, or playing a tune, or shooting at atarget, do we not assiduously practise it? Yes, every sensible man iscareful to have his hand and his foot accustomed to the trial before theappointed day comes. Practice makes perfect: practise dying, then, asRutherford counsels you, and you will make a perfect thing of your death, and not otherwise. But how are we to practise dying? Fore-fancy it, asRutherford says. Act it over beforehand; die speculatively, as Goodwinsays. Say to yourself, Suppose this were death at my door to-night. Suppose he were to visit me in the night, what would I say to him, andwhat would he say to me? Make acquaintance with death, Rutherford writesto Lady Kenmure also. Learn his ways, his manner of approach, hislanguage, and his look. Conjure him up, practise upon him, have yourpart rehearsed and ready to be performed. Let not a heathen bebeforehand with you in dying. Seneca said that every night after hislamp was out, and the house quiet, he went over all his past day, andlooked at it all in the light of death. What he did after that he doesnot tell us; but Rutherford will tell you if you consult him what youshould do. Well, that is one way of practising dying. For Sleep is thebrother of Death. And to meet the one brother right will prepare us tomeet the other. Speculate at night, then--speculate and say, Supposethis were my last night. Suppose, O my soul, thou wert to cast anchor to-morrow in Eternity, how shouldst thou close thine eyes to-night?Speculate also at other men's funerals. When the clod thuds down ontheir coffin, think yourself inside of it. When you see the undertaker'sman screwing down the lid, suppose it yours. Take your own way of doingit; only, practise dying, and let not death spring upon you unawares. Diedaily, for, as Dante says, 'The arrow seen beforehand slacks its flight. '

Writing to another old man, Rutherford points out to him the graciouspurpose of God in appointing him his death in old age. 'It is, ' saysRutherford, 'that you may have full leisure to look over all youraccounts and papers before you take ship. ' What a tangle our papers alsoare in as life goes on; and what need we have of a time of leisure to setthings right before we hand them over. Rutherford, therefore, makes ussee old Carlton on his bed with his pillows propping him up, and a draweropen on the bed, and bundles of old letters and bills spread out beforehim. Old love letters; old business letters; his mother's letters to himwhen he was a boy at Edinburgh College; letters in cipher that no humaneye can read but those old, bleared, weeping eyes that fill that too latedrawer with their tears. The old voyager is looking over his papersbefore he takes ship. And he comes on things he had totally forgotten:debts he had thought paid; petitions he had thought answered; promises hehad thought fulfilled; till he calls young Carlton, his son, to hisbedside, and tells him things that break both men's hearts to say and tohear; and commits to his son and heir sad duties that should never havebeen due; debts, promises, obligations, reparations, such that, toremember them, is a terrible experience on an old man's deathbed. Butwhat mercy that he was not carried off, and his drawer unopened!

Now, speaking of taking ship, when we are preparing for a voyage, and avisit to another country and another city, we 'read up, ' as we say, before we set sail. Before we start for Rome we read our Tacitus and ourHorace, our Gibbon and our Merivale. If it is Florence we take downVasari and Dante, Lord Lindsay and Mrs. Jamieson, and so on. Now, ifEternity holds for us a new world, with cities and peoples that are allnew to us, should we not prepare ourselves for them also? Have you, then, laid in a library for your old age, when, like old Carlton, youwill be lying waiting at the water-side? What books do you read when youwish to put on the mind of a man who intends to die well? 'Read to mewhere I first cast my anchor, ' said John Knox, when dying, to his weepingwife. Does your wife know where you first cast your anchor? Does sheknow already what to read to you when you are preparing for the lastvoyage?

And then, having prepared for, and practised dying well, play the man andperform it well when the day comes. 'Die as your father died, ' saysRutherford to Kennedy. Now, that is too much to ask of any man, becauseold Hugh Kennedy's deathbed was what it was by the special grace of God. You cannot command any man to die in rapture. But Rutherford does notmean that, as he is careful to explain. He means, as he says, 'diebelieving. ' It will be your last act as a believer, therefore do itwell. You have been practising faith all your days; show that practicemakes perfection at the end. As Rutherford said to George Gillespie whenhe was on his deathbed, 'Hand over all your bills, paid and unpaid, toyour surety. Give him the keys of the drawer, and let him clear it outfor himself after you are gone. ' And then, with the ruling passionstrong in death, he added, 'Die not on sanctification but onjustification, die not on inherent but on imputed righteousness. ' Andthen, to come to the very last act of all, there is what we call thedeath-grip. A dying man feels the whole world giving way under him. Allhe built upon, leaned upon, looked to, is like sliding sand, like sinkingwater; and he grasps at anything, anybody, the bedpost, the bed-curtains, the bed-clothes, his wife's hand, his son's arm, the very air sometimes. On what, on whom will you seize hold in your last gasp and death-grip?

 'Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee!'

XVI. JAMES GUTHRIE

 'The short man who could not bow. '--_Cromwell_. 

James Guthrie was the son of the laird of that ilk in the county ofAngus. St. Andrews was his _alma mater_, and under her excellent nurtureyoung Guthrie soon became a student of no common name. His father haddestined him for the Episcopal Church, and, what with his descent from anancient and influential family, his remarkable talents, and his excellentscholarship, it is not to be wondered at that a bishop's mitre sometimesdangled before his ambitious eyes. 'He was then prelatic, ' says Wodrowin his _Analecta_, 'and strong for the ceremonies. ' But as time went on, young Guthrie's whole views of duty and of promotion became totallychanged, till, instead of a bishop's throne, he ended his days on thehangman's ladder. After having served his college some time as regent orassistant professor in the Moral Philosophy Chair, Guthrie took licence, and was immediately thereafter settled as parish minister of Lauder, inthe momentous year 1638. And when every parish in Scotland sent up itsrepresentatives to Edinburgh to subscribe the covenant in GreyfriarsChurchyard, the parish of Lauder had the pride of seeing its youngminister take his life in his hand, like all the best ministers andtruest patriots in the land. But just as Guthrie was turning in at thegate of the Greyfriars, who should cross the street before him, so asalmost to run against him, but the city executioner! The omen--for itwas a day of omens--made the young minister stagger for a moment, butonly for a moment. At the same time the ominous incident made such animpression on the young Covenanter's heart and imagination, that he saidto some of his fellow-subscribers as he laid down the pen, 'I know that Ishall die for what I have done this day, but I cannot die in a bettercause. '

In the lack of better authorities we are compelled to trace the footstepsof James Guthrie through the Laodicean pages of Robert Baillie forseveral years to come. Baillie did not like Guthrie, and there was nolove lost between the two men. The one man was all fire together inevery true and noble cause, and the other we spew out of our mouth atevery page of his indispensable book. As Carlyle says, Baillie contrivedto 'carry his dish level' through all that terrible jostle of a time. Andaccordingly while we owe Baillie our very grateful thanks that he keptsuch a diary, and carried on such an extensive and regular correspondenceduring all that distracted time, we owe him no other thanks. He carriedhis dish level, and he had his reward. 

As we trace James Guthrie's passionate footsteps for the years to comethrough Principal Baillie's sufficiently gossiping, but not unshrewd, pages, we soon see that he is travelling fast and sure toward the NetherBow. We hear continually from our time-serving correspondent ofGuthrie's 'public invective, ' of his 'passionate debates, ' of his'venting of his mind, ' of his 'peremptory letters, ' of his 'sharpwriting, ' and of his being 'rigid as ever, ' and so on. All that abouthis too zealous co-presbyter, and then his fulsome eulogy of thereturning king--his royal wisdom, his moderation, his piety, and hisgrave carriage--as also what he says of 'the conspicuous justice of Godin hanging up the bones of Oliver Cromwell, the disgracing of the twoGoodwins, blind Milton, John Owen, and others of that maleficent crew, 'all crowned with the naive remark that 'the wisest and best are quiettill they see whither these things will go'--it is plain that while ourwise and good author is carrying his dish as level as the uneven roadswill allow, Guthrie is as plainly carrying his head straight to the Crossof Edinburgh, and to the iron spikes of the Canongate. 

All the untold woes of that so woful time came of the sword of the civilpower being still grafted on the crook of the Church; as also of theinsane attempt of so many of our forefathers to solder the crown ofCharles Stuart to the crown of Jesus Christ. How those two so fatal, andnot even yet wholly remedied, mistakes, brought Argyll to the block andGuthrie to the ladder in one day in Edinburgh, we read in the instructiveand inspiriting histories of that terrible time; and we have no betterbook on that time for the mass of readers than just honest John Howie's_Scots Worthies_. There is a passage in our Scottish martyr's lastdefence of himself that has always reminded me of Socrates' similardefence before the judges of Athens. 'My lords, ' said Guthrie, 'myconscience I cannot submit. But this old and crazy body I do submit, todo with it whatsoever you will; only, I beseech you to ponder well whatprofit there is likely to be in my blood. It is not the extinguishing ofme, or of many more like me, that will extinguish the work of reformationin Scotland. My blood will contribute more for the propagation of theCovenant and the full reformation of the kirk than my life and libertycould do, though I should live on for many years. ' One can hardly helpthinking that Guthrie must have been reading _The Apology_ in his mansein Stirling at the moment he was apprehended. But in the case ofGuthrie, as in the case of Socrates, no truth, no integrity, and noeloquence could save him; for, as Bishop Burnet frankly says, 'It wasresolved to make a public example of a Scottish minister, and so Guthriewas singled out. I saw him suffer, ' the Bishop adds, 'and he was so farfrom showing any fear that he rather expressed a contempt of death. 'James Cowie, his precentor, and beadle, and body-servant, also saw hismaster suffer, and, like Bishop Burnet, he used to tell the impressionthat his old master's last days made upon him. 'When he had receivedsentence of death, ' Cowie told Wodrow's informant, 'he came forth with akind of majesty, and his face seemed truly to shine. ' It neededsomething more than this world could supply to make a man's face to shineunder the sentence that he be hanged at the Cross of Edinburgh, his bodydismembered, and his head fixed on an iron spike in the West Port of thesame city. The disgraceful and ghastly story of his execution, and thehacking up of his body, may all be read in Howie, beside a picture of theNether Bow as it still stands in our Free Church and Free State Day. 'Artnot Thou from everlasting, O Lord my God?' were James Guthrie's lastwords as he stood on the ladder. 'O mine Holy One: I shall not die, butlive. Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace; for mine eyes haveseen Thy salvation. '

There is one fine outstanding feature that has always characterised anddistinguished the whole of the Rutherford circle in our eyes, and that istheir deep, keen Pauline sense of sin. Without this, all theirpatriotism, all their true statesmanship, and even all their martyrdomfor the sake of the truth, would have had, comparatively speaking, littleor no interest for us. What think ye of sin? is the crucial question weput to any character, scriptural or ecclesiastical, who claims our timeand our attention. If they are right about sin, they are all the morelikely to be right about everything else; and if they are either wrong oronly shallow about sin, their teaching and their experience on othermatters are not likely to be of much value or much interest to us. Wehave had written over our portals against all comers: Know thyself ifthou wouldst either interest us or benefit us, or with the understandingand the spirit worship with us. And all the true Rutherford circle, without one exception, have known the true secret and have given the truepassword. Their keen sense and scriptural estimate of the supreme evilof sin first made them correspondents of Rutherford's; and as that senseand estimate grew in them they passed on into an inner and a still moreinner circle of those Scottish saints and martyrs who corresponded withRutherford, and closed, with so much honour and love, around him. Andthe two Guthries, James and William, as we shall see, were famous even inthat day for their praying and for their preaching about sin. 

There is an excellent story told of James Guthrie's family worship in themanse of Stirling, that bears not unremotely on the matter we have now onhand. Guthrie was wont to pray too much, both at the family altar and inthe pulpit, as if he had been alone with his own heart and God. And hecarried that bad habit at last to such a length in his family, that healmost drove poor James Cowie, his man-servant, out of his senses, tillwhen Cowie could endure no longer to be singled out and exposed anddenounced before the whole family, he at last stood up with some boldnessbefore his master and demanded to be told out, as man to man, and not inthat cruel and injurious way, what it was he had done that made hismaster actually every day thus denounce and expose him. 'O James, man, pardon me, pardon me. I was, I see now, too much taken up with my ownheart and its pollutions to think enough of you and the rest. ' 'It wasthat, and the like of that, ' witnessed Cowie, 'that did me and my wifemore good than all my master's well-studied sermons. ' The intimacy andtenderness of the minister and his man went on deeper and grew closer, till at the end we find Cowie reading to him at his own request theEpistle to the Romans, and when the reader came to the passage, 'I willhave mercy on whom I will have mercy, ' the listener burst into tears, andexclaimed, 'James, James, halt there, for I have nothing but that tolippen to. ' And then, on the ladder, and before a great crowd ofEdinburgh citizens: 'I own that I am a sinner--yea, and one of the vilestthat ever made a profession of religion. My corruptions have been strongand many, and they have made me a sinner in all things--yea, even infollowing my duty. But blessed be God, who hath showed His mercy to sucha wretch, and hath revealed His Son unto me, and made me a minister ofthe everlasting Gospel, and hath sealed my ministry on the hearts of nota few of His people. ' James Guthrie's ruling passion, as Cowie remarked, was still strong in his death. 

On one occasion Guthrie and some of his fellow-ministers were comparingexperiences and confessing to one another their 'predominant sins, ' andwhen it came to Guthrie's turn he told them that he was much too eager todie a violent death. For, said he, I would like to die with all my witsabout me. I would not like eyesight and memory and reason and faith allto die out on my deathbed and leave me to tumble into eternity bereft ofthem all. Guthrie was greatly afraid at the thought of death, but it wasthe premature death of his reason, and even of his faith, that so muchalarmed and horrified him to think of. He envied the men who kneeleddown on the scaffold, or leaped off the ladder, in full possession at thelast moment of all their senses and all their graces. 'Give me a directanswer, sir, ' demanded Dr. Johnson of his physician when on his deathbed.. . . 'Then I will take no more opiates, for I have prayed that I may beable to render up my soul to God unclouded. ' And when pressed by hisattendants to take some generous nourishment, he replied almost with hislast breath, 'I will take anything but inebriating sustenance. '

But in nothing was good James Guthrie's tenderness to sin better seenthan in the endless debates and dissensions of which that day was sofull. So sensitive was he to the pride and the anger and the ill-willthat all controversy kindles in our hearts that, as soon as he felt anyunholy heat in his own heart, or saw it in the hearts of the men hedebated with, he at once cut short the controversy with some such wordsas these: 'We have said too much on this matter already; let us leave ittill we love one another more. ' If hot-blooded Samuel Rutherford had satmore at James Guthrie's feet in the matter of managing a controversy, hisname would have been almost too high and too spotless for this presentlife. Samuel Rutherford's one vice, temper, was one of James Guthrie'schief virtues. 

