initial commit of ebook 16892HEADmain

1 files changed, 5634 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/16892.txt b/16892.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1873e94
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16892.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5634 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Samuel Rutherford, by Alexander Whyte
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Samuel Rutherford
+       and some of his correspondents
+
+
+Author: Alexander Whyte
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 17, 2005  [eBook #16892]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAMUEL RUTHERFORD***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1894 Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL RUTHERFORD
+AND SOME OF
+HIS CORRESPONDENTS
+
+
+LECTURES DELIVERED IN
+ST. GEORGE'S FREE CHURCH
+EDINBURGH: BY
+ALEXANDER WHYTE, D.D.
+
+AUTHOR OF 'BUNYAN CHARACTERS'
+ETC.
+
+PUBLISHED BY
+OLIPHANT ANDERSON AND FERRIER
+
+30 ST. MARY STREET, EDINBURGH, AND
+24 OLD BAILEY, LONDON
+1894
+
+
+
+
+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 the
+south of Scotland in the year of our Lord 1600.  Thomas Goodwin was born
+in England in the same year, Robert Leighton in 1611, Richard Baxter in
+1615, John Owen in 1616, John Bunyan in 1628, and John Howe in 1630.  A
+little vellum-covered volume now lies open before me, the title-page of
+which runs thus:--'Joshua Redivivus, or Mr. Rutherford's Letters, now
+published for the use of the people of God: but more particularly for
+those who now are, or may afterwards be, put to suffering for Christ and
+His 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 in
+1664 to say more.  There is no editor's name on the title-page, no
+publisher's name, and no place of printing or of publication.  Only two
+texts of forewarning and reassuring Scripture, and then the year of grace
+1664.
+
+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 land
+and in that day; a spy who would both by his experience and by his
+testimony cheer and encourage the suffering people of God.  For all this
+Samuel Rutherford truly was.  As he said of himself in one of his letters
+to Hugh Mackail, he was indeed a spy sent out to make experiment upon the
+life of silence and separation, banishment and martyrdom, and to bring
+back a report of that life for the vindication of Christ and for the
+support and encouragement of His people.  It was a happy thought of
+Rutherford's first editor, Robert M'Ward, his old Westminster Assembly
+secretary, to put at the top of his title-page, Joshua risen again from
+the dead, or, Mr. Rutherford's Letters written from his place of
+banishment in Aberdeen.
+
+In selecting his twelve spies, Moses went on the principle of choosing
+the best and the ablest men he could lay hold of in all Israel.  And in
+selecting Samuel Rutherford to be the first sufferer for His covenanted
+people in Scotland, our Lord took a man who was already famous for his
+character and his services.  For no man of his age in broad Scotland
+stood higher as a scholar, a theologian, a controversialist, a preacher
+and a very saint than Samuel Rutherford.  He had been settled at Anwoth
+on the Solway in 1627, and for the next nine years he had lived such a
+noble life among his people as to make Anwoth famous as long as Jesus
+Christ has a Church in Scotland.  As we say Bunyan and Bedford, Baxter
+and Kidderminster, Newton and Olney, Edwards and Northampton, Boston and
+Ettrick, M'Cheyne and St. Peter's, so we say Rutherford and Anwoth.
+
+His talents, his industry, his scholarship, his preaching power, his
+pastoral solicitude and his saintly character all combined to make
+Rutherford a marked man both to the friends and to the enemies of the
+truth.  His talents and his industry while he was yet a student in
+Edinburgh had carried him to the top of his classes, and all his days he
+could write in Latin better than either in Scotch or English.  His habits
+of work at Anwoth soon became a very proverb.  His people boasted that
+their minister was always at his books, always among his parishioners,
+always at their sick-beds and their death-beds, always catechising their
+children and always alone with his God.  And then the matchless preaching
+of the parish church of Anwoth.  We can gather what made the Sabbaths of
+Anwoth so memorable both to Rutherford and to his people from the books
+we still have from those great Sabbaths: _The Trial and the Triumph of
+Faith_; _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--crucified
+indeed, but now glorified.  Rutherford's life for his people at Anwoth
+has something altogether superhuman and unearthly about it.  His
+correspondents in his own day and his critics in our day stumble at his
+too intense devotion to his charge; he lived for his congregation, they
+tell us, almost to the neglect of his wife and children.  But by the time
+of his banishment his home was desolate, his wife and children were in
+the grave.  And all the time and thought and love they had got from him
+while they were alive had, now that they were dead, returned with new and
+intensified 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 the
+ministers of Scotland into the life of banishment in that day, so as to
+try its fords and taste its vineyards, and to report to God's straitened
+and persecuted people at home.
+
+To begin with, it must always be remembered that Rutherford was not laid
+in irons in Aberdeen, or cast into a dungeon.  He was simply deprived of
+his pulpit and of his liberty to preach, and was sentenced to live in
+silence in the town of Aberdeen.  Like Dante, another great spy of God's
+providence and grace, Rutherford was less a prisoner than an exile.  But
+if any man thinks that simply to be an exile is a small punishment, or a
+light cross, let him read the psalms and prophecies of Babylon, the
+_Divine Comedy_, and Rutherford's _Letters_.  Yes, banishment was
+banishment; exile was exile; silent Sabbaths were silent Sabbaths; and a
+borrowed fireside with all its willing heat was still a borrowed
+fireside; and, spite of all that the best people of Aberdeen could do for
+Samuel Rutherford, he felt the friendliest stairs of that city to be very
+steep 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 and
+unprofitable spy for the best people of God in Scotland, for Marion
+M'Naught, and Lady Kenmure, and Lady Culross, for the Cardonesses,
+father, and mother, and son, and for Hugh Mackail, and such like, if he
+had tasted nothing more bitter than borrowed bread in Aberdeen, and
+climbed 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 you
+how Satan was sent to buffet Samuel Rutherford in his banishment, and how
+he was sifted as wheat is sifted in his exile.  I would not expose such a
+saint of God to every eye, but I look for fellow-worshippers here on
+these Rutherford Sabbath evenings, who know something of the plague of
+their own hearts, and who are comforted in their banishment and battle by
+nothing more than when they are assured that they are not alone in the
+deep darkness.  'When Christian had travelled in this disconsolate
+condition for some time he thought he heard the voice of a man as going
+before him and saying, "_Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow
+of 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 thence
+that 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 that
+dark and dismal state; and why not, thought he, with me?  Thirdly, for
+that 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 despair
+some who now hear me if I just report to them some of the discoveries and
+experiences of himself that Samuel Rutherford made among the siftings and
+buffetings of his Aberdeen exile.  Writing to Lady Culross, he says:--'O
+my guiltiness, the follies of my youth and the neglects of my calling,
+they all do stare me in the face here; . . . the world hath sadly
+mistaken 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 would
+ask me how I do. . . . I am a deeper hypocrite and a shallower professor
+than 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 think
+there is anything in me.  The house-devils that keep me company and this
+sink of corruption make me to carry low sails. . . . But, howbeit I am a
+wretched captive of sin, yet my Lord can hew heaven out of worse timber
+than I am, if worse there be.'  And to Lady Kenmure: 'I am somebody in
+the books of my friends, . . . but there are armies of thoughts within
+me, 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 so
+fearful to them that are sent to search it out as their own heart.  'The
+land,' said the ten spies, 'is a land that eateth up the inhabitants
+thereof; the cities are walled up to heaven, and very great, and the
+children 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 the
+stair of sanctification, no bread is so salt as that which is baked for a
+man of God out of the wild oats of his past sin and his present
+sinfulness.  Even Joshua and Caleb, who brought back a good report of the
+land, did not deny that the children of Anak were there, or that their
+walls went up to heaven, or that they, the spies, were as grasshoppers
+before 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 a
+land flowing with milk and honey.  And be it recorded and remembered to
+his 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 he
+tells us that some of his correspondents have written to him that he is
+possibly too joyful under the cross.  Blunt old Knockbrex, for one, wrote
+to 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 of
+extremes.'  So he was, for I know no man among all my masters in personal
+religion who unites greater extremes in himself than Samuel Rutherford.
+Who weeps like Rutherford over his banishment from Anwoth, while all the
+time who is so feasted in Christ's palace in Aberdeen?  Who loathes
+himself like Rutherford?  Not Bunyan, not Brea, not Boston; and, at the
+same time, who is so transported and lost to himself in the beauty and
+sweetness of Christ?  As we read his raptures we almost say with cautious
+old Knockbrex, that possibly Rutherford is somewhat too full of ecstasy
+for this fallen, still unsanctified, and still so slippery world.
+
+It took two men to carry back the cluster of grapes the spies cut down at
+Eshcol, and there is sweetness and strength and ecstasy enough for ten
+men in any one of Rutherford's inebriated Letters.  'See what the land
+is, and whether it be fat or lean, and bring back of the fruits of the
+land.'  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 for
+themselves 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 he
+sent back such clusters of its vineyards and such pots of its honey to
+Hugh Mackail, to Marion M'Naught, and to Lady Kenmure.  And then, when
+all his letters were collected and published, never surely, since the
+Epistles of Paul and the Gospel of John, had such clusters of
+encouragement and such intoxicating cordials been laid to the lips of the
+Church of Christ.
+
+Our old authors tell us that after the northern tribes had tasted the
+warmth and the sweetness of the wines of Italy they could take no rest
+till they had conquered and taken possession of that land of sunshine
+where such grapes so plentifully grew.  And how many hearts have been
+carried captive with the beauty and the grace of Christ, and with the
+land of Immanuel, where He drinks wine with the saints in His Father's
+house, by the reading of Samuel Rutherford's Letters, the day of the Lord
+will 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 to
+visit Scotland on business about the year 1650.  On his return home his
+friends asked him what news he had brought with him from the north.  'Good
+news,' 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 a
+little fair man, and he showed me the loveliness of Christ.  I then went
+to Irvine, where I heard a well-favoured, proper old man with a long
+beard, and that man showed me all my own heart.'  The little fair man who
+showed this English merchant the loveliness of Christ was Samuel
+Rutherford, and the proper old man who showed him all his own heart was
+David Dickson.  Dr. M'Crie says of David Dickson that he was singularly
+successful in dissecting the human heart and in winning souls to the
+Redeemer, and all that we know of Dickson bears out that high estimate.
+When he was presiding on one occasion at the ordination of a young
+minister, whom he had had some hand in bringing up, among the advices the
+old minister gave the new beginner were these:--That he should remain
+unmarried for four years, in order to give himself up wholly to his great
+work; and that both in preaching and in prayer he should be as succinct
+as possible so as not to weary his hearers; and, lastly, 'Oh, study God
+well and your own heart.'  We have five letters of Rutherford's to this
+master of the human heart, and it is in the third of these that
+Rutherford opens his heart to his father in the Gospel, and tells him
+that he is made up of extremes.
+
+In every way that was so.  It is a common remark with all Rutherford's
+biographers and editors and commentators what extremes met in that little
+fair man.  The finest thing that has ever been written on Rutherford is
+Mr. Taylor Innes's lecture in the Evangelical Succession series.  And the
+intellectual extremes that met in Rutherford are there set forth by
+Rutherford's acute and sympathetic critic at some length.  For one thing,
+the greatest speculative freedom and theological breadth met in
+Rutherford with the greatest ecclesiastical hardness and narrowness.  I
+do not know any author of that day, either in England or in Scotland,
+either Prelatist or Puritan, who shows more imaginative freedom and
+speculative power than Rutherford does in his _Christ Dying_, unless it
+is his still greater contemporary, Thomas Goodwin.  And it is with
+corresponding distress that we read some of Rutherford's polemical works,
+and even the polemical parts of his heavenly Letters.  There is a
+remarkable passage in one of his controversial books that reminds us of
+some of Shakespeare's own tributes to England: 'I judge that in England
+the Lord hath many names and a fair company that shall stand at the side
+of Christ when He shall render up the kingdom to the Father; and that in
+that renowned land there be men of all ranks, wise, valorous, generous,
+noble, heroic, faithful, religious, gracious, learned.'  Rutherford's
+whole passage is worthy to stand beside Shakespeare's great passage on
+'this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.'  But
+persecution from England and controversy at home so embittered
+Rutherford's sweet and gracious spirit that passages like that are but
+few 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 the
+glory of Christ, and few theologians of any age or any school rise to a
+larger air, or command a wider scope, or discover a clearer eye of
+speculation than Rutherford, till we feel exactly like the laird of
+Glanderston, who, when Rutherford left a controversial passage in a
+sermon and went on to speak of Christ, cried out in the church--'Ay, hold
+you there, minister; you are all right there!'  A domestic controversy
+that arose in the Church of Scotland towards the end of Rutherford's life
+so separated Rutherford from Dickson and Blair that Rutherford would not
+take part with Blair, the 'sweet, majestic-looking man,' in the Lord's
+Supper.  'Oh, to be above,' Blair exclaimed, 'where there are no
+misunderstandings!'  It was this same controversy that made John
+Livingstone say in a letter to Blair that his wife and he had had more
+bitterness over that dispute than ever they had tasted since they knew
+what bitterness meant.  Well might Rutherford say, on another such
+occasion, 'It is hard when saints rejoice in the sufferings of saints,
+and when the redeemed hurt, and go nigh to hate the redeemed.'  Watch and
+pray, my brethren, lest in controversy--ephemeral and immaterial
+controversy--you also go near to hate and hurt one another, as Rutherford
+did.
+
+And then, what strength, combined with what tenderness, there is in
+Rutherford!  In all my acquaintance with literature I do not know any
+author who has two books under his name so unlike one another, two books
+that are such a contrast to one another, as _Lex Rex_ and the _Letters_.
+A more firmly built argument than _Lex Rex_, an argument so clamped
+together with the iron bands of scholastic and legal lore, is not to be
+met with in any English book; a more lawyer-looking production is not in
+all the Advocates' Library than just _Lex Rex_.  There is as much emotion
+in the multiplication table as there is in _Lex Rex_; and then, on the
+other hand, the _Letters_ have no other fault but this, that they are
+overcharged with emotion.  The _Letters_ would be absolutely perfect if
+they were only a little more restrained and chastened in this one
+respect.  The pundit and the poet are the opposites and the extremes of
+one another; and the pundit and the poet meet, as nowhere else that I
+know of, in the author of _Lex Rex_ and the _Letters_.
+
+Then, again, what extremes of beauty and sweetness there are in
+Rutherford's style, too often intermingled with what carelessness and
+disorder.  What flashes of noblest thought, clothed in the most apt and
+well-fitting words, on the same page with the most slatternly and down-at-
+the-heel English.  Both Dr. Andrew Bonar and Dr. Andrew Thomson have
+given us selections from Rutherford's _Letters_ that would quite justify
+us in claiming Rutherford as one of the best writers of English in his
+day; but then we know out of what thickets of careless composition these
+flowers have been collected.  Both Gillespie and Rutherford ran a tilt at
+Hooker; but alas for the equipment and the manners of our champions when
+compared with the shining panoply and the knightly grace of the author of
+the incomparable _Polity_.
+
+And then, morally, as great extremes met in Rutherford as intellectually.
+Newman has a fine sermon under a fine title, 'Saintliness not forfeited
+by the Penitent.'  'No degree of sin,' he says, 'precludes the
+acquisition 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 then
+he goes on to illustrate that, and balance that, and almost to retract
+and deny all that, in a way that all his admirers only too well know.  But
+still it stands true.  A friend of mine once told me that it was to him
+often the most delightful and profitable of Sabbath evening exercises
+just to take down Newman's sermons and read their titles over again.  And
+this mere title, I feel sure, has encouraged and comforted many:
+'Saintliness not forfeited by the Penitent.'  And Samuel Rutherford's is
+just another great name to be added to the noble roll of saintly
+penitents we all have in our minds taken out of Scripture and Church
+History.  Neither great Saintliness nor great service was forfeited by
+this penitent; and he is constantly telling us how the extreme of demerit
+and the extreme of gracious treatment met in him; how he had at one time
+destroyed himself, and how God had helped him; how, where sin had
+abounded, grace had abounded much more.  In one of the very last letters
+he ever wrote--his letter to James Guthrie in 166l--he is still amazed
+that God has not brought his sin to the Market Cross, to use his own
+word.  But all through his letters this same note of admiration and
+wonder runs--that he has been taken from among the pots and his wings
+covered with silver and gold.  Truly, in his case the most seraphic
+Saintliness was not forfeited, and we who read his books may well bless
+God it was so.