We have only two, or at most three, of the many letters that must havepassed between Rutherford and Guthrie preserved to us. And, as is usualwith Rutherford when he writes to any member of his innermost circle, hewrites to Guthrie so as still more completely to win his heart. And innothing does dear Rutherford win all our hearts more than in his deephumility, and quick, keen sense of his own inability and utterunworthiness. 'I am at a low ebb, ' he writes to Guthrie from theJerusalem Chamber, 'yea, as low as any gracious soul can possibly be. Shall I ever see even the borders of the good land above?' I read thatfine letter again last Sabbath afternoon in my room at hospitableHelenslee, overlooking the lower reaches of the Clyde, and as I read thispassage, I recollected the opportune sea-view commanded by my window. Ihad only to rise and look out to see an excellent illustration of my much-exercised author; for the forenoon tide had just retreated to the sea, and the broad bed of the river was left by the retreated tide less ariver than a shallow, clammy channel. Shoals of black mud ran out fromour shore, meeting and mingling with shoals of black mud from theopposite shore. There was scarce clean water enough to float themultitude of buoys that dipped and dragged in their bed of mire. Thatany ship, to call a ship, could ever work its way up that swelteringsewer seemed an utter impossibility. There was Rutherford's low ebb, then, under my very eyes. There was low water indeed. And the low waterseemed to laugh the waiting seamen's hopes to scorn. But next morning myheart rose high as I looked out at my window and saw all the richly-ladenvessels lighting their fires and spreading their sails, and setting theirfaces to the replenished river. And I thought of Samuel Rutherford'sship, far past all her ebbing tides now, and for ever anchored in herhaven above. 

On the wall of my room in the same beautiful house there was a powerfulcartoon of Peter's crucifixion, head downwards, for his Master's sake. The masterpiece of Filippino Lippi I felt to be an excellent illustrationalso of Rutherford's letter to James Guthrie and the rest of theministers and elders who were imprisoned in the Castle of Edinburgh fordaring to remind Charles Stuart of the contents of the Covenant to whichboth he and the whole nation had solemnly sworn. 'If Christ doth ownme, ' Rutherford wrote to the martyrs in the Castle, 'let me be laid in mygrave in a bloody winding-sheet; let me go from the scaffold to thespikes in four quarters--grave or no grave, as He pleases, if only He butowns me. ' And I seemed to see the crucified disciple's glorified Masterappearing over his reversed cross and saying, 'Thou art Peter, and withthis thy blood I will sow widespread my Church. ' Yes, my brethren, ifChrist but owns us, that will far more than make up to us in a moment forall our imprisonments, and all our martyrdoms, and all our ebbing tidesdown here. 'Angels, men, and Zion's elders eye us in all our sufferingfor Christ's sake, but what of all these? Christ is by us, and lookethon, and writeth it all up Himself. '

James Guthrie was hanged and dismembered at the Cross of Edinburgh on thefirst day of June, 1661. His snow-white head was cut off, and was fixedon a spike in the Nether Bow. James Guthrie got that day that which hehad so often prayed for--a sudden plunge into everlasting life with allhis senses about him and all his graces at their brightest and theirkeenest exercise. 

XVII. WILLIAM GUTHRIE

 'A merry heart doeth good like a medicine. '--_Solomon_. 

William Guthrie was a great humorist, a great sportsman, a greatpreacher, and a great writer. The true Guthrie blood has always had adrop of humour in it, and the first minister of Fenwick was a genuineGuthrie in this respect. The finest humour springs up out of a wide anda deep heart, and it always has its roots watered at a wellhead of tears. 'William Guthrie was a great melancholian, ' says Wodrow, and as we readthat we are reminded of some other great melancholians, such as BlaisePascal and John Foster and William Cowper. William Guthrie knew, by histemperament, and by his knowledge of himself and of other men, that hewas a great melancholian, and he studied how to divert himself sometimesin order that he might not be altogether drowned with his melancholy. Andthus, maugre his melancholy, and indeed by reason of it, William Guthriewas a great humorist. He was the life of the party on the moors, in themanse, and in the General Assembly. But the life of the party when hewas present was always pure and noble and pious, even if it was sometimessomewhat hilarious and boisterous. 'If a man's melancholy temperament issanctified, ' says Rutherford in his _Covenant of Grace_, 'it becomes tohim a seat of sound mortification and of humble walking. ' And that wasthe happy result of all William Guthrie's melancholy; it was alwaysalleviated and relieved by great outbursts of good-humour; but both hismelancholy and his hilarity always ended in a humbler walk. SamuelRutherford confides in a letter to his old friend, Alexander Gordon, thathe knows a man who sometimes wonders to see any one laugh or sport inthis so sinful and sad life. But that was because he had embittered thesprings of laughter in himself by the wormwood sins of his youth. WilliamGuthrie had no such remorseful memories continually taking him by thethroat as his divinity professor had, and thus it was that with all hismelancholy he was known as the greatest humorist and the greatestsportsman in the Scottish Kirk of his day. No doubt he sometimes feltand confessed that his love of fun and frolic was a temptation that hehad to watch well against. In his _Saving Interest_ he speaks of somesins that are wrought up into a man's natural humour and constitution, and are thus as a right hand and a right eye to him. 'My merriment!' heconfessed to one who had rebuked him for it, 'I know all you would say, and my merriment costs me many a salt tear in secret. ' At the same timethis was often remarked with wonder in Guthrie, that however boisteroushis fun was, in one moment he could turn from it to the most seriousthings. 'It was often observed, ' says Wodrow, 'that, let Mr. Guthrie benever so merry, he was presently in a frame for the most spiritual duty, and the only account I can give of it, ' says wise Wodrow, 'is, that heacted from spiritual principles in all he did, and even in hisrelaxations. ' Poor Guthrie had a terrible malady that preyed on his mostvital part continually--a malady that at last carried him off in the mid-time of his days, and, like Solomon in the proverb, he took to a merryheart as an alleviating medicine. 

Like our own Thomas Guthrie, too, William Guthrie was a great angler. Hecould gaff out a salmon in as few minutes as the deftest-handedgamekeeper in all the country, and he could stalk down a deer in as fewhours as my lord himself who did nothing else. When he was composing his_Saving Interest_, he somehow heard of a poor countryman near Haddingtonwho had come through some extraordinary experiences in his spirituallife, and he set out from Fenwick all the way to Haddington to see andconverse with the much-experienced man. All that night and all the nextday Guthrie could not tear himself away from the conversation of the manand his wife. But at last, looking up and down the country, his anglingeye caught sight of a trout-stream, and, as if he had in a momentforgotten all about his book at home and all that this saintly man hadcontributed to it, Guthrie asked him if he had a fishing-rod, and if hewould give him a loan of it. The old man felt that his poor rough tacklewas to be absolutely glorified by such a minister as Guthriecondescending to touch it, but his good wife did not like this come-downat the end of such a visit as his has been, and she said so. She was aclever old woman, and I am not sure but she had the best of it in thedebate that followed about ministers fishing, and about their facetiousconversation. The Haddington stream, and the dispute that rose out ofit, recall to my mind a not unlike incident that took place in the streetof Ephesus, in the far East, just about 1800 years ago. John, thevenerable Apostle, had just finished the fourteenth chapter of his greatGospel, and felt himself unable to recollect and write out any more thatnight. And coming out into the setting sun he began to amuse himselfwith a tame partridge that the Bactrian convert had caught and made apresent of to his old master. The partridge had been waiting till thepen and the parchment were put by, and now it was on John's hand, and nowon his shoulder, and now circling round his sportful head, till you wouldhave thought that its owner was the idlest and foolishest old man in allEphesus. A huntsman, who greatly respected his old pastor, was passinghome from the hills and was sore distressed to see such a saint as Johnwas trifling away his short time with a stupid bird. And he could notkeep from stopping his horse and saying so to the old Evangelist. 'Whatis that you carry in your hand?' asked John at the huntsman with greatmeekness. 'It is my bow with which I shoot wild game up in themountains, ' replied the huntsman. 'And why do you let it hang so loose?You cannot surely shoot anything with your bow in that condition!' 'No, 'answered the amused huntsman, 'but if I always kept my bow strung itwould not rebound and send home my arrow when I needed it. I unstring mybow on the street that I may the better shoot with it when I am up amongmy quarry. ' 'Good, ' said the Evangelist, 'and I have learned a lessonfrom you huntsmen. For I am playing with my partridge to-night that Imay the better finish my Gospel to-morrow. I am putting everything outof my mind to-night that I may to-morrow the better recollect and setdown a prayer I heard offered up by my Master, now more than fifty yearsago. ' We readers of the Fourth Gospel do not know how much we owe to theBactrian boy's tame partridge, and neither John Owen nor Thomas Chalmersknew how much they owed to the fishing-rods and curling-stones, thefowling-pieces and the violins that crowded the corners of the manse ofFenwick. I do not know that William Guthrie made a clean breast to thePresbytery of all the reasons that moved him to refuse so many calls to acity charge, though I think I see that David Dickson, the Moderator, divined some of them by the joke he made about the moors of Fenwick toone of the defeated and departing deputations. 

William Guthrie, the eldest son and sole heir of the laird of Pitforthy, might have had fishing and shooting to his heart's content on his ownlands of Pitforthy and Easter Ogle had he not determined, when underRutherford at St. Andrews, to give himself up wholly to his preaching. But, to put himself out of the temptation that hills and streams andlochs and houses and lands would have been to a man of his tastes andtemperament, soon after his conversion William made over to a youngerbrother all his possessions and all his responsibilities connectedtherewith, in order that he might give himself up wholly to hispreaching. And his reward was that he soon became, by universal consent, the greatest practical preacher in broad Scotland. He could not touchRutherford, his old professor, at pure theology; he had neitherRutherford's learning, nor his ecstatic eloquence, nor his surpassinglove of Jesus Christ, but for handling broken bones and guiding ananxious inquirer no one could hold the candle to William Guthrie. Descriptions of his preaching abound in the old books, such as this: AGlasgow merchant was compelled to spend a Sabbath in Arran, and though hedid not understand Gaelic, he felt he must go to the place of publicworship. Great was his delight when he saw William Guthrie come into thepulpit. And he tells us that though he had heard in his day many famouspreachers, he had never seen under any preacher so much concern of soulas he saw that day in Arran, under the minister of Fenwick. There wasscarcely a dry eye in the whole church. A gentleman who was well knownas a most dissolute liver was in the church that day, and could notcommand himself, so deeply was he moved under Guthrie's sermon. That daywas remembered long afterwards when that prodigal son had become aneminent Christian man. We see at one time a servant girl coming homefrom Guthrie's church saying that she cannot contain all that she hasheard to-day, and that she feels as if she would need to hear no more onthis side heaven. Another day Wodrow's old mother has been at Fenwick, and comes home saying that the first prayer was more than enough for allher trouble without any sermon at all. 'He had a taking and a soaringgift of preaching, ' but it was its intensely practical character thatmade Guthrie's pulpit so powerful and so popular. The very fact that hecould go all the way in those days from Fenwick to Haddington, just tohave a case of real soul-exercise described to him by the exercised manhimself, speaks volumes as to the secret of Guthrie's power in thepulpit. His people felt that their minister knew them; he knew himself, and therefore he knew them. He did not pronounce windy orations aboutthings that did not concern or edify them. He was not learned in thepulpit, nor eloquent, or, if he was--and he was both--all his talents, and all his scholarship, and all his eloquence were forgotten in theintensely practical turn that his preaching immediately took. All thebroken hearts in the west country, all those whose sins had found themout, all those who had learned to know the plague of their own heart, andwho were passing under a searching sanctification--all such found theirway from time to time from great distances to the Kirk of Fenwick. FromGlasgow they came, and from Paisley, and from Hamilton, and from Lanark, and from Kilbride, and from many other still more distant places. Thelobbies of Fenwick Kirk were like the porches of Bethesda with all theblind, halt, and withered from the whole country round about. AfterHutcheson of the _Minor Prophets_ had assisted at the communion ofFenwick on one occasion, he said that, if there was a church full ofGod's saints on the face of the earth, it was at Fenwick communion-table. Pitforthy and Glen Ogle, and all the estates in Angus, were but dust inthe balance compared with one Sabbath-day's exercise of such a preachinggift as that of William Guthrie. 'There is no man that hath forsakenhouses and lands for My sake and the Gospel's, but shall receive anhundredfold now in this life, and in the world to come life everlasting. '

But further, besides being a great humorist and a great sportsman and agreat preacher, William Guthrie was a great writer. A great writer isnot a man who fills our dusty shelves with his forgotten volumes. It isnot given to any man to fill a whole library with first-rate work. Ourgreatest authors have all written little books. Job is a small book, sois the Psalms, so is Isaiah, so is the Gospel of John, so is the Epistleto the Romans, so is the _Confessions_, so is the _Comedy_, so is the_Imitation_, so are the _Pilgrim_ and the _Grace Abounding_, and thoughWilliam Guthrie's small book is not for a moment to be ranked with suchmaster-pieces as these, yet it is a small book on a great subject, and abook to which I cannot find a second among the big religious books of ourday. You will all find out your own favourite books according to yourown talents and tastes. My calling a book great is nothing to you. Butit may at least interest you for the passing moment to be told what twomen like John Owen, in the seventeenth century, and Thomas Chalmers, inthe nineteenth, said about William Guthrie's one little book. Said JohnOwen, drawing a little gilt copy of _The Great Interest_ out of hispocket, 'That author I take to be one of the greatest divines that everwrote. His book is my _vade mecum_. I carry it always with me. I havewritten several folios, but there is more divinity in this little bookthan in them all. ' Believe John Owen. Believe all that he says aboutGuthrie's _Saving Interest_; but do not believe what he says about hisown maligned folios till you have read twenty times over his _Person andGlory of Christ_, his _Holy Spirit_, his _Spiritual-mindedness_, and his_Mortification, Dominion, and Indwelling of Sin_. Then hear Dr. Chalmers: 'I am on the eve of finishing Guthrie, which I think is thebest book I ever read. ' After you have read it, if you ever do, thelikelihood is that you will feel as if somehow you had not read the rightbook when you remember what Owen and Chalmers have said about it. Yes, you have read the right enough book; but the right book has not yet gotin you the right reader. There are not many readers abroad like Dr. JohnOwen and Dr. Thomas Chalmers. 

In its style William Guthrie's one little book is clear, spare, crisp, and curt. Indeed, in some places it is almost too spare and too curt inits bald simplicity. True students will not be deterred from it when Isay that it is scientifically and experimentally exact in its treatmentof the things of the soul. They will best understand and appreciate thisstatement of Guthrie's biographer that 'when he was working at his_Saving Interest_ he endeavoured to inform himself of all the Christiansin the country who had been under great depths of exercise, or were stillunder such depths, and endeavoured to converse with them. ' Guthrie isalmost as dry as Euclid himself, and almost as severe, but, then, hedemonstrates almost with mathematical demonstration the all-importantthings he sets out to prove. There is no room for rhetoric on a finger-post; in a word, and, sometimes without a word, a finger-post tells youthe right way to take to get to your journey's end. And many who havewandered into a far country have found their way home again under WilliamGuthrie's exact marks, clear evidences, and curt directions. You openthe little book, and there is a sentence of the plainest, directest, andleast entertaining or attractive prose, followed up with a text ofScripture to prove the plain and indisputable prose. Then there isanother sentence of the same prose, supported by two texts, and thus thelittle treatise goes on till, if you are happy enough to be interested inthe author's subject-matter, the eternal interests of your own soul, astrong, strange fascination begins to come off the little book and intoyour understanding, imagination, and heart, till you look up again whatDr. Owen and Dr. Chalmers said about your favourite author, and feelfortified in your valuation of, and in your affection for, WilliamGuthrie and his golden little book. 

XVIII. GEORGE GILLESPIE

 'Our apprehensions are not canonical. '--_Rutherford_. 

George Gillespie was one of that remarkable band of statesmanlikeministers that God gave to Scotland in the seventeenth century. Gillespiedied while yet a young man, but before he died, as Rutherford wrote tohim on his deathbed, he had done more work for his Master than many ahundred grey-headed and godly ministers. Gillespie and Rutherford gotacquainted with one another when Rutherford was beginning his work atAnwoth. In the good providence of God, Gillespie was led to KenmureCastle to be tutor in the family of Lord and Lady Kenmure, and that threwRutherford and Gillespie continually together. Gillespie was still aprobationer. He was ready for ordination, and many congregations wereeager to have him, but the patriotic and pure-minded youth could notsubmit to receive ordination at the hands of the bishops of that day, andthis kept him out of a church of his own long after he was ready to beginhis ministry. But the time was not lost to Gillespie himself, or to theChurch of Christ in Scotland, --the time that threw Rutherford andGillespie into the same near neighbourhood, and into intimate andaffectionate friendship. The mere scholarship of the two men would atonce draw them together. They read the same deep books; they reasonedout the same constitutional, ecclesiastical, doctrinal, and experimentalproblems; till one day, rising off their knees in the woods of KenmureCastle, the two men took one another by the hand and swore a covenantthat all their days, and amid all the trials they saw were coming toScotland and her Church, they would remain fast friends, would oftenthink of one another, would often name one another before God in prayer, and would regularly write to one another, and that not on churchquestions only and on the books they were reading, but more especially onthe life of God in their own souls. Of the correspondence of those tworemarkable men we have only three letters preserved to us, but they areenough to let us see the kind of letters that must have frequently passedbetween Kenmure Castle and Aberdeen, and between St. Andrews andEdinburgh during the next ten years. 

Gillespie was born in the parish manse of Kirkcaldy in 1613; he wasordained to the charge of the neighbouring congregation of Wemyss in1638, was translated thence to Edinburgh in 1642, and then became one ofthe four famous deputies who were sent up from the Church of Scotland tosit and represent her in the Westminster Assembly in 1643. Gillespie'sgreat ability was well known, his wide learning and his remarkablecontroversial powers had been already well proved, else such a young manwould never have been sent on such a mission; but his appearance in thedebates at Westminster astonished those who knew him best, and won forhim a name second to none of the oldest and ablest statesmen and scholarswho sat in that famous house. 'That noble youth, ' Baillie is continuallyexclaiming, after each new display of Gillespie's learning and power ofargument; 'That singular ornament of our Church'; 'He is one of the bestwits of this isle, ' and so on. And good John Livingstone, in his wiseand sober _Characteristics_, says that, being sent as a Commissioner fromthe Church of Scotland to the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, Gillespie, 'promoted much the work of reformation, and attained to a giftof clear, strong, pressing, and calm debating above any man of his time. '

Many stories were told in Scotland of the debating powers of youngGillespie as seen on the floor of the Westminster Assembly. Selden wasone of the greatest lawyers in England, and he had made a speech one daythat both friend and foe felt was unanswerable. One after another of theConstitutional and Evangelical party tried to reply to Selden's speech, but failed. 'Rise, George, man, ' said Rutherford to Gillespie, who wassitting with his pencil and note-book beside him. 'Rise, George, man, and defend the Church which Christ hath purchased with His own blood. 'George rose, and when he had sat down, Selden is reported to have said tosome one who was sitting beside him, 'That young man has swept away thelearning and labour of ten years of my life. ' Gillespie's Scottishbrethren seized upon his note-book to preserve and send home at least theheads of his magnificent speech, but all they found in his little bookwere these three words: _Da lucem_, _Domine_; Give light, O Lord. Rutherford had foreseen all this from the days when Gillespie and hetalked over Aquinas and Calvin and Hooker and Amesius and Zanchius asthey took their evening walks together on the sands of the Solway Firth. It is told also that when the Committee of Assembly was engaged on thecomposition of the Shorter Catechism, and had come to the question, Whatis God? like the able men they were, they all shrank from attempting ananswer to such an unfathomable question. In their perplexity they askedGillespie to offer prayer for help, when he began his prayer with thesewords: 'O God, Thou art a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable inThy being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. ' Assoon as he said Amen, his opening sentences were remembered, and takendown, and they stand to this day the most scriptural and the mostcomplete answer to that unanswerable question that we have in any creedor catechism of the Christian Church. 

As her best tribute to the talents and services of her youngestCommissioner, the Edinburgh Assembly of 1648 appointed Gillespie herModerator; but his health was fast failing, and he died in the Decemberof that year, in the thirty-sixth year of his age. The inscription onhis tombstone at Kirkcaldy ends with these sober and true words: 'A manprofound in genius, mild in disposition, acute in argument, flowing ineloquence, unconquered in mind. He drew to himself the love of the good, the envy of the bad, and the admiration of all. ' Such was the life andwork of George Gillespie, one of the most intimate and confidentialcorrespondents of Samuel Rutherford;--for it was to him that Rutherfordwrote the words now before us, 'Our apprehensions are not canonical. '

Every line of life has its own language, its own peculiar vocabulary, that none but its experts, and those who have been brought up to it, know. Go up to the Parliament House and you will hear the advocates andjudges talking to one another in a professional speech that the learnedlayman no more than the ignorant can understand. Our doctors, again, have a shorthand symbolism that only themselves and the chemistsunderstand. And so it is with every business and profession; eachseveral trade strikes out a language for itself. And so does divinity, and, especially, experimental divinity, of which Rutherford's letters arefull. We not only need a glossary for the obsolete Scotch, but we needthe most simple and everyday expressions of the things of the soulexplained to us till once we begin to speak and to write thoseexpressions ourselves. There are judges and advocates and doctors andspecialists of all kinds among us who will only be able to make a far-offguess at the meaning of my text, just as I could only make a far-offguess at some of their trade texts. This technical term, 'apprehension, 'does not once occur in the Bible, and only once or twice in Shakespeare. 'Our death is most in apprehension, ' says that master of expression; and, again, he says that 'we cannot outfly our apprehensions. ' And Milton hasit once in _Samson_, who says:--

 'Thoughts, my tormentors, armed with deadly stings, Mangle my apprehensive tenderest parts. '

But, indeed, we all have the thing in us, though we may never have putits proper name upon it. We all know what a forecast of evil is--asecret fear that evil is coming upon us. It lays hold of our heart, orof our conscience, as the case may be, and will not let go its hold. Andthen the heart and the conscience run out continually and lay hold of thefuture evil and carry it home to our terrified bosoms. We apprehend thecoming evil, and feel it long before it comes. We die, like the coward, many times before our death. 

Now, Rutherford just takes that well-known word and applies it to hisfears and his sinkings of heart about his past sins, and about theunsettled wages of his sins. His conscience makes him a coward, till hethinks every bush an officer. But then he reasons and remonstrates withhimself in his deep and intimate letter to Gillespie, and says that thesehis doubts, and terrors, and apprehensions are not canonical. He iswriting to a divine and a scholar, as well as to an experienced Christianman, and he uses words that such scholars and such Christian men quitewell understand and like to make use of. The canon that he here refersto is the Holy Scriptures; they are the rule of our faith, and they arealso the rule of God's faithfulness. What God has said to us in Hisword, that we must believe and hold by; that, and not our deserts or ourapprehensions, must rule and govern our faith and our trust, just asGod's word will be the rule and standard of His dealings with us. Hisword rules us in our faith and life; and again it rules Him also in Hisdealings with our faith and with our life. God does not deal with us aswe deserve; He does not deal with us as we, in our guilty apprehensions, fear He will. He deals with the apprehensive, penitent, believing sinneraccording to the grace and the truth of His word. His promises arecanonical to Him, not our apprehensions. 

Thomas Goodwin, that perfect prince of pulpit exegetes, lays down thiscanon, and continually himself acts upon it, that 'the context of ascripture is half its interpretation; . . . If a man would open a placeof scripture, he should do it rationally; he should go and consider thewords before and the words after. ' Now, let us apply this rule to theinterpretation of this text out of Rutherford, and look at the context, before and after, out of which it is taken. 

Remembering his covenant with young Gillespie in the woods of Kenmure, Rutherford wrote of himself to his friend, and said:--'At my first entryon my banishment here my apprehensions worked despairingly upon mycross. ' By that he means, and Gillespie would quite well understand hismeaning, that his banishment from his work threw him in upon hisconscience, and that his conscience whispered to him that he had beenbanished from his work because of his sins. God is angry with you, hisconscience said; He does not love you, He has not forgiven you. But hissanctified good sense, his deep knowledge of God's word, and of God'sways with His people, came to his rescue, and he went on to say toGillespie that our apprehensions are not canonical. No, he says, ourapprehensions tell lies of God and of His grace. So they do in our casealso. When any trouble falls upon us, for any reason, --and there aremany reasons other than His anger why God sends trouble uponus, --conscience is up immediately with her interpretation and explanationof our troubles. This is your wages now, conscience says. God has beenslow to wrath, but His patience is exhausted now. As Rutherford says inanother letter, our tearful eyes look asquint at Christ and He appears tobe angry, when all the time He pities and loves us. Is there any manhere to-night whose apprehensions are working upon his cross? Is thereany man of God here who has lost hold of God in the thick darkness, andwho fears that his cross has come to him because God is angry with him?Let him hear and imitate what Rutherford says when in the same distress:'I will lay inhibitions on my apprehensions, ' he says; 'I will not let myunbelieving thoughts slander Christ. Let them say to me "there is nohope, " yet I will die saying, It is not so; I shall yet see the salvationof God. I will die if it must be so, under water, but I will diegripping at Christ. Let me go to hell, I will go to hell believing inand loving Christ. ' Rutherford's worst apprehensions, his best-groundedapprehensions, could not survive an assault of faith like that. Imitatehim, and improve upon him, and say, that with a thousand times worseapprehensions than ever Rutherford could have, yet, like him, you willmake your bed in hell, loving, and adoring, and justifying Jesus Christ. And, if you do that, hell will have none of you; all hell will cast youout, and all heaven will rise up and carry you in. 

'Challenges' is another of Rutherford's technical terms that heconstantly uses to his expert correspondents. 'I was under greatchallenges, ' he says, in this same letter; and in a letter written thesame month of March to William Rigg, of Athernie, he says, 'Oldchallenges revive, and cast all down. ' Dr. Andrew Bonar, Rutherford'sexpert editor, gives this glossary upon these passages: 'Charges, self-upbraidings, self-accusations. ' Challenges of conscience came toRutherford like these: 'Why art thou writing letters of counsel to othermen? Counsel thyself first. Why art thou appealed to and trusted andloved by God's best people in Scotland, when thou knowest that thou art aCain in malice and a Judas in treachery, all but the outbreaks? Why artthou taking thy cross so easily, when thou knowest the unsettledcontroversy the Lord still has with thee?' 'Hall binks are slippery, 'wrote stern old Knockbrex, challenging his old minister for his too greatjoy. 'Old challenges now and then revive and cast all down again. ' Thatreminds me of a fine passage in that great book of Rutherford's, _ChristDying_, where he shows us how to take out a new charter for all ourpossessions, and for the salvation of our souls themselves when oursalvation, or our possessions and our right to them, is challenged. Itis better, he says, to hold your souls and your lands by prayer than byobedience, or conquest, or industry. Have you wisdom, honour, learning, parts, eloquence, godliness, grace, a good name, wife, children, a house, peace, ease, pleasure? Challenge yourself how you got them, and see thatyou hold them by an unchallengeable charter, even by prayer, and then bygrace. And if you hold these things by any other charter, hasten to geta new conveyance made and a new title drawn out. And thus old, andangry, and threatening challenges will work out a charter that cannot bechallenged. 

And, then, when George Gillespie was lying on his deathbed in Edinburgh, with his pillow filled with stinging apprehensions, as is often the casewith God's best servants and ripest saints, hear how his old friend, nowprofessor of divinity in St. Andrews, writes to him:--

'My reverend and dear brother, look to the east. Die well. Your life offaith is just finishing. Finish it well. Let your last act of faith beyour best act. Stand not upon sanctification, but upon justification. Hand all your accounts over to free grace. And if you have any bands ofapprehension in your death, recollect that your apprehensions are notcanonical. ' And the dying man answered: 'There is nothing that I havedone that can stand the touchstone of God's justice. Christ is my all, and I am nothing. '

XIX. JOHN FERGUSHILL

 'Ho, ye that have no money, come and buy in the poor man's market. '--_Rutherford_. 