+
+And then, experimentally also, what extremes met in our author!  Pascal
+in Paris and Rutherford in Anwoth and St. Andrews were at the very
+opposite poles ecclesiastically from one another.  I do not like to think
+what Rutherford would have said of Pascal, but I cannot embody what I
+have to say of Rutherford's experimental extremes better than just by
+this passage taken from the _Thoughts_: 'The Christian religion teaches
+the righteous man that it lifts him even to a participation in the divine
+nature; but that, in this exalted state, he still bears within him the
+fountain of all corruption, which renders him during his whole life
+subject to error and misery, to sin and death, while at the same time it
+proclaims to the most wicked that they can still receive the grace of
+their 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 so
+well acquainted with the defects of man, and a great desire for the truth
+of a religion that promises remedies so precious.'  And yet again, what
+others thought of him, and how they treated him, compared with what he
+knew himself to be, caused Rutherford many a bitter reflection.  Every
+letter he got consulting him and appealing to him as if he had been God's
+living oracle made him lie down in the very dust with shame and
+self-abhorrence.  Writing on one occasion to Robert Blair he told him
+that his letter consulting him about some matter of Christian experience
+had been like a blow in the face to him; it affects me much, said
+Rutherford, 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 says
+that he is put out of all love of writing letters because his
+correspondents 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 then
+alive on the earth so much looked up to and consulted in the deepest
+matters of the soul, in the secrets of the Lord with the soul, as
+Rutherford was, and his letters bear evidence on every page that there
+was no man who had a more loathsome and a more hateful experience of his
+own heart, not even Taylor, not even Owen, not even Bunyan, not even
+Baxter.  What a day of extremest men that was, and what an inheritance we
+extreme men have had left us, in their inward, extreme, and heavenly
+books!
+
+Once more, hear him on the tides of feeling that continually rose and
+fell within his heart.  Writing from Aberdeen to Lady Boyd, he says: 'I
+have 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; only
+I wait on the shore till the Lord sends a full sea. . . .  But even to
+dream of Him is sweet.'  And then, just over the leaf, to Marion
+M'Naught: 'I am well: honour to God. . . . He hath broken in upon a poor
+prisoner's soul like the swelling of Jordan.  I am bank and brim full: a
+great high springtide of the consolations of Christ hath overwhelmed me.'
+. . .  But sweet as it is to read his rapturous expressions when the tide
+is full, I feel it far more helpful to hear how he still looks and waits
+for the return of the tide when the tide is low, and when the shore is
+full, as all left shores are apt to be, of weeds and mire, and all
+corrupt and unclean things.  Rutherford is never more helpful to his
+correspondents than when they consult him about their ebb tides, and find
+that 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 Samuel
+Rutherford?  Why do we tell to all the world that such an eminent saint
+was full of such sad extremes?  Well, we surely do so out of obedience to
+the divine command to comfort God's people; for, next to their having no
+such extremes in themselves, their next best comfort is to be told that
+great and eminent saints of God have had the very same besetting sins and
+staggering extremes as they still have.  If the like of Samuel Rutherford
+was vexed and weakened with such intellectual contradictions and
+spiritual extremes in his mind, in his heart and in his history, then may
+we 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 in
+his _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 Samuel
+Rutherford's Letters.  But she holds a great place--indeed, the foremost
+place--in that noble book, to be written in which is almost as good as to
+be written in heaven.
+
+Rutherford's first letter to Marion M'Naught was written from the manse
+of Anwoth on the 6th of June 1627, and out of a close and lifelong
+correspondence we are happy in having had preserved to us some forty-five
+of Rutherford's letters to his first correspondent.  But, most
+unfortunately, we have none of her letters back again to Anwoth or
+Aberdeen or London or St. Andrews.  It is much to be wished we had, for
+Marion M'Naught was a woman greatly gifted in mind, as well as of quite
+exceptional experience even for that day of exceptional experiences in
+the divine life.  But we can almost construct her letters to Rutherford
+for ourselves, so pointedly and so elaborately and so affectionately does
+Rutherford 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 of
+Scotland, and she was now the wife of a well-known man in that day,
+William Fullarton, the Provost of Kirkcudbright.  It is interesting to
+know that Marion M'Naught was closely connected with Lady Kenmure,
+another of Rutherford's chief correspondents.  Lord Kenmure was her
+mother's brother.  Kenmure had lived a profligate and popularity-hunting
+life till he was laid down on his death-bed, when he underwent one of the
+most remarkable conversions anywhere to be read of--a conversion that, as
+it would appear, his niece Marion M'Naught had no little to do with.  As
+long as Kenmure was young and well, as long as he was haunting the
+purlieus of the Court, and selling his church and his soul for a smile
+from the King, the Provost of Kirkcudbright and his saintly wife were
+despised and forgotten; but when he was suddenly brought face to face
+with death and judgment, when his ribbons and his titles were now like
+the coals of hell in his conscience, nothing would satisfy him but that
+his niece must leave her husband and her children and take up her abode
+in Kenmure Castle.  _The Last and Heavenly Speeches of Lord Kenmure_ was
+a classic memoir of those days, and in that little book we read of his
+niece's constant attendance at his bedside, as good a nurse for his soul
+as she was for his body.
+
+Samuel Rutherford's favourite correspondent was, to begin with, a woman
+of quite remarkable powers of mind.  We gather that impression powerfully
+as we read deeper and deeper into the remarkable series of letters that
+Rutherford addressed to her.  To no one does he go into deeper matters
+both of Church and State, both of doctrinal and personal religion than to
+her, and the impression of mental power as well as of personal worth she
+made on Rutherford, she must have made on many of the ablest and best men
+of that day.  Robert Blair, for instance, tells us that when he was on
+his way home from London to Ireland he visited Scotland chiefly that he
+might see Rutherford at Anwoth and Marion M'Naught at Kirkcudbright, and
+when he came to Kirkcudbright he found Rutherford also there.  And when
+Rutherford was in exile in Aberdeen, and in deep anxiety about his people
+at Anwoth, he wrote beseeching Marion M'Naught to go to Anwoth and give
+his people her counsel about their congregational and personal affairs.
+But, above all, it is from the depth and the power of Rutherford's
+letters to herself on the inward life that we best gather the depth and
+the power of this remarkable woman's mind.
+
+There is no other subject of thought that gives such scope for the
+greatest 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 of
+mental gifts and spiritual graces to understand it aright as the Bible.
+The history and the biography of the Bible, the experimental parts of the
+Bible, the doctrines of grace deduced by the apostles out of the history
+and the experience recorded in the Bible, and then the personal, the most
+inward and most spiritual bearing of all that,--what occupation can be
+presented to the mind of man or woman to compare with that?  True
+religion, really true religion, gives unequalled and ever-increasing
+scope for the best gifts of mind and for the best graces of heart and
+character.  'In truth, religious obedience is a very intricate problem,
+and the more so the farther we proceed in it.'  And he has poor eyes and
+a poor heart for true religion, and for its best fruits both in the mind
+and the heart and the character, who does not see those fruits increasing
+letter 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 and
+justice in that day made his name far more public than ever he wished it
+to be.  And in all his services and sufferings for the truth he had a
+splendid wife in Marion M'Naught.  'Remember me to your husband,'
+Rutherford writes; 'tell him that Christ is worthy to be suffered for not
+only to blows but to blood.  He will find that innocence and uprightness
+will 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 keep
+the crown of the causey in Scotland.'  And when the petition is being got
+up for his being permitted to return to Anwoth, Rutherford asks his
+correspondent 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 in
+those days, or in any day this world has yet seen, without raising up
+many and bitter enemies.  And both she and her husband suffered heavily,
+both in name and in estate, from the malice and the hatred that their
+fearless devotion to truth and justice stirred up.  So much so, that some
+of the finest passages in Rutherford's early letters to her are those in
+which he counsels her and her husband to patience, and meekness, and
+forgiveness of injuries.  'Keep God's covenant in all your trials.  Hold
+you by His blessed word, and sin not; flee anger, wrath, grudging,
+envying, fretting.  Forgive an hundred pence to your fellow-servant, for
+your Lord has forgiven you ten thousand talents.'  And again: 'Be
+patient; Christ went to heaven with many a wrong.  His visage was more
+marred than that of any of the sons of men.  He was wronged and received
+no reparation, but referred all to that day when all wrongs shall be
+righted.'  And again: 'You live not upon men's opinion.  Happy are you
+if, when the world trampleth upon you in your credit and good name, you
+are yet the King's gold and stamped with His image.  Pray for the spirit
+of love, for love beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all
+things, endureth all things.  Forgive, therefore, your fellow-servant his
+one talent.  Always remember what has been forgiven you.'  And on every
+page of the Kirkcudbright correspondence we see that, amid all these
+temptations and trials, no man had a better wife than the provost, and no
+children a better mother than Grizel and her two brothers.  Her talents
+sought no nobler sphere for their exercise and increase than her own
+fireside; and her public spirit was better seen in her life at home than
+anywhere out of doors.  Hers was truly a public spirit, and like a spirit
+it inspired and animated both her own and her husband's life with
+interest in and with care for the best good, both of the Church and the
+State.  Her public spirit was not incompatible with great personal
+modesty and humility, and great attention to her domestic duties, all
+rooted in a life hid with Christ in God.