It makes us think when we find two such men as Samuel Rutherford and JohnFergushill falling back for their own souls on a Scripture like this. Wenaturally think of Scriptures like this as specially sent out to thechief of sinners; to those men who have sold themselves for naught, or, at least, to new beginners in the divine life. We do not readily thinkof great divines and famous preachers like Rutherford, or of godly andable pastors like Fergushill, as at all either needing such Scriptures asthis, or as finding their own case at all met in them. But it is surelya great lesson to us all--a great encouragement and a great rebuke--tofind two such saintly men as the ministers of Anwoth and Ochiltreereassuring and heartening one another about the poor man's market as theydo in their letters to one another. And their case is just anotherillustration of this quite familiar fact in the Church of Christ, thatthe preachers who press their pulpits deepest into the doctrines ofgrace, and who, at the same time, themselves make the greatestattainments in the life of grace, are just the men, far more than any oftheir hearers, both to need and to accept the simplest, plainest, freest, fullest offer of the Gospel. If the men of the house of Israel will notaccept the peace you preach to them, said our Lord to His first apostles, then take that peace home to yourselves. And how often has that beenrepeated in the preaching of the Gospel since the days of Peter and John!How often have our best preachers preached their best sermons tothemselves! 'I preached the following Lord's Day, ' says Boston in hisdiary, 'on "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" and my sermon was mostlyon my own account. ' And it was just because Boston preached so often inthat egoistical way that the people of Ettrick were able to give such agood account of what they heard. Weep yourselves, if you would have yourreaders weep, said the shrewd old Roman poet to the shallow poetasters ofhis Augustan day. And the reproof and the instruction come up from everypew to every pulpit still. 'Feel what you say, if you would have us feelit. Believe what you say, if you would have us believe it. Flee to therefuge yourselves, if you would have us flee. And let us see you sellingall in the poor man's market, if you would see us also selling all andcoming after you. ' The people of Anwoth and Ochiltree were very well offin this respect also that their ministers did not bid them do anythingthat they did not first do themselves. The truest and best apostolicalsuccession had come to those two parishes in that their two pastors wereable, with a good conscience before God and before their people, to saywith Paul to the Philippians: 'Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me do; and the God of peace shall bewith you. '

As to the merchandise of the poor man's market, --that embraces everythingthat any man can possibly need or find any use for either in this worldor in the next. Absolutely everything is found in the poor man'smarket--everything, from God Himself, the most precious of all things, down to the sinner himself, the most vile and worthless of all things. The whole world, and all the worlds, are continually thrown into thismarket, both by the seller and by the purchaser. The seller holdsnothing back from this market, and the purchaser comes to this market foreverything. Even what he already possesses; even what he bought and paidfor but yesterday; even what everybody else would call absolutely thepoor man's own, he throws it all back again upon God every day, and thusholds all he has as his instant purchase of the great Merchantman. Thepoor man's market is as far as possible from being a Vanity Fair, but thecatalogues and the sale-lists of that fair may be taken as a specimen ofthe things that change hands continually in the poor man's market also. For here also are sold such merchandise as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, pleasures and delights of all sorts; wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, gold, silver, and what not. All these things God sells to poor men every day;and for all these things, as often as they need any of them, His poor mencome to His market for them. And, as has been said, even after they havegot possession of any or all of these things, as if the market had anabsolute fascination for them, like gamblers who cannot stay away fromthe wheel, they are back again, buying and selling what, but yesterday, they took home with them as the best bargain they had ever made. Yes, the things that, once possessed, either by inheritance or by purchase orby gift, you would think they would die rather than part with--apatrimony in ancient lands and houses, a possession they had toiled andprayed and waited for all their days, Christ on His cross, their ownchild in his cradle--absolutely everything they possess, or would die topossess, they part with again, just that they may have the excitement, the debate, the delight, the security, and the liberty of purchasing itall over again every day in the poor man's market. 

Over all this merchandise God Himself is the Master Merchant. It allbelongs to Him, and He has put it all into the poor man's purchase. Heowns all the merchandise, and He has opened the market: He invites andadvertises the purchasers, fixes the prices, and settles the conditionsof sale. And the first condition of sale is that all intendingpurchasers shall come to Himself immediately for whatever they need. Allnegotiation here must be held immediately with God. There are nomiddlemen here. They have their own place in the markets of earth; butthere is no room and no need for them here. The producer and thepurchaser meet immediately here. He employs whole armies of servants todistribute and deliver His goods, but the bargain itself must be struckwith God alone. The price must be paid directly to Him; and then, withHis own hand, He will write out your right and title to your purchase. Let every poor man, then, be sure to draw near to God, and to God alone. Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Ho, ye that have nomoney: incline your ear, and come to Me: hear, and your soul shall live!

Now, surely, one of the most remarkable things about the purchasers inthis market is just their fewness. We find Isaiah in his day canvassingthe whole of Jerusalem, high and low, and glad to get even one purchaserhere and another there. And Rutherford, looking back to Anwoth fromAberdeen, was not sure that he had got even so much as one really earnestpurchaser brought near to God. And thus it was that, while at Anwoth, hewas so much in that market himself. Partly on the principle thatpreachers are bidden to take to themselves for their trouble what theirproud people refuse, and partly because Rutherford was out of all sightthe poorest man in all Anwoth. 

Now, what made Isaiah and Rutherford and Fergushill such poor menthemselves, was just this, that they came out of every money-makingenterprise in the divine life far poorer men than they entered it. Thereare some unlucky men in life who never prosper in anything. Everythinggoes against them. Everything makes shipwreck into which they adventuretheir time and their money and their hope. They go into one promisingconcern after another with flying colours and a light heart. Other menhave made great fortunes here, and so will they; but before long theirold evil luck has overtaken them, and they are glad that they are not alltheir life in prison for the uttermost farthing. And so on, till at lastthey have to go to the poor man's market for the last decencies of theirdeath and burial; for their winding-sheet, and their coffin, and theirgrave. And so was it with the ministers of Anwoth and Ochiltree; and soit is with all that poverty-stricken class of ministers to which theybelonged. For, whatever their attainments and performances in preachingor in pastoral work may do to enrich others, one thing is certain: allthey do only impoverishes to pennilessness the men who put their wholelife and their whole heart into the performance of such work. Theirwhole service of God, both in the public ministry of the word, and intheir more personal submission to His law, has this fatal and hopelessprinciple ruling it, that the better it is done, and the more completelyany man gives himself up to the doing of it, the poorer and the weaker itleaves him who does it. So much so, that while he leads other men intothe way of the greatest riches, he himself sinks deeper and deeper intopoverty of spirit every day. Till, out of sheer pity, and almostremorse, that His service should entail such poverty on all His servants, Christ sends them out continually less with an invitation to their peoplethan to themselves, saying always to them, 'Take the invitation toyourselves; and he of My servants who hath no money let him buy withoutmoney and bear away what he will. ' 'My dear Fergushill, our Lord is notso cruel as to let a poor man see salvation and never let him touch itfor want of money; indeed, the only thing that commendeth sinners toChrist is their extreme necessity and want. Ho, he that hath no money, that is the poor man's market. ' When James Guthrie was lying ill andlike to die, he called in his man, James Cowie, to read in the Epistle tothe Romans to him, and when Cowie came to these words, 'I will have mercyon whom I will have mercy, ' his master burst into tears, and said, 'James, I have nothing but that to lippen to. '

Look now at the prices that are demanded and paid in the poor man'smarket. And, paradoxical and past all understanding as are so many ofthe things connected with this matter, the most paradoxical and past allunderstanding of them all is the price that is always asked, and that issometimes paid, in that market. When any man comes here to buy, it isnot the value of the article on sale that is asked of him; but the firstquestion that is asked of him is, How much money have you got? And if itturns out that he is rich and increased with goods, then, to him, theprice, even of admittance to this market, is all that he has. The veryentrance-money, before he comes in sight of the stalls and tables at all, has already stripped him bare of every penny he possesses. And that iswhy so few purchasers are found in this market; they do not feel able orwilling to pay down the impoverishing entrance-price. As a matter offact, it is a very unusual thing to find a young man who has been so welltaught about this market by his parents, his schoolmasters, or even byhis ministers, that he is fit to enter early on its great transactions. And increasing years do not tend of themselves to reconcile him to theterms on which God sells His salvation. The price in the poor man'smarket is absolutely everything that a rich man possesses; and then, whenhe has nothing left, when he has laid down all that he has, or has lostall, or has been robbed of all, only then the full paradox of the casecomes into his view; for then he begins to discover that the price hecould not meet or face so long as he was a rich and a well-to-do man issuch a price that, in his absolute penury, he can now pay it down tillall the market is his own. Multitudes of poor men up and down the landremember well, and will never forget, this poor man Rutherford's soIsaiah-like words, 'Our wants best qualify us for Christ'; and again, 'All my own stock of Christ is some hunger for Him. ' 'Say Amen to thepromises, and Christ is yours, ' he wrote to Lady Kenmure. 'This issurely an easy market. You need but to look to Him in faith; for Christsuffered for all sin, and paid the price of all the promises. '

'Faith cannot be so difficult, surely, ' says William Guthrie in his_Saving Interest_, 'when it consists of so much in _desire_. ' Now, bothits exceeding difficulty and its exceeding ease also just consist inthat. Nothing is so easy to a healthy man as the desire for food; but, then, nothing is so impossible to a dead man, or even to a sick man, asjust desire. Desire sounds easy, but how few among us have that capacityand that preparation for Christ and His salvation that stands in desire. Have you that desire? Really and truly, in your heart of hearts, haveyou that desire? Then how well it is with you! For that is all that Godlooks for in him who comes to the poor man's market; indeed, it is theonly currency accepted there. Isaiah's famous invitation is drawn outjust to meet the case of a man who has desire, and nothing but desire, inhis heart. All the encouragements and assurances that his evangelicalgenius can devise are set forth by the prophet to attract and to win thedesiring heart. The desiring heart says to itself, I would give thewhole world if I had it just to see Christ, just to be near Christ, andjust, if it were but possible, that I should ever be the least thing likeChrist. Now, that carries God. God, the Father of our Lord JesusChrist, cannot resist that. No true father could, and least of all afather who loves his son, and who has such a son to love as God has inChrist. Well, He says; if you love and desire, honour and estimate MySon like that, I cannot deny Him the reward and the pleasure ofpossessing you and your love. And thus, without any desert in you--anydesert but sheer desire--you have made the greatest, the easiest, thespeediest, the most splendid purchase that all the poor man's marketaffords. No, William Guthrie; faith is not so very difficult to thesinner who has desire. For where desire of the right quality is, and theright quantity, there is everything. And all the merchandise of God isat that sinner's nod and bid. 

Ho, then, he that hath no money, but only the _desire_ for money, and forwhat money can, and for what money cannot, buy, come and buy, withoutmoney and without price. Instead of money, instead of merit, even if youhave nothing but Rutherford's only fitness for Christ, 'My loathsomewretchedness, ' then come with that. Come boldly with that. Come as ifyou had in and on you the complete opposite of that. The opposite ofloathsomeness is delightsomeness; and the opposite of wretchedness ishappiness. Yes! but you will search all the Book of God and all itspromises, and you will not find one single letter of them all addressedto the abounding and the gladsome and the self-satisfied. It is the poorman's market; and this market goes best when the poor man is not onlypoor, but poor beyond all ordinary poverty: poor, as Samuel Rutherfordalways was, to 'absolute and loathsome wretchedness. ' Let him here, then, whose sad case is best described in Rutherford's dreadful words, let him come to Rutherford's market and make Rutherford's merchandise, and let him do it now. Ho, he that hath no money, he that hath onlymisery, let him come, and let him come now. 

 XX. JAMES BAUTIE, STUDENT OF DIVINITY

 'You crave my mind. '--_Rutherford_. 

As a rule the difficulties of a divinity student are not at all thedifficulties of the best of his future people. A divinity student'sdifficulties are usually academic and speculative, whereas thedifficulties of the best people in his coming congregation will bedifficulties of the most intensely real and practical kind. And thus itis that we so often hear lately-ordained ministers confessing that theyhave come to the end of their resources and experiences, and have nothingeither fresh or certain left to preach to the people about. Just as, onthe other hand, so many congregations complain that they look up to thepulpit from Sabbath to Sabbath and are not fed. It is not much to bewondered at that a raw college youth cannot all at once feed and guideand extricate an old saint; or that a minister, whose deepestdifficulties hitherto have been mostly of the debating society kind, should not be able to afford much help to those of his people who arewading through the deep and drowning waters of the spiritual life. Andwhether something could not be done by the institution of chairs ofgenuine pastoral and experimental theology for the help of our studentsand the good of our people is surely a question that well deserves theearnest attention of all the evangelical churches. Meantime we are to beintroduced to a divinity student of the middle of the seventeenth centurywho was early and deeply exercised in those intensely real problems ofthe soul which occupied such a large place both in the best religiousliterature and in the best pulpit work of that intensely earnest day. James Bautie, or Beattie, as we shall here call him on Dr. Bonar'ssuggestion, was a candidate for the ministry such that the ripest andmost deeply exercised saints in Scotland might well have rejoiced to havehad such an able and saintly youth for their preacher on the Sabbath-dayas well as for their pastor all the week. As James Beattie's collegedays drew on to an end he became more and more exercised about his mentaldeficiencies, and still more about his spiritual unfitness to beanybody's minister. Beattie had, to begin with, this always infalliblemark of an able man--an increasing sense of his own inability: and hehad, along with that, this equally infallible mark of aspiritually-minded man--an overwhelming sense of his utter lack ofanything like a spiritual mind. No man but a very able man could havewritten the letter that Beattie wrote about himself to Samuel Rutherford;and Rutherford's letter back to Beattie will not be a bad test of adivinity student whether he has enough of the true divinity student mindin him to read that letter, to understand it, and to translate it. Beattie had an excellent intellect, and his excellent intellect had notbeen laid out at college on those windy fields that so puff up a beginnerin knowledge and in life; his whole mind had been given up already tothose terrible problems of the soul that both humble and exalt the manwho spends his life among them. Beattie's future congregation will notvaunt themselves about their minister's ability or scholarship oreloquence; his sermons will soon push his people back behind all suchsuperficial matters. Beattie's preaching and his whole pastorate willsoon become another illustration of the truth that it is not gifts butgraces in a minister that will in the long-run truly edify the body ofChrist. You have James Beattie's portrait as a divinity student inRutherford's 249th letter, and you will find a complementary portrait ofBeattie as a grey-haired pastor in Dr. Stalker's _Preacher and hisModels_. 'He was a man of competent scholarship, and had the reputationof having been in early life a powerful and popular preacher. But it wasnot to those gifts that he owed his unique influence. He moved throughthe town, with his white hair and somewhat staid and dignified demeanour, as a hallowing presence. His very passing in the street was a kind ofbenediction; the people, as they looked after him, spoke of him to eachother with affectionate reverence. Children were proud when he laid hishand on their heads, and they treasured the kindly words which he spoketo them. They who laboured along with him in the ministry felt that hismere existence in the community was an irresistible demonstration ofChristianity and a tower of strength to every good cause. Yet he had notgained this position of influence by brilliant talents or greatachievements or the pushing of ambition; for he was singularly modest, and would have been the last to credit himself with half the good he did. The whole mystery lay in this, that he had lived in the town for fortyyears a blameless life, and was known by everybody to be a godly and aprayerful man. The prime qualification for the ministry is goodness. '

Beattie as a student challenged himself severely on this account also, that some truths found a more easy and unshaken credit with him thanother truths. This is a common difficulty with many of our modernstudents also, and how best to advise with them under this realdifficulty constantly puts their professors and their pastors to thetest. Whatever Beattie may have got, I confess I do not get much help inthis difficulty out of Rutherford's letter back to Beattie. Rutherford, with all his splendid gifts of mind and heart, had sometimes a certaindogmatic and dictatorial way with him, and this is just the temper thatour students still meet with too often in their old and settled censors. The 'torpor of assurance' has not yet settled on the young divine as ithas done on too many of the old. There was a modest, a genuine, and anevery way reasonable difficulty in this part of Beattie's letter toRutherford, and I wish much that Rutherford had felt himself put upon hisquite capable mettle to deal with the difficulty. Or, if he had not timeto go to the bottom of all Beattie's deep letter, as he says he has not, he might have referred his correspondent--for his correspondent was awell-read student--to a great sermon by the greatest of EnglishChurchmen--a sermon that a reader like Rutherford must surely have had byheart, entitled, 'A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certainty andPerpetuity of Faith in the Elect. ' But, unfortunately for England andScotland both, England was thrusting that sermon and all the otherwritings of its author on the Church of Christ in Scotland at the pointof the bayonet, and that is the very worst instrument that can beemployed in the interests of truth and of ecclesiastical comprehensionand conformity. And among the many things we have to be thankful for inour more emancipated and more catholic day, it is not the least thatRutherford and Hooker lie in peace and in complemental fulness beside oneanother on the tables of all our students of divinity. 