+
+And then, all this--her birth, her station, her talents, and her public
+spirit--could not fail to give her a great influence for good.  In a
+single 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 out
+of that town all will be undone.'  What a tribute is that to the
+provost's wife!  And again, far on in the Letters he writes to Grizel
+Fullarton: 'Your dear mother, now blessed and perfected with glory, kept
+life 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 daughter
+to take up!  So have we all known in country towns and villages one man
+or one woman who kept life in the place.  Out of the memories of my own
+boyhood 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 there
+a working housekeeper, who kept life in the whole place.  It is not
+station that does it, nor talent, though both station and talent greatly
+help; it is character, it is true and genuine godliness.  True and
+genuine godliness--especially when it is purged of pride, and harsh
+judgment, 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 most
+obscure man or woman will find its way to a thousand consciences, and
+will impress and overawe a whole town, as Marion M'Naught's rare
+godliness impressed and overawed all Kirkcudbright.  Just as, on the
+other hand, the ignorance, the censoriousness, the bitterness, the
+intolerance, that too often accompany what would otherwise be true
+godliness, work as widespread mischief as true godliness works good.  'One
+little deed done for God's sake, and against our natural inclination,
+though in itself only of a conceding or passive character, to brook an
+insult, to face a danger, or to resign an advantage, has in it a power
+outbalancing all the dust and chaff of mere profession--the profession
+whether of enlightened benevolence or candour, or, on the other hand, of
+high religious faith and fervent zeal;' or, as Rutherford could write to
+Marion M'Naught's daughter: 'There is a wide and deep difference between
+a name of godliness and the power of godliness.'  Even the schoolboys of
+Kirkcudbright could quite well distinguish the name from the reality; and
+long after they were Christian men they would tell with reverence and
+with love when, and from whom, they took their first and
+never-to-be-forgotten impressions.  It was, they would say to their
+children, from that woman of such rare godliness as well as public
+spirit, Marion M'Naught.
+
+It was all this, and nothing other and nothing less than all this, that
+made Marion M'Naught Rutherford's favourite correspondent.  Her mind and
+her heart together early and often drew her across the country to
+Rutherford's preaching.  Marion M'Naught had a good minister of her own
+at home; but Rutherford was Rutherford, and he made Anwoth Anwoth.  I
+think I can understand something of her delight on Communion forenoons,
+when his text was Christ Dying, in John xii. 32, or the Syro-Phoenician
+woman, in Matt. xv. 28.  And then the feasts on the fast-days at
+Kirkcudbright, over the cloud of witnesses, in Heb. xii. 1, and all tears
+wiped away, in Rev. xxi. 4, and the marriage of the Lamb, in xix. 7.  And
+then, on the other hand, Rutherford is not surely to be blamed for loving
+such a hearer.  His Master loved a Mary also of His day, for that also
+among other good reasons.  If a good hearer likes a good preacher, why
+should a good preacher not like a good hearer?  Take a holiday, and give
+us another day soon of such and such a preacher, our people sometimes say
+to us.  And why should that preacher not also say to us, Give me a day
+soon again of your good hearers?  As a matter of fact, our good preaching
+friends do say that to us.  And why not?  Fine hearers, deep hearers,
+thoroughly well-prepared hearers, hearers of genius are almost as scarce
+as fine, deep, thoroughly well-prepared preachers and preachers of
+genius.  And who shall blame Rutherford for liking to see Marion M'Naught
+coming into the church on a Sabbath morning as well as she liked to see
+him coming into the pulpit?  'I go to Anwoth so often,' she said,
+'because, though other ministers show me the majesty of God and the
+plague of my own heart, Mr. Samuel does both these things, but he also
+shows me, as no other minister ever does, the loveliness of Christ.'  It
+is as great a mistake to think that all our Christian people are able to
+take in a sermon on the loveliness of Christ as it is that all ordained
+men can preach such a sermon.  There are diversities of gifts among
+hearers as well as among preachers; and when the gifts of the pulpit meet
+the corresponding graces in the pew, you need not wonder that they
+recognise and delight in one another.  Jesus Christ was Rutherford's
+favourite subject in the pulpit, and thus it was that he was Marion
+M'Naught's favourite preacher, as she, again, was his favourite hearer in
+the church and his favourite correspondent in the Letters.  To how many
+in 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 thing
+like that in truth and soberness?  And how many could hear it?  Only a
+preacher of the holy passion of Rutherford, and only a hearer of the
+intellect and heart and rare experience of Marion M'Naught.  'O the fair
+face 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!  What
+astonishment will be mine when I first see that fairest and most lovely
+face!  It would be heaven to me just to look through a hole of heaven's
+door to see Christ's countenance!'  No wonder that the congregations were
+few, 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 Marion
+M'Naught met, they corresponded ever after with one another in their own
+enraptured 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 distinguished
+for the depth of their piety, their public spirit, and their love for the
+Presbyterian polity; and Lady Jane was one of the most richly-gifted
+members of that richly-gifted house.  But, with all that, Lady Jane
+Campbell had her own crosses to carry.  She had the sore cross of bad
+health to carry all her days.  Then she had the sad misfortune to make a
+very bad marriage in the morning of her days; and, partly as the result
+of all that, and partly because of her peculiar mental constitution, her
+whole life was drenched with a deep melancholy.  But, as we are told in
+John Howie and elsewhere, all these evils and misfortunes were made to
+work together for good to her through the special grace of God, and
+through the wise and wistful care of her lifelong friend and minister and
+correspondent, Samuel Rutherford.  Lady Jane Campbell had very remarkable
+gifts of mind.  We would have expected that from her distinguished
+pedigree; and we have abundant proof of that in Rutherford's sheaf of
+letters to her.  His dedication of that most remarkable piece, _The Trial
+and Triumph of Faith_, is sufficient of itself to show how highly
+Rutherford esteemed Lady Kenmure, both as to her head and her heart.  Till
+our theological students have been led to study _The Trial and Triumph of
+Faith: 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 the
+intellectual rank of Samuel Rutherford himself, or of the intelligence
+and the attainments of his hearers and readers and correspondents.  Thomas
+Goodwin was always telling the theological students of Oxford in those
+days to thicken their too thin homilies with more doctrine: Rutherford's
+very thinnest books are almost too thick, both with theology and with
+thought.
+
+How ever a woman like Jane Campbell came to marry a man like John Gordon
+will remain a mystery.  It was not that he was a man of no mind; he was a
+man of no worth or interest of any kind.  He was a rake and a
+lick-spittle, the very last man in Scotland for Jane Campbell to throw
+herself away upon.  And she was too clever and too good a woman not to
+make a speedy and a heart-breaking discovery of the fatal mistake she had
+committed.  Poor Jane Campbell soon wakened up to the discovery that she
+had exchanged the name and the family of a brave and noble house for the
+name and the house of a poltroon.  No wonder that Rutherford's letters to
+her are so often headed: 'To Lady Kenmure, under illness and depression
+of mind.'  Could you have kept quite well had you been a Campbell with
+John Gordon for a husband?  Think of having to nurse your humbug of a
+husband through a shammed illness.  Think of having to take a hand in
+sending in a sham doctor's certificate because your husband was too much
+of a time-server to go to Edinburgh to give his vote for a persecuted
+church.  Think of having to wear the title and decoration your husband
+had 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 keep
+her in bare life all the time the county dames were green with envy at
+the dear-bought honours.  And Kenmure himself had to be brought to his
+death-bed before he became a husband worthy of his wife.  We still read
+in his _Last Speeches_ how God made Lord Gordon's sins to find him out,
+and with what firmness and with what tenderness Rutherford handled the
+soul 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 them
+than even his grossest sins.  Whoredom and wine after all are but the
+lusts of a man, whereas time-serving and truth-selling are the lusts of a
+devil.  'Dig deeper,' said Rutherford to the dying courtier, and Kenmure
+did dig deeper, till he came down to the seals and the titles and the
+ribbons for which he had sold his soul.  But he that confesses and
+forsakes his sins even at the eleventh hour shall always find mercy, and
+so 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 shall
+need as much grace and more ourselves; but we do somewhat grudge such a
+man a place of honour among the Scots worthies.  We are tempted to throw
+down the book and to demand what right John Gordon has to stand beside
+such men as Patrick Hamilton, and John Knox, and John Wishart, and
+Archibald Campbell, and Hugh M'Kail, and Richard Cameron, and Alexander
+Shields?  But Lochgoin answers us that God sometimes accepts the late
+will for the whole timeous deed, and the bravery and loyalty of the wife
+for the meanness and poltroonery of the husband.  'Have you a present
+sense of God's love?'  'I have, I have,' said the dying Viscount.  As
+Rutherford continued in prayer, Kenmure was observed to smile and look
+upwards.  About sunset Lord Kenmure died, at the same instant that
+Rutherford said Amen to his prayer.  _The Last and Heavenly Speeches_ is
+a rare pamphlet that will well repay its price to him who will seek it
+out and read it.