Coming still closer home to himself, our divinity student puts this acutedifficulty to his spiritual casuist: Whether a man of God, and especiallya minister of Christ, can be right who does not love God for Himself, forHis nature and for His character solely and purely, and apart altogetherfrom all His benefactions both in nature and in grace. James Beattie hadbeen brought up with such a love for the Kirk of Scotland, and for herministers and her people; he had of late grown into such a love for hisbooks also, and for the work of the ministry, that in examining himselfin prospect of his approaching licence he had felt afraid that he lovedthe thought of a study, and a pulpit, and a manse, and its inhabitants, and, indeed, the whole prospective life of a minister, with more keennessof affection than he loved the souls of men, or even his Master Himself. And he put that most distressing difficulty also before Rutherford. Nowthere was an expression on that matter that was common in the pulpits ofRutherford's school in that day that Rutherford would be sure to quote inhis second letter to Beattie, if not in his first. It was a Latinproverb, but all the common people of that day quite well understood it, not to speak of a student like Beattie. _Aliquid in Christo formosiusSalvatore_, wrote Rutherford to distressed Beattie; that is to say, Thereis that in Christ which is far more fair and sweet than merely His beinga Saviour. Never be content, that is, till you can rise up above mansesand pulpits and books and sermons, and even above your own salvation, tosee the pure and infinite loveliness of Christ Himself. Dost thou, O mysoul, love Jesus Christ for Himself alone, and not only as thy Redeemer?though to love Him as such He doth allow thee, yet there is that inChrist that is far more amiable than merely in His being thy Saviour. Andyet the two kinds of love may quite well stand together, writesRutherford, just as a child loves his mother because she is his mother, and yet his love leaps the more out when she gives him an apple. At thesame time, to love Christ for Himself alone is the last end of a truebeliever's love. 

It was one of the great experimental problems much agitated among thegreater evangelical divines of that deep, clear-eyed, and honest day, Whythe truly regenerate are all left so full of all manner of indwellingsin. We never hear that question raised nowadays, nor any question atall like that. The only difficulty in our day is why any man should haveany difficulty about his own indwelling sin at all. But neither Beattie, nor Rutherford, nor any of the masters who remain to us had got so far aswe. And as for the Antinomian, perfectionist, and higher-life preachersof that day, they are all so dead and forgotten that you would not knowtheir names even if I repeated them. Beattie, as a beginner in thespiritual life, had made this still not uncommon mistake. He had takenthose New Testament passages in which the apostles portray an idealChristian man as he stands in the election and calling of God, and as hewill be found at last and for ever in heaven, and he had prematurely andinconsequently applied all that to himself as a young man undersanctification and under the painful and humiliating beginnings of it;and no wonder that, so confusing the very first principles of the Gospel, he confused and terrified himself out of all peace and all comfort andall hope. Now, that was just the kind of difficulty with whichRutherford could deal with all his evangelical freedom and fulness, depthand insight. No preacher or writer of that day held up the absolutenecessity of holiness better than Rutherford did; but then, that only themore compelled him to hold up also such comfort as he conveys in hisconsoling and reassuring letter to despairing Beattie: 'Comparing thestate of one truly regenerate, whose heart is a temple of the Holy Ghost, with your own, which is full of uncleanness and corruption, you standdumb and dare not call Christ heartsomely your own. But, I answer, thebest regenerate have their defilements, and, wash as they will, therewill be the filth of sin in their hearts to the end. Glory alone willmake our hearts pure and perfect, never till then will they be absolutelysinless. ' And if we, Rutherford's so weak-kneed successors, preached thelaw of God and true holiness as he preached those noble doctrines, thesheer agony of our despairing people would compel us to preach also thetrue nature, the narrow limits, and the whole profound laws ofevangelical sanctification as we never preach, and scarce dare to preach, those things now. They who preach true holiness best are just therebythe more compelled to preach its partial, tentative, elementary, andsuperficial character in this life. And the hearer who knows in the wordof God and in his own heart what indeed true holiness is, will insist onhaving its complementary truths frequently preached to him to keep himfrom despair; or else he will turn continually to those great divineswho, though dead, yet preach such things in their noble books. And thatthose books are not still read and preached among us, and that the needfor them and their doctrines is so little felt, is only anotherillustration of the true proverb that where no oxen are the crib isclean. 

James Beattie was in very good company when he said that he must havemore assurance, both of his gifts and his graces, before he could enteron his ministry. For Moses, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and many anotherminister who could be named, have all felt and said the same thing. Nowthat he is near the door of the pulpit, Beattie feels that he cannotenter it till he has more certainty that it is all right with himself. But our young ministers will attain to assurance not so much byconsulting Rutherford, skilled casuist in such matters as he is, as bythemselves going forward in a holy life and a holy ministry. 'It is notGod's design, ' says Jonathan Edwards, 'that men should obtain assurancein any other way than by mortifying corruption, increasing in grace, andobtaining the lively exercises of it. Assurance is not to be obtained somuch by self-examination as by action. Paul obtained assurance ofwinning the prize more by running than by reflecting. The swiftness ofhis pace did more toward his assurance of the goal than the strictness ofhis self-examination. ' 'I wish you a share of my feast, ' repliesRutherford. 'But, for you, hang on our Lord, and He will fill you with asense of His love, as He has so often filled me. Your feast is not faroff. Hunger on; for there is food already in your hunger for Christ. Never go away from Him, but continue to fash Him; and if He delays, yetcome not away, albeit you should fall aswoon at His feet. ' Pray, saysRutherford, and you will not long lack assurance. Work, says Edwards, and assurance of God's love will be an immediate earnest of your fullwages. 

XXI. JOHN MEINE, JUNR. , STUDENT OF DIVINITY

 'If you would be a deep divine I recommend you to sanctification. '--_Rutherford_. 

Old John Meine's shop was a great howf of Samuel Rutherford's all thetime of his student life in Edinburgh. Young Rutherford had got anintroduction to the Canongate shopkeeper from one of the elders ofJedburgh, and the old shopkeeper and the young student at once took toone another, and remained fast friends all their days. John Meine's shopwas so situated at a corner of the Canongate that Rutherford could seethe Tolbooth and John Knox's house as he looked up the street, andHolyrood Palace as he looked down, and the young divine could never hearenough of what the old shopkeeper had to tell him of Holyrood and itsdoings on the one hand, and of the Reformer's house on the other. Thevery paving-stones of the Canongate were full of sermons on the one hand, and of satires on the other, in that day. 'He was an old man when hecame to live near my father's shop, ' John Meine would say to the eagerstudent. 'But, even as an errand boy, taking parcels up his stair, Ifelt what a good man's house I was in, and I used to wish I was already aman, that I might either be a soldier or a minister. ' The divinitystudent often sat in the shopkeeper's pew on Sabbath-days, and aftersermon they never went home till they had again visited John Knox'sgrave. And as they turned homeward, old Meine would lay his hand onyoung Rutherford's shoulder and say: 'Knoxes will be needed in Edinburghagain, before all is over, and who knows but you may be elect, my lad, tobe one of them?'

Barbara Hamilton, who lived above her husband's shop, was almost moreyoung Rutherford's intimate friend than even her intimate husband. Barbara Hamilton was both a woman of eminent piety and of a high and boldpublic spirit. And stories are still told in the Wodrow Books of herinterest and influence in the affairs of the Kirk and its silencedministers. The godly old couple had two children: John, called after hisfather, and Barbara, called after her mother, and Barbara assisted hermother in the house, while John ran errands and assisted his father. Rutherford and the little boy had made a great friendship while thelatter was still a boy; and one of Rutherford's fellow-students had madea still deeper friendship upstairs than any but the two friendsthemselves suspected. Twenty years after this Barbara Hume will receivea letter from Samuel Rutherford, written in the Jerusalem Chamber atWestminster, consoling and sanctifying her for the death of his oldfriend William Hume, lately chaplain in the Covenanters' army atNewcastle. 

By the time that Rutherford was minister at Anwoth, and then prisoner inAberdeen, John Meine, junior, had grown up to be almost a ministerhimself. He is not yet a minister, but he is now a divinity student, hard at work at his books, and putting on the shopkeeper's apron an hourevery afternoon to let his father have a rest. The old merchant used torise at all hours in the morning, and spend the early summer mornings onArthur's Seat with his Psalm-book in his hand, and the winter mornings athis shop fire, reading translations from the Continental Reformers, comparing them with his Bible, singing Psalms by himself and offeringprayer. Till his student son felt, as he stood behind the counter for anhour in the afternoon, that he was like Aaron and Hur holding up hisfather's praying and prevailing hands. 

There have always been speculative difficulties and animated debates inour Edinburgh Theological Societies, and, from the nature of the study, from the nature of the human mind, and from the nature of the Scottishmind, there will always be. John Meine's difficulties were not the samedifficulties that exercise the minds of the young divines in our day, butthey were anxious and troublesome enough to him, and he naturally turnedto his old friend at Anwoth for counsel and advice. When Rutherford camein to Edinburgh, there was always a prophet's chamber in BarbaraHamilton's house ready for him; and when the winter session came to aclose her young son would set off to Anwoth with a thousand questions inhis head. But Aberdeen was too far away, and, though the posts of thatday were expensive and uncertain, the old merchant did not grudge to seehis son's letters sent off to Samuel Rutherford. Samuel Rutherford knewthat John Meine, junior, was not shallow in his divinity, young as hewas, nor an entire stranger to sanctification, else he would not havewritten that still extant letter back to him:--'I have little of Christin this prison, little but desires. All my present stock of Christ issome hunger for Him; I cannot say but that I am rich in that. But, blessed be my Lord, who taketh me as I am. Christ had only one summer inHis year, and shall we insist on two? My love to your father. And, foryourself, if you would be a deep divine, I recommend you tosanctification. ' What with his father and his mother, his books, hisacquaintance with Rutherford and Hume, and, best of all, his acquaintancewith his own evil heart, young John Meine must have been a somewhat deepdivine already, else Rutherford would not have cast such pearls ofexperience down before him. 

A divine, according to our division of labour, is a man who has chosen ashis life-work to study the things of God; the things, that is, of God inChrist, in Scripture, in the Church, and in the heart and life of man. John and James and Peter and Andrew ceased to be fishermen, and becamedivines when Christ said to them 'Follow me. ' And after seventy years ofsanctification the second son of Zebedee had at last attained to divinityenough to receive the Revelation, to write it out, and to be called bythe early Church John the Divine. 

But what is this process of sanctification that makes a young man alreadya deep divine? What is sanctification? Rutherford had a deep hand indrawing up the well-known definition, and, therefore, we may take it asnot far from the truth: 'Sanctification is the work of God's free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and areenabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness. ' That, or something like that, was the recipe that Samuel Rutherford sent southto John Meine, student of divinity, with the assurance that, if hefollowed it close enough and long enough, it would result in making him adeep divine. I wonder if he took the recipe; I wonder if he kept to it;I wonder how he pictured to himself the image of God; I wonder, nay, Iknow, how he felt as he submitted his whole man--body, soul, andspirit--to the renewing of the Holy Ghost. And did he begin and continueto die more and more unto sin, till he died altogether to this sinfulworld, and live more and more unto righteousness, till he went to livewith Knox, and Rutherford, and Hume, and his father and mother in theLand of Life?

'Did he begin with regeneration?' Dr. John Duncan, of the New College, asked his daughter, one Sabbath when she had come home from church fullof praise of a sermon she had just heard on sanctification. Dr. Duncanwas perhaps the deepest divine this century has seen in Edinburgh; andhis divinity took its depth from the same study and the same exercisethat Rutherford recommended to John Meine. Dr. Duncan was a greatscholar, but it was not his scholarship that made him such a singularlydeep divine. He was a profound philosopher also; but neither was it hisphilosophy. He was an immense reader also; but neither was it the pilesof books; it was, he tells us, first the new heart that he got as astudent in Aberdeen, and then it was the lifelong conflict that went onwithin him between the old heart and the new. And it is this that makessanctification rank and stand out as the first and the oldest of all theexperimental sciences. Long before either of the Bacons were born, thehumblest and most obscure of God's saints were working out their ownsalvation on the most approved scientific principles and methods. Longbefore science and philosophy had discovered and set their seal to thatmethod, the Church of Christ had taught it to all her true children, andall her best divines had taken a deep degree by means of it. Whatexperimentalists were David and Asaph and Isaiah and Paul; and that, asthe subtlest and deepest sciences must be pursued, not upon foreignsubstances but upon themselves, upon their own heart, and mind, and will, and disposition, and conversation, and character. Aristotle says that'Young men cannot possess practical judgment, because practical judgmentis employed upon individual facts, and these are learned only byexperience, and a youth has not experience, for experience is gained onlyby a course of years. '

'A truly great divine, ' was Jonathan Edwards' splendid certificate to ourown Thomas Boston. Now, when we read his _Memoirs_, written by himself, we soon see what it was that made Boston such a truly great and deepdivine. It was not the number of his books, for he tells us how he waspained when a brother minister opened his book-press and smiled at itsfew shelves. 'I may be a great bookman, ' writes Rutherford to LadyKenmure, 'and yet be a stark idiot in the things of Christ. ' It was nothis knowledge of Hebrew, though he almost discovered that hidden languagein Ettrick. No, but it was his discovery of himself, and hisexperimental study of his own heart. 'My duties, the best of them, woulddamn me; they must all be washed with myself in that precious blood. Though I cannot be free of sin, God Himself knows that He would bewelcome to make havoc of all my lusts to-night, and to make me holy. Iknow no lust I would not be content to part with to-night. The firstimpression on my spirit this morning was my utter inability to put awaysin. I saw that it was as possible for a rock to raise itself as it wasfor me to raise my heart from sin to holiness. '

But the study of divinity is not a close profession: a profession for menonly, and from which women are shut out; nor is the method of it shut offfrom any woman or any man. 'I counsel you to study sanctification, 'wrote Rutherford, the same year to the Lady Cardoness. And if you thinkthat Rutherford was a closet mystic and an unpractical and head-carriedenthusiast, too good for this rough world, read his letter to LadyCardoness, and confess your ignorance of this great and good man. 'Dealkindly with your tenants, ' he writes, 'and let your conscience be yourfactor'; and again, 'When your husband's passion overcomes him, mycounsel to your ladyship is, that a soft answer putteth away wrath. ' Andlastly, 'Let it not be said that the Lord hath forsaken your housebecause of your neglect of the Sabbath-day and its exercises. I counselyou to study sanctification among your tenants, and beside your husband, and among your children and your guests. Your lawful and loving pastor, in his only, only Lord, --SAMUEL RUTHERFORD. 

XXII. ALEXANDER BRODIE OF BRODIE

 'Mr. Rutherford's letter desiring me to deny myself. '--Brodie's _Diary_. 

Alexander Brodie was born at Brodie in the north country in the year1617. That was the same year that saw Samuel Rutherford matriculate inthe College of Edinburgh. Of young Brodie's early days we know nothing;for, though he has left behind him a full and faithful diary both of hispersonal and family life, yet, unfortunately, Brodie did not begin tokeep that diary till he was well advanced in middle age. Young Brodie'sfather died when his son and heir was but fourteen years old, and aftertaking part of the curriculum of study in King's College, Aberdeen, theyoung laird married a year before he had come to his majority. Hisexcellent wife was only spared to be with him for two years when she wastaken away from him, leaving him the widowed father of one son and onedaughter. 

As time goes on we find the laird of Brodie a member of Parliament, amember of General Assembly, and a Lord of Session. He was one of thecommissioners also, who were sent out to the Hague to carry onnegotiations with Charles, and during the many troubled years thatfollowed that mission, we find Brodie corresponding from time to timewith Cromwell and his officers, and with Charles and his courtiers, bothabout public and private affairs. Brodie was one of the ablest men ofhis day in Scotland, and he should have stood in the very front rank ofher statesmen and her saints; but, as it is, he falls very far short ofthat. We search the signatures of the National Covenant in vain for thename of Alexander Brodie, and the absence of his name from that nobleroll is already an ill-omen for his future life. David Laing, in hisexcellent preface to Brodie's _Diary_, is good enough to set down theabsence of Brodie's name from the Covenant to his youth and retiredhabits. I wish I could take his editor's lenient view of Brodie'sabsence from Greyfriars church on the testing day of the Covenant. Itwould be an immense relief to me if I could persuade myself to look atBrodie in that matter with Mr. Laing's eyes. I have tried hard to do so, but I cannot. Far younger men than the laird of Brodie were in theGreyfriars churchyard that day, and far more modest men than he was. AndI cannot shut my eyes to what appears to me, after carefully studying hislife and his character, a far likelier if a far less creditable reason. After the Restoration Brodie's life, if life it could be called, wasspent in a constant terror lest he should lose his estates, his liberty, and his life in the prelatic persecution; but, with his sleeplessmanagement of men, if not with the blessing of God and the peace of agood conscience, Alexander Brodie died in his own bed, in Brodie Castle, on the 17th of April, 1680. 

There were some things in which Alexander Brodie ran well, to employ theapostle's expression; in some things, indeed, no man of his day ranbetter. To begin with, Brodie had an excellent intellect. If he did notalways run well it was not for want of a sound head or a sharp eye. Inreading Brodie's diary you all along feel that you are under the hand ofa very able man, and a man who all his days does excellent justice to hisexcellent mind, at least on its intellectual side. The books he entersas having read on such and such a date, the catalogues of books he buyson his visits to Edinburgh and London, and the high planes of thought onwhich his mind dwells when he is at his best, all bespeak a very able mandoing full justice to his great ability. The very examinations he putshimself under as to his motives and mainsprings in this and that actionof his life; the defences and exculpations he puts forward for this andthat part of his indefensible conduct; the debate he holds now with thepresbyterian party and now with the prelatist; the very way he puts hisfinger down on the weak and unsound places in both of the opposingparties; and, not least, his power of aphoristic thought and expressionin the running diary of his spiritual life, all combine to leave theconviction on his reader's mind that Lord Brodie was one of the veryablest men of a very able day in Scotland. I open his voluminous diaryat random, and I at once come on such passages as these: 'If substantialduties are neglected or slighted it is a shrewd suspicion, be therepentance what it will, that all is not right. Lord, discover Thyselfin the duties of the time, and in every substantial duty. At the sametime, hang not the weight of our wellbeing on our duties, but on Christby faith. I am a reeling, unstable, staggering, unsettled, lukewarmcreature. For Thy compassion's sake forgive and heal, warm, establish, enlighten, draw me and I will follow. I am full of self-love, darknessin my judgment, fear to confess Thee, or hazard myself, or my estate, ormy peace. . . . We poor creatures are commanded by our affections andour passions; they are not at our command; but the Holy One doth exerciseall His attributes at His own will; they are all at His command; they arenot passions or perturbations in His mind, though they transport us. WhenI would hate, I cannot. When I would love, I cannot. When I wouldgrieve, I cannot. When I would desire, I cannot. But it is the betterfor us that all is as He wills. . . . Another of the deep deceits of myheart is this, that I have more affection in prayer than I havecorresponding holiness in my walk or conversation. I wondered not to seethe men of the world so taken up with covetous, ambitious, vain projects, for no man's head and heart can be so full of them as my head and heartare. Oh keep me from these unsober, distempered, mad, unruly thoughts!When I am away from Thee then I am quite out of my wit. But God can makeuse of poison to expel poison. Oh, if I were examined and brought to thelight, what a monstrous creature I would be seen to be! For as I seemyself I am no better than a devil, void of sincerity and of uprightnessin what I do myself, and yet judge others, condemning in another man whatI excuse and even approve in myself: plunged in deep snares of self-love, not loving others nor judging nor acting for others as I do for myselfand for my relations. ' And then a passage which might have been takenfrom _The Confessions_ itself: 'Ere I come to glory and to my journey'send, I shall have spent so much of Thy free grace--what in pardoning, what in preventing, what in convincing, what in enlightening, what instrengthening, and confirming, and upholding; what in watering and makingme to grow; what in growth of sanctification, knowledge, faith, experience, patience, mortification, uprightness, steadfastness, watchfulness, humiliation, resolution, and self-denial; what for public, what for private, and what for the family; what against snares on theright hand and on the left;--O Lord, the all-sufficiency of Thy grace!'Surely the man must run well and must make a good goal at last who canwrite about sin and grace in himself in that fashion! And that is notall he wrote on that subject and in that style. You have no idea of thewealth of personal and experimental matter there lies buried in AlexanderBrodie's diary. When I first read Brodie's big diary I said to myself, What a treasure is this I have stumbled upon! Here is yet another ofScotland's statesmen, scholars, and eminent saints. Here, I thought, isan author on the inward life to be set beside Brae and Halyburton, if notbeside Shepard and Edwards themselves. 

In the religious upbringing also, and lifelong care of his orphaned sonand daughter, Brodie was all we could wish to see. In the sanctificationand wise occupation of the Sabbath-day; in the family preparation forcommunion seasons; in the personal and private covenants he encouragedhis children to make with God in their own religious life; in the companyhe brought to his house and to his table; in his own devotional habits athome--in all these all-important matters Brodie was all that a father ofchildren too early bereft of their mother ought to be. Till we do notwonder to find his son commencing his diary on the day of his father'sdeath in this way: 'My precious, worthy, and dear father! I can hardlyapprehend the consequence of it to the land, and the Church, and hisfamily. The Lord give instruction. I have seen the godly conversation, holy and Christian walk of a father, his watchfulness and fruitfulness, his secret communion with God, and yet I cannot say that my heart hasbeen won to God by his example. ' A complete directory, indeed, for aHighland gentleman's household religion might easily be collected out ofAlexander Brodie's domestic diary. 

Another thing that greatly drew me to Brodie when I first read his diarywas his noble and truly Christian acknowledgment of God in all themanifold experiences and events of his daily life. '23_rd_ _July_, 1661. --Came through the fells in England to Alsbori and dined there, sawa country full of grass, plentiful in comparison of us, and acknowledgedGod in it. . . . Thus I saw a large beautiful country, not straitenedwith the poverty that my native soil labours under. I desired toconsider and understand this. . . . I saw a mighty city, London, numerous, many souls in it, great plenty of things, and thought him agreat king that had so many things at his command; yet how much greateris He who hath at His command all things created in heaven and on earth. Who shall not fear Him? . . . _August_ 17. --Went this afternoon withCassilis to the Bridge for natural refreshment, and I saw this populouscity, and plenty in it. I therein saw something of the Lord'sprovidence, who hath divided the kingdoms of the earth and given themtheir habitations, not all alike, but as His wisdom hath seen fit. I sawthe copper-works also, and acknowledged the Lord in the gifts and thefaculties He hath given to the children of men. 27. --I did see the LordMayor, his solemnities, and desired to be instructed by what I saw. Thevariety of the Lord's creatures on other parts of the earth wasrepresented. In this I did acknowledge Him. But all the glory of thecity neither abides nor can make its owner any the happier. It cannot belaid hold upon. It is not solid; it is but in conceit. Oh learn me tobe crucified to all this and the like, and make me wise unto salvation!_Nov_. 9--Dined at Billingsgate; saw the prison of King's Bench atSouthwark, and the workers of glass, in all which I saw the manifoldwisdom of God in all the gifts and faculties He hath given to the sons ofmen. But alas! I am so barren of any thoughts of God, and so have Ifound myself this day and at all times. '

 'Yet, all these fences, and their whole array, One cunning bosom sin blows quite away. '

Now, there is no more cunning bosom sin in some men than the sin ofcovetousness, and that sin in Alexander Brodie's heart and life blewalmost, if not altogether, away all these and many more fences of hissalvation. Well as David Laing edits Alexander Brodie's _Diary_, unfortunately for some of his readers he leaves his index an index ofnames only, neglecting things. And thus I have had to extemporise anindex for myself under such sad heads as those of Brodie's'passionateness, ' his 'covetousness, ' his 'time-serving' and'tuft-hunting, ' and suchlike. And I am compelled in truth to say thatthe entries in my index under 'covetousness' and under 'time-serving' and'tergiversation' is a long and yet far from exhaustive list. And now, acting, I hope, on the Scriptural principle that

 'The saints are lowered that the world may rise, '

I shall say a single word on each of Brodie's two so besetting sins. And, doing in the matter of Brodie's vices as I have just done in the matterof his virtues, I shall let the singularly honest Diarist speak forhimself. I certainly would not dare, on any evidence, to characterise orcondemn a man like Brodie as he will now characterise and condemnhimself. '_July_ 30, 1653. --I find covetousness getting deeper anddeeper into my heart, insatiable desires of lands and riches, the desireof acquiring my neighbour's property, and many vain projects and want ofcontentment, albeit I have already what might satisfy and well contentme. I find that it is not ten hundred times what I possess that wouldcontent and stay my mind from greedy lusts and insatiable desires. Whatavails prayer as long as these lusts remain? I scarcely allow meat andfish and beer and victual to my family and to the poor. Lord, pity! 21_Aug_. --Sin and snare are inseparable from this haste to be rich. Lord, in this Thou punishest one sin with another, with unrighteousness, oppression, unevenness, uncharitableness, deceit, falsehood, rigour totenants, straitenedness to the poor. 24 _Sept_. --Read 1 Cor. Viii. 14, 15, which did reprove my straitenedness, my coldness, and my parsimony. 19 _July_. --Was taken up inordinately with trash and hagg. Let not theLord impute it! 9 _Oct_. --My heart challenged me that I could so freelylay out money on books, plenishing, clothes to myself, and was so loth tolay out for the Lord. Oh, what does this presage and witness but that Iam of the earth and that my portion is not blessed, but that my goods arerather accursed! 4 _Nov_. --Neil Campbell staid with me. I found myniggardly nature still encroaching upon me, and made my supplication forescape. _July_ 1. --Because I have not employed my wealth in charitableuses, therefore does the Lord take other ways more grievous to me toscatter what I have so sinfully kept back. ' And so on, alternatelyscrimping and confessing; filling his pockets with money, and prayingthat he may be enabled to open them, he goes on till we read suchmiserably self-deceiving entries as this almost at the end of his dolefuldiary: 'I purpose, if the Lord would give strength and grace andconstancy, and an honest and sound heart, to lay by some money for suchuses from time to time, whereof this much shall be a sign and memorial. '