+
+This was the correspondent, then, to whom Samuel Rutherford wrote such
+counsels and encouragements as these: 'Therefore, madam, herein have
+comfort, that He who seeth perfectly through all your evils, and who
+knoweth the frame and constitution of your nature, and what is most
+healthful for your soul, holdeth every cup of affliction to your head
+with his own gracious hand.  Never believe that your tender-hearted
+Saviour 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 of
+the elect of Christ within you' (_Letter_ III.).  On the death of her
+infant daughter, Rutherford writes to the elect lady: 'She is only sent
+on before, like unto a star, which, going out of our sight, doth not die
+and vanish, but still shineth in another hemisphere.  What she wanted of
+time she hath gotten of eternity, and you have now some plenishing up in
+heaven.  Build your nest upon no tree here, for God hath sold the whole
+forest to death' (_Letter_ IV.).  'Madam, when you are come to the other
+side of the water and have set down your foot on the shore of glorious
+eternity, and look back to the water and to your wearisome journey, and
+shall see in that clear glass of endless glory nearer to the bottom of
+God's wisdom, you shall then be forced to say, "If God had done otherwise
+with me than He hath done, I had never come to the enjoying of this crown
+of glory"' (_Letter_ XL).  'Madam, tire not, weary not; for I dare find
+you the Son of God caution that when you are got up thither and have cast
+your eyes to view the golden city and the fair and never-withering Tree
+of Life that beareth twelve manner of fruits every month, you shall then
+say, "Four-and-twenty hours' abode in this place is worth threescore and
+ten years' sorrow upon earth"' (_Letter_ XIX.).  'Your ladyship goeth on
+laughing and putting on a good countenance before the world, and yet you
+carry heaviness about with you.  You do well, madam, not to make them
+witnesses of your grief who cannot be curers of it' (_Letter_ XX.).
+'Those who can take the crabbed tree of the cross handsomely upon their
+backs and fasten it on cannily shall find it such a burden as its wings
+are to a bird or its sails to a ship' (_Letter_ LXIX.).  'I thought it
+had been an easy thing to be a Christian, and that to seek God had been
+at the next door; but, oh, the windings, the turnings, the ups and downs
+He hath led me through!' (_Letter_ CIV.)  'I may be a book-man and yet be
+an idiot and a stark fool in Christ's way!  The Bible beguiled the
+Pharisees, and so may I be misled' (_Letter_ CVI.).  'I find you
+complaining of yourself, and it becometh a sinner so to do.  I am not
+against you in that.  The more sense the more life.  The more sense of
+sin the less sin' (_Letter_ CVI.).  'Seeing my sins and the sins of my
+youth deserved strokes, how am I obliged to my Lord who hath given me a
+waled and chosen cross!  Since I must have chains, He would put golden
+chains on me, watered over with many consolations.  Seeing I must have
+sorrow (for I have sinned, O Preserver of men!), He hath waled out for me
+joyful sorrow--honest, spiritual, glorious sorrow' (_Letter_ CCVI.).
+There are hundreds of passages as good as these scattered up and down the
+forty-seven letters we have had preserved to us out of the large and
+intimate correspondence that passed between Samuel Rutherford and Lady
+Kenmure.
+
+
+
+
+V.  LADY CARDONESS
+
+
+   'Think it not easy.'--_Rutherford_.
+
+What a lasting interest Samuel Rutherford's pastoral pen has given to the
+hoary old castle of Cardoness!  Those nine so heart-winning letters that
+Rutherford wrote from Aberdeen to Cardoness Castle will still keep the
+memory of that old tower green long after its last stone has crumbled
+into dust.  Readers of Rutherford's letters will long visit Cardoness
+Castle, and will musingly recall old John Gordon and Lady Cardoness, his
+wife, who both worked out each their own salvation in that old fortress,
+and found it a task far from easy.  For nine faithful years Rutherford
+had been the anxious pastor of Cardoness Castle, and then, after he was
+banished from his pulpit and his parish, he only ministered to the Castle
+the more powerfully and prevailingly with his pen.  After reading the
+Cardoness correspondence, we do not wonder to find the stout old
+chieftain heading the hard-fought battles which the people of Anwoth made
+both against Edinburgh and St. Andrews, when those cities and colleges
+attempted 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 man
+with the high-set voice and the unearthly smile till he had lost him; and
+if force of arms could have kept Rutherford in Anwoth, Cardoness would
+soon have buckled on his sword.  He was ashamed to be seen reading the
+letters that came to the Castle from Aberdeen; he denied having read them
+even after he had them all by heart.  The wild old laird was nearer the
+Kingdom of Heaven than any one knew; even his Christian lady did not know
+all that Rutherford knew, and it was a frank sentence of Rutherford's in
+an Aberdeen letter that took lifelong hold of the old laird, and did more
+for his conversion and all that followed it than all Rutherford's sermons
+and all his other letters.  'I find true religion to be a hard task; I
+find heaven hard to be won,' wrote Rutherford to the old man; and that
+did more for his hard and late salvation than all the sermons he had ever
+heard.  'A hard task, a hard task!' the serving-men and the serving-women
+often overheard their old master muttering, as he alighted from the hunt
+and 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 ever
+knew all that his muttering meant.
+
+'Read over your past life often,' Rutherford wrote to the old man.  And
+Cardoness found that to be one of the hardest tasks he had ever tried.  He
+had not forgotten his past life; there were things that came up out of
+his past continually that compelled him to remember it.  But what
+Rutherford meant was that his old parishioner should willingly,
+deliberately and repeatedly open the stained and torn leaves of his past
+life and read it all over in the light of his old age, approaching death,
+and late-awakened conscience.  Rutherford wished Cardoness to sit down as
+Matthew Henry says the captives sat down by the rivers of Babylon, and
+weep 'deliberate tears.'  There were pages in his past life that it was
+the very pains of hell to old Cardoness to read; but he performed the
+hard task, and thus was brought much nearer salvation than even his old
+pastor knew.  'It will take a long lance to go to the bottom of your
+heart, my friend,' wrote Rutherford, faithfully, and, at the same time,
+most respectfully, to the old man.  'Human nature is lofty and
+head-strong in you, and it will cost you far more suffering to be
+mortified and sanctified than it costs the ordinary run of men.'  And,
+instead of that plain speech offending or angering the old laird, it had
+the very opposite effect; it softened him, and humbled him, and
+encouraged him, and gave him new strength for the hard task on which he
+was day and night employed.
+
+Cardoness was a small property, heavily bonded, and some of the leaves
+that were hardest to read in the diary of Gordon's early manhood told the
+bitter history of some added bonds.  Sin would need to be sweet, for it
+is 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 in
+conversation, and he was not silent in his letters.  'You are now upon
+the very borders of the other life.  I told you, when I was with you, the
+whole counsel of God in this matter, and I tell it you again.  Awake to
+righteousness.  Do not lay the burden of your house on other people; do
+not 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, as
+you pass their stables and their cattle-stalls, "Behold, I am old and
+grey-headed; behold, here I am: whose ox have I taken?  Whose ass have I
+taken?  Whom have I defrauded?  Whom have I oppressed?"  I charge you to
+write to me here at once, and be plain with me, and tell me whether your
+salvation is sure.  I hope for the best; but I know that your reckonings
+with the righteous Judge are both many and deep.'  That was a hard task
+to set to a tyrannical old landlord who had been used to call no man
+master, or God either, to take such commands from a poor banished
+minister!  But Cardoness did it.  He mastered his rising pride and
+resentment and did it; and though he found it a hard task to go through
+with his reductions at next rent-day, yet he did it.  Such boldness in
+the Day of Judgment will a good conscience give a man, as when old
+Cardoness actually stood up before the parishioners in the kirk of Anwoth
+and read to them, after the elders had conducted the exercises, a letter
+he had received last week from their silenced minister.  It is one of
+Rutherford's longest and most passionate letters.  Take a sentence or two
+out of it: 'My soul longeth exceedingly to hear whether there be any work
+of Christ in the parish that will bide the trial of fire and water.  I
+think of my people in my sleep.  You know how that, out of love to your
+souls, and out of the desire I had to make an honest account of you, I
+often 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 to
+Aberdeen, though I was preaching about it every day to you.  It would be
+life to me if you would read this letter to my people, and if they would
+profit 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 on
+thy guilty soul.  Christ has His heaven ready for thee, and He will make
+good 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 harder
+task to John Gordon, with his proud neck, with his past life to read,
+with his debts and bonds and increasing expenditure, and with old age
+heavy upon him and death at his door.  And Lady Cardoness was not finding
+her salvation to be easy either in all these untoward circumstances.