And then, as to his fear of man, his time-serving, and vacillation in theday of difficult duty, hear his own humiliating confessions: '_Jan_. 20, 1662. --My perplexity continues as to whether I shall move now or not, stay or return, hold by Lauderdale, or make use of the Bishop. I desiredto reflect on giving titles, speaking fair, and complying. I foundLauderdale changed to me, and I desired to spread this out before God. Iwent to Sir George Mushet's funeral, where I was looked at, as I thought, like a speckled bird. I apprehend much trouble to myself, my family, andmy affairs, from the ill-will of those who govern. May God keep me underthe shadow of His wings. _Oct_. 16. --Did see the Bishop, and in mydiscourse with him did go far in fair words and the like. The 31. --JamesUrquhart was with me. Oh that I could attain to his steadfastness andfirmness! But, alas! I am soon overcome; I soon yield to the leastdifficulty. The 26. --Duncan Cuming was here, and I desired him to tellthe honest men in the south that though I did not come up their length, Ihoped they would not stumble at me. ' In other words, 'Tell the prisonersin the Bass and in Blackness, and the martyrs of the Grass-market and theTolbooth, that Lord Brodie is a Presbyterian at heart, and ought to be aCovenanter and a sufferer with his fellows; but that he loves BrodieCastle and a whole skin better than he loves the Covenant and theCovenanters, or even the Surety of the better covenant. ' And havingdespatched his sympathetic message to the honest men in the South, hetakes up his pen again to carry on his diary, which he carries on inthese actual terms. Believe me, I copy literally and scrupulously fromthe humiliating book. 'Die Dom. --I find great averseness in myself tosuffering. I am afraid to lose life or estate. I hold it a duty not toabandon those honest ministers that have stuck to the Reformation. Andif the Lord would strengthen me, I would desire to confess the truth likethem. . . . I questioned whether I might not safely use means to declinethe cross and to ward off the wrath of the Lords and the Magistrates. Shall I begin to hear Mr. William Falconer? Shall I write to Seaforthand Argyll to ask them to clear and vindicate me? Shall I forbear tohear that honest minister, James Urquhart, for a time, seeing the stormis like to fall on me if I do so? What counsel shall I give my son?Shall I expose myself and my family to danger at this time? What is Thywill? What is my duty?' And then this able and honest hypocrite has thegrace to add: 'A grain of sound faith would easily answer all thesequestions. ' I have a sheaf of such passages. It is sickening work tospeak and hear such things. But they must sometimes be spoken and heard, if only to afford a reply to Paul's question in the text: 'Ye did runwell: what did hinder you?' How well Alexander Brodie ran for a time, and how well he might have run to the end but for those two sins that didso easily beset him--the love of money and the fear of man! But underthe arrest and overthrow that those two so mean and so contemptible vicesbrought on Brodie, we see his spiritual life, or what might have ripenedinto spiritual life, gradually but surely decaying, even in his diary, till we read this last entry on the day of his death: 'My darkness hasnot taken an end, nor my confusions. '

Alexander Brodie being long dead yet speaketh with terrible power inevery page of his solemnising diary. Young men of Scotland, he says, young statesmen, young senators of the College of Justice, youngchurchmen, young magistrates, young landlords, and all young men oftalent and of influence, sons of the Cavaliers and the Covenantersalike--seek the right and the true, the just and the honourable, in yourday; choose it for your part, and take your stand firmly and boldly uponit. Make hazards in order to stand upon it. Read my humbling life, andtake warning from me. And when your times are confused and perplexed;when truth and duty are not wholly and commandingly clear; give a goodconscience the benefit of the doubt, and suspect the side on which safetyand promotion and public praise lie. Pray without ceasing, and then liveas you pray. And then my diary shall not have been written and left openamong you in vain. 

XXIII. JOHN FLEMING, BAILIE OF LEITH

 'I wish that I could satisfy your desire in drawing up and framing for you a Christian Directory. '--_Rutherford_. 

Samuel Rutherford and John Fleming, Bailie of Leith, were old and fastfriends. Away back in the happy days when Rutherford was still astudent, and was still haunting the back-shop of old John Meine in theCanongate of Edinburgh, he had formed a fast friendship with the youngwood-merchant of Leith. And all the trials and separations of life, instead of deadening their love for one another, or making them forgetone another, had only drawn the two men the closer to one another. Forwhen Rutherford's two great troubles came upon him, --first his dismissalfrom the Latin regency in Edinburgh University, and then his banishmentfrom his pulpit at Anwoth, --John Fleming came forward on both occasionswith money, and with letters, and with visits that were even better thanmoney, to the penniless and friendless professor and exiled pastor. 'Sir, I thank you kindly for your care of me and of my brother. I hope it islaid up for you and remembered in heaven. '

Robert M'Ward, the first editor of Rutherford's _Letters_, with all hisassiduity, was only able to recover four letters out of the heap ofcorrespondence that had passed between the rich timber-merchant of Leithand the exiled minister, but, those four tell us volumes, both about theintimacy of the two men and about the depth and the worth of the bailie'scharacter. Fleming wrote a letter to Rutherford in the spring of 1637, which must have run in some such terms as these:--'My life is fast ebbingaway, and I am not yet begun aright to live. I am in mid-time of mydays. I sometimes feel that I am coming near the end of them; and whatevil days they have been! My business that my father left me isprosperous. I have a good and kind wife, as you know. My children arenot wholly without promise. My place in this town is far too honourablefor me, and I have many dear friends among the godly both in Leith and inEdinburgh. But I feel bitterly that I have no business to mix myselfamong them, and to be counted one of them. For, what with the burdensomeaffairs of this great seaport, and my own growing business, my days andmy nights are like a weaver's shuttle. I intend and I begin well, butanother year and another year comes to an end and I am just where I was. I have had some success, by God's blessing, in making money, but I am abankrupt before Him in my soul. My inward life is a ravelled hesp, and Ineed guidance and direction if I am ever to come out of this confusionand to come to any good. Protestant and Presbyterian as I am, ' he goeson, 'if I could only find a director who would take trouble with me andcommand me as I take trouble with and command my servants, I vow to youthat I would put the reins without reserve into his hands. Will you nottake me in hand? You know me of old. We used to talk in dear old JohnMeine's back-shop on week-nights and upstairs on Sabbath nights aboutthese things. And long as it is since we saw much of one another, I feelthat you know me out and in, and through and through, as no one elseknows me. Tell me, then, what I am to do with myself. I will try to dowhat you tell me, for I am wearied and worn out with my stagnant andmiserable life. Pity me, Mr. Samuel, my honoured and dear friend, for mypirn is almost run out, and I am not near saved. '

'My worthy and dearly beloved brother in the Lord, ' replied Rutherford toFleming, 'I dare not take it upon me to lay down rules and directions foryour inner life. I have not the judiciousness, nor the experience, northe success in the inner life myself that would justify me. And, besides, there is no lack of such Directories as you ask me for. Searchthe Scriptures. Buy Daniel Rogers, and Richard Greenham, and especiallyWilliam Perkins. My own wall is too much broken down, my own garden istoo much overrun with weeds; I dare not attempt to lay down the law toyou. But I will do this since you are so importunate; I will tell you, as you have told me, some of my own mistakes and failings and shipwrecks, and the rocks on which I have foundered may thus, be made to carry alantern to light your ship safely past them. '

 'Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write;

and, like Sir Philip Sydney, Samuel Rutherford looked into his own heart, and drew a Directory out of it for the better Christian conduct of hisfriend John Fleming. 

1. Now--would you believe it?--the first thing Samuel Rutherford foundhis own heart accusing him in before God was, of all things, the way hehad wasted his time. Would you believe it that the student who wassummer and winter in his study at three o'clock in the morning, and theminister who, as his people boasted, was always preparing his sermons, always visiting his people, always writing books, and always entertainingstrangers, --would you believe it that one of his worst consciences wasfor the bad improvement of his time? What an insatiable thirst forabsolute and unearthly perfection God has awakened in the truly graciousheart! Give the truly gracious heart a little godliness and it cries outnight and day for more. Give it more, and it straightway demands all. Give it all and it still accuses you that it has literally got none atall. Samuel Rutherford gave all his time and all his strength to hispastoral and his professorial duties, and yet when he looked into his ownheart to write a letter to Bailie Fleming out of it, his whole heartcondemned him to his face because he had so mismanaged his time, and hadnot aright redeemed it. 'You complain that your time is fast speedingaway, and that you have not even begun to employ it well. So is mine. Igive a good part of my time to my business, as you say you do to yours;but, just like you, that leaves me no time to give to God. God forgiveme for the way I forget Him and neglect Him all the time that I ambustling about in the things of His house! Let us both begin, and meespecially, to give some of God's best earthly gift back to Him again. Let us spare a little of His time that He allows us and bestow it backagain upon Himself. He values nothing so much as a little of ourallotted time. Let us meditate on Him more, and pray more to Him. Letus throw up ejaculations of prayer to Him more and more while we are atour daily employments; you in the timber-yard, down among the ships, atthe desk, and at the Council-table; and I among my books, and among mypeople, and in my pulpit. These are always golden moments to me, and whythey do not multiply themselves into hours and days and years is to mebut another proof of my deep depravity. And, John Fleming, sanctify youthe Sabbath. As you love and value your immortal soul, sanctify and donot waste and desecrate the Sabbath. Let no man steal from you a singlehour of the Sabbath-day. Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. '

2. And again and again in his letters to Fleming Rutherford returns tothe sins of the tongue. Rutherford himself was a great sinner by histongue, and he seems to have taken it for granted that the bailies ofLeith were all in the same condemnation. 'Observe your words well, ' hewrites out of the bitterness of his own heart. 'Make conscience of allyour conversations. ' Cut off a right hand, pluck out a right eye, saysChrist. And I wonder that half of His disciples have not bitten outtheir offending tongues. What a world of injury and of all kinds ofiniquity has the tongue always and everywhere been! In Jerusalem inDavid's day; and still in Jerusalem in James's day; in Anwoth andAberdeen and St. Andrews in Rutherford's day; and in Leith in JohnFleming's day; and still in all these places in our own day. The tonguecan no man tame, and no wonder, for it is set on fire of hell. 'I shallshow you, ' says Rutherford, 'what I would fain be at myself, howbeit Ialways come short of my purpose. ' Rutherford made many enemies both as apreacher and as a doctrinal and an ecclesiastical controversialist. Hewas a hot, if not a bad-blooded man himself, and he raised both hot andbad blood in other men. He was a passionate-hearted man, was Rutherford;he would not have been our sainted Samuel Rutherford if he had not had afast and a high-beating heart. And his passionate heart was not allspent in holy love to Jesus Christ, though much of it was. For the dregsof it, the unholy scum and froth of it, came out too much in his books ofdebate and in his differences with his own brethren. His high-mettledand almost reckless sense of duty brought him many enemies, and it washis lifelong sanctification to try to treat his enemies aright, and tokeep his own heart and tongue and pen clean and sweet towards them. Andhe divined that among the merchants and magistrates of Leith, anger andmalice, rivalry and revenge were not unknown any more than they wereamong their betters in the Presbytery and the General Assembly. He knew, for Fleming had told him, that his very prosperity and his father'sprosperity had procured for Fleming many enemies. The Norway timbertrade was not all in the Fleming hands for nothing. The late Councilelection also had left Fleming many enemies, and his simple duty at theCouncil-table daily multiplied them. It was quite unaccountable to himhow enemies sprang up all around him, and it was well that he had such anopen-eyed and much-experienced correspondent as Rutherford was, to whomhe could confide such ghastly discoveries, and such terrible shocks tofaith and trust and love. 'Watch well this one thing, Bailie Fleming, even your deep desire for revenge. Be sure that it is in your heart inLeith to seek revenge as well as it is in my heart here in Aberdeen. Watch, as you would the workings of a serpent, the workings of your sore-hurt heart in the matter of its revenges. Watch how the calamities thatcome on your enemies refresh and revive you. Watch how their prosperityand their happiness depress and darken you. Disentangle the desire forrevenge and the delight in it out of the rank thickets of your wickedheart; drag that desire and delight out of its native darkness; know it, name it, and it will be impossible but that you will hate it like deathand hell, and yourself on account of it. Do you honestly wish, as yousay you do, for direction as to your duty to your many enemies in Leith, and to God and your own soul among them? Then begin with this: watch andfind yourself out in your deep desire for revenge, and in your secretsatisfaction and delight to hear it and to speak it. Begin with that;and, then, long after that, and as the divine reward of that, you will beenabled to begin to try to love your enemies, to bless them that curseyou, to do good to them that hate you, and to pray for them thatdespitefully use you and persecute you. You need no Directory for thesethings from me when you have the Sermon on the Mount in your own NewTestament. '

3. And, still looking into his own heart and writing straight out of it, Rutherford says to Fleming, 'I have been much challenged in myconscience, and still am, for not referring all I do to God as my lastand chiefest end. ' Which is just Samuel Rutherford's vivid way of takinghome to himself the first question of the Shorter Catechism which he hadafterwards such a deep hand in drawing up. I do not know any otherauthor who deals so searchingly with this great subject as that princeamong experimental divines, Thomas Shepard, the founder of Yale in NewEngland. His insight is as good as his style is bad. His English isexecrable, but his insight is nothing short of divine. 'The pollution ofthe whole man, and of all his actions, ' he says in his _Parable of theTen Virgins_, 'consists chiefly in his self-seeking, in making ourselvesour utmost end. This makes our most glorious actions vile; this stainsthem all. And so the sanctification of a sinner consists chiefly inmaking the Lord our utmost end in all that we do. Every man living seekshimself as his last end and chiefest good, and out of this captivity nohuman power can redeem us. . . . Make this your last and best end--tolive to Christ and to do His will. This is your last end; this is theend of your being born again--nay, of your being redeemed by Hisblood--that you may live unto Christ. ' And in the same author's_Meditations and Spiritual Experiences_, he says, 'On Sabbath morning Isaw that I had a secret eye to my own name in all that I did, and Ijudged myself to be worthy of death because I was not weaned from allcreated glory, from all honour and praise, and from the esteem of men. .. . On Sabbath, again, when I came home, I saw into the deep hypocrisyof my own heart, because in my ministry I sought to comfort and quickenthe people that the glory might reflect on me as well as on God. . . . Onthe evening before the sacrament I saw it to be my duty to sequestermyself from all other things and to prepare me for the next day. And Isaw that I must pitch first on the right end. I saw that mine own endswere to procure honour to myself and not to the Lord. There was somepoor little eye in seeking the name and glory of Christ, yet I sought notit only, but my own glory, too. After my Wednesday sermon I saw thepride of my heart acting thus, that when I had done public work my heartwould presently look out and inquire whether I had done it well or ill. Hereupon I saw my vileness to be to make men's opinions my rule, and thatmade me vile in mine own eyes, and that more and more daily. ' 'I havebeen much challenged, ' writes Rutherford to Fleming, 'because I do notrefer all I do to God as my last end: that I do not eat and drink andsleep and journey and speak and think for God. ' And, the fanatic that heis, he seems to think that that is the calling and chief end not only ofministers like himself and Shepard, but of the bailies andtimber-merchants of Edinburgh and Leith also. 