+'Think it not easy,' wrote Rutherford to her.  And to make her salvation
+sure, 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 the
+whole Cardoness family and their salvation.  Rutherford had seen that
+from the first day he arrived in Anwoth, and Cardoness and its
+difficulties lay heavy upon his heart in his prison in Aberdeen.  And he
+could not write consolations and comforts and promises to Lady Cardoness
+till he had told her the truth again as he had told her husband.  'The
+kingdom of God and His righteousness is the one thing needful for you and
+for Cardoness and for your children,' wrote Rutherford.  'Houses, lands,
+credit, honour may all be lost if heaven is won.  See that Cardoness and
+you buy the field where the pearl is.  Sell all and buy that field.  I
+beseech you to make conscience of your ways.  Deal kindly with your
+tenants.  I have written my mind at length to your husband, and my
+counsel to you is that, when his passion overcometh him, a soft answer
+will turn away wrath.  God casteth your husband often in my mind; I
+cannot forget him.'
+
+What a power for good is in Samuel Rutherford's pen!  At a few touches it
+carries us across Scotland to the mouth of the Fleet, and back two
+hundred and fifty years, and summons up Cardoness Castle, and peoples the
+hoary old keep again with John Gordon and his wife and children.  We see
+the castle; we see the rack-rented farms lying around the rock on which
+the castle stands; we see Anwoth manse and pulpit empty and silenced; and
+then 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 his
+proper share of human nature--a mass of sinful manhood, strong in will,
+hot in temper, burdened with debt--debt in Edinburgh, and a deeper and
+darker debt elsewhere.  The old lion lay, taken in a net of trouble, and
+the more he struggled the more entangled he became.  And then her
+ladyship, a religious woman; yes, really a religious woman, only, like so
+many religious women, more religious than moral; more emotional than
+practically helpful in everyday life.  All who have only heard of Samuel
+Rutherford and his letters will feel sure that he was just the effusive
+minister, and that his letters were just the soft stuff, to foster a
+piety that came out in feminine moods and emotions rather than in well-
+kept accounts and a well-managed kitchen and nursery.  But we who have
+read Rutherford know better than that.  Lady Cardoness is told, in
+kindest and sweetest but most unmistakable language, that she has to work
+out a not easy salvation in Cardoness Castle, and that, if her husband
+fails 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 for
+eternal life, a divine voice says to ourselves, Work out your own
+salvation with fear and trembling; and at that voice the old keep fades
+from 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--a
+past life to read, to repent of, to redress, to reform, to weep
+deliberate and bitter tears over.  There are debts and many other
+disorders that have to be put right; there are those under us--tenants
+and servants and poor relations--whose cases have to be dealt with
+considerately, justly, kindly, affectionately.  There are things in those
+we love best--in a father, in a mother, in a husband, in a wife--that we
+have to be patient and forbearing with, and to command ourselves in the
+presence of Salvation was not easy in Cardoness Castle, with such a
+master, and such a mistress, and such children, and such tenants, and
+with such debts and straits of all kinds; and Cardoness Castle is
+repeated 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 a
+remarkable feature of a remarkable time in Scotland that so many ladies
+of birth, intellect and influence were found on the side of the
+persecuted Covenanters.  I do not remember any other period in the
+history of the Church of Christ, since the day when the women of Galilee
+ministered of their substance to our Lord Himself, in which noble women
+took such a noble part as did Lady Culross, Lady Jane Campbell, the
+Duchess of Hamilton, the Duchess of Athol, and other such ladies in that
+eventful time.  We had something not unlike it again in the ten years'
+conflict that culminated in the Disruption; and in the social and
+religious movements of our own day, women of rank and talent are not
+found wanting.  At the same time, I do not know where to find such a
+cloud of witnesses for the faith of Christ from among the eminent women
+of 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 innermost
+circles of our best Scottish Christians, for the hand she had in that
+wonderful outpouring of God's grace at the kirk of Shotts on that
+Thanksgiving Monday in 1636.  Under God, that Covenanters' Pentecost was
+more due to Lady Culross than to any other human being.  True, John
+Livingstone preached the Thanksgiving Sermon, but it was through Lady
+Culross's influence that he was got to preach it; and he preached it
+after a night of prayer spent by Lady Culross and her companions, such
+that 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 that
+night they spent at Shotts with God.  It is so unlike what we have ever
+seen or heard of.  There may be one or two of us here who have spent
+whole nights in prayer at some crisis in our life, going from one promise
+to another, when, in the Psalmist's words, the sorrows of death compassed
+us, 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 to
+match in a private way with the hand of God on the kirk of Shotts.  But
+even 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 pray
+for a baptism of spiritual blessing upon to-morrow's congregation.  What
+a mother in Israel was Lady Culross, with five hundred children born of
+her travail in one day!
+
+I have not found any of Lady Culross's letters to Samuel Rutherford, but
+John Livingstone's literary executors have published some eight letters
+she wrote to Livingstone, her close and lifelong friend.  And Lady
+Culross's first letter to John Livingstone is in every point of view, a
+remarkable piece.  It has a strength, an irony, and a tenderness in it
+that at once tell the reader that he is in the hands of a very remarkable
+writer.  But it is not Lady Culross's literature that so much interests
+us 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 obsolete
+spelling, she goes on thus: 'Did you get any heart to remember me and my
+bonds?  As for me, I never found so great impediment within.  Still, it
+is the Lord with whom we have to do, and He gives and takes, casts down
+and raises up, kills and makes alive as pleases His Majesty. . . . My
+task at home is augmented and tripled, and yet I fear worse.  Sin in me
+and 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 overtaken
+him, and this is how her ladyship writes to him:--
+
+'My very worthy and dear brother: Courage, dear brother: it is all in
+love, all works together for the best.  You must be hewn and hammered and
+drest and prepared before you can be a _Leiving-ston_ fit for His
+building.  And if He is minded to make you meet to help others, you must
+look for another manner of strokes than you have yet felt, . . . but when
+you are laid low, and are vile in your own eyes, then He will raise you
+up and refresh you with some blinks of His favourable countenance, that
+you may be able to comfort others with those consolations wherewith you
+have been comforted of Him. . . .  Since God has put His work in your
+weak hands, look not for long ease here: you must feel the full weight of
+your 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 with
+me is but the beginning of another: but guiltiness in me and in mine is
+my greatest cross.'  And after midnight one Sabbath she writes again to
+Livingstone: '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 in
+your heart and in your mouth, and has overcome you with mercy when you
+deserved nothing but wrath, and has not only forgiven your many sins, but
+has saved you from breaking out, as it may be better men have done; but
+He has covered you and restrained you; has loved you freely and has made
+His saints to love you; who will guide you also with His counsel, and
+afterwards receive you to His glory.'
+
+It was from his silent prison in Aberdeen that Samuel Rutherford wrote to
+Lady Culross the letter in which this sentence stands: 'I see that grace
+groweth best in winter.'  Rutherford had had but a short and unsettled
+summer among the birds at Anwoth.  His wife and his two children had been
+taken from him there, and now that which he loved more than wife or child
+had been taken from him too--his pulpit and pastoral work for Jesus
+Christ.  He felt his banishment all the more keenly that he was the first
+of the evangelical ministers of Scotland to be so silenced.  He will have
+plenty of companions in tribulation soon, if that will be any comfort to
+him; but, as it is, he confesses to Lady Culross that it was a peculiar
+pang to him to be 'the first in the kingdom put to utter silence.'  The
+bitterness of banishment has been sung in immortal strains by Dante,
+whose grace under banishment also grew to a fruitfulness we still partake
+of 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 its
+proper root, till we read in his later Aberdeen letters a rapture and a
+richness that his remain-at-home correspondents are fain to tone down.
+
+Not only does true grace grow best in winter, but winter is the best
+season for planting grace.  'I was to be married, and she died,' was a
+young man's explanation to me the other day for proposing to sit down at
+the Lord's Table.  The winter cold that carried off his future wife saw
+planted in his ploughed-up heart the seeds of divine grace; and, no
+doubt, all down the coming winters, with such short interludes of summers
+as may be before him in this cold climate, the grace that was planted in
+winter will grow.  It is not a speculation, it is a personal experience
+that hundreds here can testify to, that the Bible, the Sabbath, the
+Supper, all became so many means of grace to them after some great
+affliction greatly sanctified.  The death of a bride, the death of a
+wife, the death of a child; some blow from bride or wife or child worse
+than 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 they
+will wholly open their hearts to the grace of God.  'Before I was
+afflicted 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 do
+not last long.  It is rather a start in grace we take at such seasons
+than a steady and deep growth in it.  The growth in grace that comes to
+us in connection with some sore affliction is apt to be violent and
+spasmodic; it comes and it goes with the affliction; it is not slow,
+constant, steady, sure, as all true and natural growth is.  If one might
+say so, an unbroken winter in the soul, a continual inward winter, is
+needed to keep up a steady, deep and fruitful growth in grace.  Now, is
+there anything in the spiritual husbandry of God that can be called such
+a winter of the soul?  I think there is.  The winter of our outward
+life--trials, crosses, sickness and death are all the wages of sin; and
+it is among these things that grace first strikes its roots.  And what is
+the continual presence of sin in the soul but the true winter of the
+soul, amid which the grace that is planted in an outbreak of winter ever
+after strikes deeper root and grows?  Once let a man be awakened of God
+to his own great sinfulness; and that not to its fruits in outward
+sorrow, but to its malignant roots that are twisted round and round and
+through and through his heart, and that man has thenceforth such a winter
+within him as shall secure to him a lifelong growth in the most inward
+grace.  Once let a poor wretch awake to the unbroken winter of his own
+sinfulness, a sinfulness that is with him when he lies down and when he
+rises up, when he is abroad among men and when he is at home with himself
+alone: an incessant, increasing, agonising, overwhelming sense of
+sin,--and how that most miserable of men will grow in grace, and how he
+will drink in all the means of grace!  How he will hear the word of grace
+preached, mixing it no longer with fault-finding, as he used to do, but
+with repentance and faith under any and every ministry.  How he will
+examine himself every day; or, rather, how every day will examine,
+accuse, expose and condemn him; and how meekly he will accept the
+exposures and the condemnations!  That man will not need you to preach to
+him about the sanctifying of the Sabbath, or about waiting on this and
+that 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.  He
+will almost get beyond the Word and within the Sacrament, so close up
+will his corruptions drive him to Christ and to God.  Till, having
+provided for that man so much grace and so much growth in grace, God will
+soon have to give him glory, if only to satisfy him and pacify him and
+lift him out of the winter of his discontent.  And then, 'Thy sun shall
+no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw herself; for the Lord
+shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be
+ended.'
+
+
+
+
+VII.  LADY BOYD
+
+
+   'Be sorry at corruption.'--_Rutherford_.
+
+Out of various published and unpublished writings of her day we are able
+to gather an interesting and impressive picture of Lady Boyd's life and
+character.  But there was a carefully written volume of manuscript, that
+I much fear she must have burned when on her death-bed, that would have
+been invaluable to us to-night.  Lady Boyd kept a careful diary for many
+years of her later life, and it was not a diary of court scandal or of
+social gossip or even of family affairs, it was a memoir of herself that
+would have satisfied even John Foster, for in it she tried with all
+fidelity to 'discriminate the successive states of her mind, and so to
+trace the progress of her character, a progress that gives its chief
+importance to human life.'  Lady Boyd's diary would, to a certainty, have
+pleased 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 very
+able man.  He rose from being a simple advocate at the Scottish Bar to be
+Lord President of the Court of Session, after which, for his great
+services, he was created Earl of Haddington.  Christina, his eldest
+daughter, inherited no small part of her father's talents and strength of
+character.  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 and
+a blessing to her old age.  And, under the Divine promise, we do not
+wonder at that, when we see what sort of mother they had.  For with all
+sovereign and inscrutable exceptions the rule surely still holds, 'Train
+up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart
+from it.'  All her days Lady Boyd was on the most intimate terms with the
+most eminent ministers of the Church of Scotland.  We find such men as
+Robert Bruce, Robert Blair, John Livingstone, and Samuel Rutherford
+continually referring to her in the loftiest terms.  But it was not so
+much her high rank, or her great ability, or her fearless devotion to the
+Presbyterian and Evangelical cause that so drew those men around her; it
+was rather the inwardness and the intensity of her personal religion.  You
+may be a determined upholder of a Church, of Presbytery against Prelacy,
+of Protestantism against Popery, or even of Evangelical religion against
+Erastianism and Moderatism, and yet know nothing of true religion in your
+own heart.  But men like Livingstone and Rutherford would never have
+written of Lady Boyd as they did had she not been a rare pattern of
+inward and spiritual Christianity.
+
+I have spoken of Lady Boyd's diary.  'She used every night,' says
+Livingstone, 'to write what had been the state of her soul all day, and
+what she had observed of the Lord's doing.'  When all her neighbours were
+lying down without fear, her candle went not out till she had taken pen
+and ink and had called herself to a strict account for the past day.  Her
+duties and her behaviour to her husband, to her children, to her
+servants, and to her many dependants; the things that had tried her
+temper, her humility, her patience, her power of self-denial; any
+strength and wisdom she had attained to in the government of her tongue
+and in shutting her ears from the hearing of evil; as, also, every
+ordinary as well as extraordinary providence that had visited her that
+day, and how she had been able to recognise it and accept it and take
+good out of it.  Thus the Lady Boyd prevented the night-watches.  When
+the women of her own rank sat down to write their promised letters of
+gossip and scandal and amusement she sat down to write her diary.  'We
+see many things, but we observe nothing,' said Rutherford in a letter to
+Lady Kenmure.  All around her God had been dealing all that day with Lady
+Boyd's neighbours as well as with her, only they had not observed it.  But
+she 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 it
+touched and all that touched it immediately to fine gold.  Riding home
+late one night from a hunting supper-party, young Lord Boyd saw his
+mother's candle still burning, and he made bold to knock at her door to
+ask why she was not asleep.  Without saying a word, she took her son by
+the hand and set him down at her table and pointed him to the wet sheet
+she had just written.  When he had read it he rose, without speaking a
+word, and went to his own room, and though that night was never all their
+days spoken of to one another, yet all his days Lord Boyd looked back on
+that night of the hunt as being the night when his soul escaped from the
+snare of the fowler.  I much fear the diary is lost, but it would be well
+worth the trouble of the owner of Ardross Castle to cause a careful
+search 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 things
+about this remarkable woman out of the letters and reminiscences of such
+men as Livingstone and Rutherford and her namesake, Principal Boyd of
+Trochrig.  Rutherford, especially, was, next to her midnight page, her
+ladyship's confidential and bosom friend.  'Now Madam,' he writes in a
+letter from Aberdeen, 'for your ladyship's own case.'  And then he
+addresses himself in his finest style to console his correspondent,
+regarding some of the deepest and most painful incidents of her rare and
+genuine 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 of
+technical term much in vogue with spiritual writers of the profounder
+kind.  It expresses to those unhappy persons who have the thing in
+themselves, and who are also familiar with the Scriptural and
+experimental use of the word--to them it expresses with fearful truth and
+power the sinfulness of their own hearts, as that sinfulness abides and
+breaks out continually.  Now, how could Lady Boyd, being the woman she
+was, but be sorry and inconsolably sorry to find all that in her own
+heart every day?  No wonder that she and her son never referred to what
+she 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 secure
+when she saw and felt every day that deadly disease eating at her own
+heart?  She could not be secure for an hour; she would have been anything
+but the grave and prudent woman she was--she would have been mad--had she
+for a single moment felt secure with such a corrupt heart.  You must all
+have read a dreadful story that went the round of the newspapers the
+other day.  A prairie hunter came upon a shanty near Winnipeg, and
+found--of all things in the world!--a human foot lying on the ground
+outside the door.  Inside was a young English settler bleeding to death,
+and almost insane.  He had lost himself in the prairie-blizzard till his
+feet were frozen to mortification, and in his desperation he had taken a
+carving-knife and had hacked off his most corrupt foot and had thrown it
+out of doors.  And then, while the terrified hunter was getting help, the
+despairing man cut off the other corrupt foot also.  I hope that brave
+young Englishman will live till some Winnipeg minister tells him of a yet
+more terrible corruption than ever took hold of a frozen foot, and of a
+knife that cuts far deeper than the shanty carver, and consoles him in
+death with the assurance that it was of him that Jesus Christ spoke in
+the Gospel long ago, when He said that it is better to enter into life
+halt and maimed, rather than having two feet to be cast into everlasting
+fire.  There was no knife in Ardross Castle that would reach down to Lady
+Boyd's corrupt heart; had there been, she would have first cleansed her
+own 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 religion
+to cut off a right hand and a right foot so as to keep Christ and the
+life everlasting, and so had her eldest son, Lord Boyd.  As Bishop
+Martensen also says, 'Many a time we cannot avoid feeling a deep sorrow
+for ourselves because of the bottomless depth of corruption which lies
+hidden in our heart--which sorrow, rightly felt and rightly exercised, is
+a weighty basis of sanctification.'