4. Lastly, in the closing sentences of this inexhaustible letter, Rutherford says to his waiting and attentive correspondent: 'Growth ingrace, sir, should be cared for by you above all other things. ' And soit should. Literally and absolutely above all other things. Above goodhealth, above good name, above wealth, and station, and honour. Thesethings, take them all together, if need be, are to be counted loss inorder to gain growth in grace. But what is growth in grace? It isgrowth in everything that is truly good; but Fleming, as he read hisDirectory daily, would always think of growth in grace as the rightimprovement of his remaining time, and, especially, its religious use anddedication to God; as also of the government of his own untamed tongue;the extinction of the desire for revenge, and of all delight in theinjury of his enemies; and, above all, and including all, in making Godhis chief end in all that he did. How all-important, then, is a soundand Scriptural Directory to instruct us how we are to grow in grace. Andhow precious must that directory-letter have been to a man in deadearnest like John Fleming. It was precious to his heart, you may besure, above all his ships, and all his woodyards, and all his finehouses, and all his seats of honour. And if his growth in grace in Leithhas now become full-grown glory in Heaven, how does he there bless God to-day that ever he met with Samuel Rutherford in old John Maine's shop inhis youth, and had him for a friend and a director all his after-days. And when John Fleming at the table above forgets not all His benefits, high up, you may be very sure, among them all he never forgets to putSamuel Rutherford's letters; and, more especially, this very directory-letter we have read here for our own direction and growth in grace thisCommunion-Sabbath night. 

XXIV. THE PARISHIONERS OF KILMACOLM

 'For want of time I have put you all in one letter. '--_Rutherford_. 

There is a well-known passage in _Lycidas_ that exactly describes thereligious condition of the parish of Kilmacolm in the year 1639. For theshepherd of that unhappy sheepfold also had climbed up some other waybefore he knew how to hold a sheephook, till, week after week, the hungrysheep looked up and were not fed. The parishioners of Kilmacolm musthave been fed to some purpose at one time, for the two letters they writeto Rutherford in their present starvation bear abundant witness on everypage to the splendid preaching and the skilful pastorate that this parishmust at one time have enjoyed. There must have been men of no commonability, as well as of no common profundity of spiritual life inKilmacolm during those trying years, for the letters they wrote toRutherford would have done credit to any of Rutherford's ablest and bestcorrespondents--to William Guthrie, or David Dickson, or Robert Blair, orJohn Livingstone. Indeed, the expert author of the _Therapeutica_himself would have been put to it to answer fully and satisfactorilythose two so acute and so searching letters. The Kilmacolm people hadheard about the famous answers that Samuel Rutherford, now home again inAnwoth, had written both from Anwoth and from Aberdeen to all classes ofpeople and on all kinds of subjects; copies, indeed, of some of those nowalready widespread letters had come to Kilmacolm itself, till, at one oftheir private meetings for conference and prayer, it was resolved that asmall committee of their elders should gather up their painfulexperiences in the spiritual life that got no help from the parishpulpit, and should set them by way of submission and consultation beforethe great spiritual casuist. Everybody else was getting what counsel andcomfort they needed from the famous adviser of Anwoth, and why not they, the neglected parishioners of Kilmacolm? And thus it was that two orthree of the oldest and ablest men in the kirk-session so wrote toRutherford, as, after some delay, to get back the elaborate letter fromAnwoth numbered 286 in Dr. Bonar's edition. 

I am tempted to think it possible that the old, long-experienced, andmuch-exercised saints of Kilmacolm may have demanded a little too much oftheir minister: at any rate, I am quite as anxious to hear whatRutherford shall say to them as they can be to hear from him themselves. And all that leads me to believe that not only must there have been somequite remarkable people in the parish church at that date, but that theymust also have had some very special pulpit and pastoral work expended onthem in former years. Or, if not that, then their case is just anotherillustration of what Rutherford says in his reassuring answer, namely, that the life of grace among a people is not at all tied up to the lipsof their minister. Which, again, is just another way of putting what thePsalmist says of himself in his humble and happy boast: 'I have moreunderstanding than all my teachers, for Thy testimonies are mymeditation. I understand more than the ancients, because I keep Thyprecepts. '

1. The first complaint that came to Anwoth from Kilmacolm was expressedin the quaint and graphic language natural to that day. 'Security, strong and sib to nature, is stealing in upon us. ' The holy law of God, they mean, was never preached in their parish; at any rate, it was nevercarried home to any man's conscience. Nobody was ever disturbed. Nobody's feelings were ever hurt. Nobody in all the parish had everheard a voice of thunder saying, Thou art the man. Toothless and timidgeneralities made up all the preaching they ever heard either on theethical or on the evangelical side: and generalities disturb no man'speace of mind. The pulpit of Kilmacolm was but too sib to the pew, andboth pulpit and pew slept on together in undisturbed security. And thatsupplied Samuel Rutherford with an excellent text for a sermon he wascontinually preaching in every utterance of his--the constant danger weall lie under as long as we are in this life. Danger from sin, and, inits own still subtler way, as much danger from grace; danger from want, and danger from fulness; danger from our weakness, and danger from ourstrength. So much danger is there that if any man in this life is in astate of security about himself he is surely the foolishest of allfoolish men. For, Thy close pursuers' busy hands do plant Snares in thy substance, snares attend thy want; Snares in thy credit, snares in thy disgrace; Snares in thy high estate, snares in thy base; Snares tuck thy bed, and snares attend thy board; Snares watch thy thoughts, and snares attack thy word; Snares in thy quiet, snares in thy commotion; Snares in thy diet, snares in thy devotion; Snares lurk in thy resolves, snares in thy doubt; Snares lurk within thy heart, and snares without; Snares are above thy head, and snares beneath; Snares in thy sickness, snares are in thy death. 

What a fool and what a sluggard nature must be, as Rutherford here saysshe is, if she can lull us into security about ourselves in such a lifeas this! And what a noble field does this snare-filled life supply forall a preacher's boldest and best powers!

2. They have some new beginners in Kilmacolm in spite of all itsspiritual stagnation, and the older people are full of anxiety lest thosenew beginners should not be rightly directed. 'Tell them for one thing, 'says Rutherford in reply, 'to dig deep while they are yet among theirfoundations. Tell them that a sick night for sin is not so common eitheramong young or old as I would like to see it. Make them to understandwhat I mean by digging deep. I mean deep into their own heart in orderto discover and lay bare to themselves the corrupt motives from whichthey act every day even in the very best things they do. And that ofitself will give them many sufficiently sick days and nights too, both asnew beginners and as old believers. And tell them, also, from me, thatonce they have seen themselves in their own hearts, and Jesus Christ inHis heart, it will be impossible for them ever to go back from Him. Absolutely impossible. So much so that it is perfectly certain that hewho goes back from Christ has never really seen himself or Christ either. He may have seen something somewhat more or less like Christ, but, allthe time, it was not Christ. Let your soul once come up to closequarters with Christ, and I defy you ever to forget Him again. Tell allyour new beginners that from me, Samuel Rutherford, who, after all, amnot yet well begun myself. '

3. 'You complain bitterly of a dead ministry in your bounds. I haveheard as much. But I will reply that a living ministry is notindispensable to a parish. All our parishes ought to have it, and weought to see to it that they all get it; but neither the conversion ofsinners, nor the sanctification and comfort of God's saints, is tied upto any man's lips. You will read your unread Bibles more: you will buymore good books: you will meet more in private converse and prayer: andit will not be bad for you for a season to look above the pulpit, and tolook Jesus Christ Himself more immediately in the face. ' As Fraser ofBrea also said in a striking passage in his diary, so Rutherford says inhis reply letter: 'in your sore famine of the water of life, run yourpipe right up to the fountain. '

4. If the parishioners of Kilmacolm were severe on their minister it wasnot that they let themselves escape. And there was something in theirpresent letters that led Rutherford to warn them against a mistake thatonly people of the Kilmacolm type will ever fall into. 'Some of thepeople of God, ' says their sharp-eyed censor, 'slander the grace of Godin their own soul. ' And that is true of some of God's best people still. We meet with such people now and then in our own parishes to-day. Theyare so possessed with penitence and humility; they have such high andinflexible and spiritual standards for measuring themselves by; the lawhas so fatally entered their innermost souls that they will not evenadmit or acknowledge what the grace of God has, to all other men'sknowledge, done in them. Seek out, says Rutherford, the signs of truegrace in yourselves as well as the signs of secret sin. And when youhave found such and such an indubitable sign of grace, say so. Say_this_, and _this_, and _this_, pointing it out, is assuredly the work ofGod in my soul. When you, after all defeat, really discover your soulgrowing in grace; in patience under injuries; in meekness under reproofsand corrections; in love for, or at least in peace of heart toward, thoseyou at one time did not like, but disliked almost to downright hatred; insilent and assenting acceptance, if not yet in actual and positiveenjoyment, of another man's talents and success, gain and fame; in thedecay and disappearance of party spirit, and in openness to all the goodand the merit of other men; in prayerfulness; in liberality, and so on;when you cannot deny these things in yourself, then speak good of Christ, and do not traduce and backbite His work because it is in your own soul. 'Some wretches murmur of want while all the time their money in the bankand their fat harvests make them liars. ' Rutherford thinks he has puthis finger upon some such saintly liars in the kirk-session of Kilmacolm. 

5. 'Fear your light, my lord, ' wrote Rutherford to Lord Craighall fromAberdeen; 'stand in awe of your light. ' But the poor Kilmacolm peopledid not need that sharp rebuke, for they had written to Rutherford attheir own instance to consult him in their terror of conscience aboutthis very matter, till Rutherford had to exhaust his vocabulary ofcomfort in trying to pacify his correspondents just in this sufficientlydisquieting matter of light in the mind with great darkness in the heartand the life. Our light in this world, he tells them, is a broad andshining field, whereas our life of obedience is at best but a short andstraggling furrow. Only in heaven shall the broad and basking fields oflight and truth be covered from end to end with the songs of therejoicing reapers. And Rutherford is very bold in this matter, becausehe knows he has the truth about it. A perfect life, he says, up to ourever-increasing light, is impossible to us here, if only because ourlight always increases with every new progress in duty. The field oflight expands to a new length and breadth every time the plough passesthrough it. And, knowing well to whom he writes on this subject, Rutherford goes on to say that there is a sorrow for sin, and forshortcoming in service, that is as acceptable with God in the evangelicalcovenant as would be the very service itself. But, then, it must be whatRutherford calls 'honest sorrow after a sincere aim. ' And let no maneasily allow himself to take shelter under that, lest it turn out to himlike taking shelter in a thunderstorm under a lightning rod. For what anaim must that be, and then, what a sorrow, that is as good in the sightof God as a full obedience is itself. At the same time, 'A sincere aim, and then an honest sorrow, both of the right quality and quantity, takentogether with Christ's intercession, must be our best life before Godtill we be over in the other country where the law of God will get aperfect soul in which to fulfil itself. Your complaint on this head isalready booked in the New Testament (Rom. Vii. 18). '

6. 'The less sense of liberty and sweetness, the more true spiritualityin the service of God, ' is Rutherford's reply to their next perplexity. Ought we to go on with our work and with our worship when our hearts aredry and when we have no delight in what we do? That is just the time topersevere, replies their evangelical guide, for it is in the absence ofall sense of liberty and sweetness that our duties prove themselves to betruly spiritual. A sweet service has often its sweetness from analtogether other source than the spiritual world. Let a man be engagedin divine service, or in any other religious work, and let him havesensible support and success in it; let him have liberty and enjoyment inthe performance of it; and, especially, let him have the praise of menafter it, and he will easily be deceived into thinking that he has hadGod's Spirit with him, and the light of God's countenance, whereas allthe time it has only been an outpouring on his deceived heart of his ownlying spirit of self-seeking, self-pleasing, and self-exalting. While, again, a man's spirit may be all day as dry as the heath in thewilderness, and all other men's spirits around him and toward him thesame, yet a very rich score may be set down beside that unindulgedservant's name against the day of the 'well-dones. ' 'I believe that manythink that obedience is lifeless and formal unless the wind be in thewest, and all their sails are filled with the joys of sense. But I amnot of their mind who think so. '

7. The scrupulosity of the Kilmacolm people was surely singular andremarkable even in that day of tests and marks and scruples in thespiritual life. The ministry may not have been wholly dead in and aroundKilmacolm, though it could not keep pace and patience with those so eagerand so anxious souls who would have Rutherford's mind on all possiblepoints of their complicated case. Six of their complaints we have justseen, but their troubles are not yet all told. 'Surely, ' they wrote, 'aMaster like our Lord, who gave such service when He was still a servantHimself, --surely He will have hearty and unfeigned service from us, ornone at all. Will He not spue the lukewarm servant out of His mouth?' Igrant you, wrote Rutherford, that our Master must have honesty. The onething He will unmask and will not endure is hypocrisy. But if you meanto insinuate that our hearts must always be entirely given up to Hisservice in all that we do, else He will cast us away, for all I am worthin the world I would not have that true of me. I would not have thattrue, else where would my hope be? An English contemporary ofRutherford's puts it memorably: 'Our Master tries His servants not withthe balances of the sanctuary, but with the touchstone. ' Take that, saysRutherford, for my reply to your opinion that Christ must always have aperfect service at our hands, or none at all. 

8. Again, hold by the ground-work when the outworks and thesuperstructure are assailed. Fall back the more nakedly upon your surefoundation. Keep the ground of your standing and acceptance clear, andtake your stand on that ground at every time when despair assaults you. For great faults and for small, for formality in spiritual service, forcold-heartedness and for half-heartedness, you have always open to youyour old and sure ground, the blood and the righteousness of yourCovenant-surety. 'Seek still the blood of atonement for faults much andlittle. Know the gate to the fountain, and lie about it. Make much ofassurance, for it keepeth the anchor fixed. '

9. The last paragraph of Rutherford's letter to the parishioners ofKilmacolm is taken up with the consolation that always comes to aChristian man's heart after every deed of true self-mortification. Thatis an experience that all Christian men must often have, whether theytake note sufficiently of it or no. Let any man suffer for Christ'ssake; let any man be evil-entreated and for Christ's sake take itpatiently; let him be reviled and persecuted in public or in private forthe truth; let him deny himself some indulgence--allowed, doubtful, orcondemned--and all truly for the sake of Christ and other men; andimmediately, and as a consequence of that, a peace, a liberty, a light asof God's countenance will infallibly visit his heart. After temptationresisted and overcome angels will always visit us. 'Temptations, ' saysBunyan in the fine preface to his _Grace Abounding_, 'when we meet themfirst are as the lion that roared upon Samson; but, if we overcome them, the next time we see them we shall find a nest of honey within them. ''Blessed are they that mourn, ' says our Lord, 'for they shall becomforted. ' 'After my greatest mortifications, ' said Edwards, 'I alwaysfind my greatest comforts. ' And even Renan tells us of a Roman lady whohad 'the ineffable joy of renouncing joy. ' 'A Christ bought withstrokes, ' says Rutherford in closing, 'is the sweetest of all Christs. '