+
+To an able woman building on such a weighty basis as that on which Lady
+Boyd had for long been building, Rutherford was quite safe to lay weighty
+and unusual comforts on her mind and on her heart.  'Christ has a use for
+all your corruptions,' he says to her, to her surprise and to her
+comfort.  'Beata culpa,' cried Augustine; and 'Felix culpa,' cried
+Gregory.  '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 most
+spiritually-minded of men, James Fraser of Brea.  Those who are willing
+and able to read a splendid passage for themselves on this paradoxical-
+sounding subject will find it on page xii. of the Address to the Godly
+and Judicious Reader in Samuel Rutherford's _Christ Dying and Drawing
+Sinners to Himself_.
+
+What Rutherford was bold to say to Lady Boyd about her corruptions she
+was able herself to say to Trochrig about her crosses.  'Right Honourable
+Sir,--It is common to God's children and to the wicked to be under
+crosses, but their crosses chase God's children to God.  O that anything
+would chase me to my God!'  There speaks a woman of mind and of heart who
+knows 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 our
+other crosses taken together.  We have no cross to be compared with our
+corruptions, and when they have chased us close enough and deep enough
+into the secret place of God, then we will begin to understand and adorn
+the dangerous doxologies of Augustine and Gregory, Fraser and Fox.  Yes;
+anything and everything is good that chases us up to God: crosses and
+corruptions, sin and death and hell.  'O that anything would chase me to
+my God!' cried saintly Lady Boyd.  And that leads her ladyship in another
+letter to Trochrig to tell him the kind of preaching she needs and that
+she must have at any cost.  'It will not neither be philosophy nor
+eloquence that will draw me from the broad road of perdition: I must have
+a trumpet to tell me of my sins.'  That was a well-said word to the then
+Principal of Glasgow University who had so many of the future ministers
+of Scotland under his hands, all vying with one another as to who should
+be the best philosopher and the most eloquent preacher.  Trochrig was
+both 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 true
+minister, and I hope he read her letter and gave his students her name in
+his pastoral theology class.  'Lady Boyd on the broad road of perdition!'
+some of his students would exclaim.  'Why, Lady Boyd is the most saintly
+woman in all the country.'  And that would only give the learned
+Principal an opportunity to open up to his class, as he was so well
+fitted to do, that saying of Rutherford to Lady Kenmure: that 'sense of
+sin is a sib friend to a spiritual man,' till some, no doubt, went out of
+that class and preached, as Thomas Boston did, to 'terrify the godly.'
+Such results, no doubt, came to many from Lady Boyd's letter to the
+Principal as to the preaching she needed and must at any cost have: not
+philosophy, nor eloquence, but a voice like a trumpet to tell her of her
+sin.
+
+Rutherford was in London attending the sittings of the Westminster
+Assembly when his dear friend Lady Boyd died in her daughter's house at
+Ardross.  The whole Scottish Parliament, then sitting at St. Andrews,
+rose out of respect and attended her funeral.  Rutherford could not be
+present, but he wrote a characteristically comforting letter to Lady
+Ardross, which has been preserved to us.  He reminded her that all her
+mother's sorrows were comforted now, and all her corruptions healed, and
+all her much service of Christ and His Church in Scotland far more than
+recompensed.
+
+Children of God, take comfort, for so it will soon be with you also.  Your
+salvation, far off as it looks to you, is far nearer than when you
+believed.  You will carry your corruptions with you to your grave; 'they
+lay 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 loathsome
+will you feel your corruptions to be; but what about that, if only they
+chase you the closer up to God, and make what is beyond the grave the
+more sure and the more sweet to your heart.  Lady Boyd is not sorry for
+her corruptions now.  She is now in that blessed land where the
+inhabitant 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 for
+the like of you that that inheritance is prepared and kept, that
+inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.  Take
+comfort, for they that be whole need not a physician, but they that are
+sick.
+
+
+
+
+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'Naught
+and Grizel Fullarton.  Lady Robertland, like so many of the other ladies
+of the Covenant, was not only a woman of deep personal piety and great
+patriotism, she was also, like Lady Kenmure, Lady Boyd, and Marion
+M'Naught, a woman of remarkable powers of mind.  For one thing, she had a
+fascinating gift of conversation, and, like John Bunyan, it was her habit
+to speak of spiritual things with wonderful power under the similitude
+and parable of outward and worldly things.  At the time of the famous
+'Stewarton sickness' Lady Robertland was of immense service, both to the
+ministers and to the people.  Robert Fleming tells us that the profane
+rabble of that time gave the nickname of the Stewarton sickness to that
+'extraordinary outletting of the Spirit' that was experienced in those
+days over the whole of the west of Scotland, but which fell in perfect
+Pentecostal power on both sides of the Stewarton Water.  'I preached
+often to them in the time of the College vacation,' says Robert Blair,
+'residing at the house of that famous saint, the Lady Robertland, and I
+had much conference with the people, and profited more by them than I
+think they did by me; though ignorant people and proud and secure livers
+called them "the daft people of Stewarton."'  The Stewarton sickness was
+as like as possible, both in its manifestations and in its results, to
+the Irish Revival of 1859, in which, when it came over and awakened
+Scotland, the Duchess of Gordon, another lady of the Covenant, acted much
+the same part in the North that Lady Robertland acted in her day in the
+West.  Many of our ministers still living can say of Huntly Lodge, 'I
+resided often there, and preached to the people, profiting more by them
+than they could have done by me.'
+
+_Outgate_ is an old and an almost obsolete word, but it is a word of
+great expressiveness and point.  It bears on the face of it what it
+means.  An outgate is just a _gate out_, a way of redemption, deliverance
+and escape.  And her _rare_ outgates does not imply that Lady
+Robertland's outgates were few, but that they were extraordinary, seldom
+matched, and above all expectation and praise.  Lady Robertland's
+outgates 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 in
+the sense that she, like the Psalmist in Mr. James Guthrie's psalm, was a
+wonder unto many, and most of all unto herself.  But a gate out, and
+especially such a gate as the Lady Robertland so often came out at, needs
+a key, needs many keys, and many keys of no common kind, and it needs a
+janitor also, or rather a redeemer and a deliverer of a kind
+corresponding to the kind of gate and the kind of confinement on which
+the gate shuts and opens.  And when Lady Robertland thought of her rare
+outgates--and she thought more about them than about anything else that
+ever happened to her--and as often as she could get an ear and a heart
+into which to tell them, she always pictured to her audience and to
+herself the majestic Figure of the first chapter of the Revelation.  She
+often spoke of her rare outgates to David Dickson, and Robert Blair, and
+John Livingstone, and to her own Stewarton minister, Mr. Castlelaw, whose
+name 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 at
+Stewarton, and accompanied him back and forward, singing psalms all the
+way.'  Her ladyship often told saintly Mr. Castlelaw of her rare
+outgates, and always so spoke to him of the Amen, who has the keys of
+hell and of death, that he never could read that chapter all his days
+without praising God that he had had the Lady Robertland and her rare
+outgates in his sin-sick parish.
+
+But it is time to turn to some of those special and rare outgates that
+the Amen with the keys gave to His favoured handmaiden, the Lady
+Robertland; and the first kind of outgate, on account of which she was
+always such an astonishment to herself, was what she would call her
+outgate from providential disabilities, entanglements, and
+embarrassments.  She was wont to say to William Guthrie, who best
+understood her witty words and her wonderful history, that the wicked
+fairies had handicapped her infant feet in her very cradle.  She could
+use a freedom of speech with Guthrie, and he with her, such as neither of
+them could use with Livingstone or with Rutherford.  Rutherford could not
+laugh when his heart was breaking, as Lady Robertland and the witty
+minister of Fenwick were often overheard laughing.  'Yes, but your
+Ladyship has won the race with all your weights,' Guthrie would laugh and
+say.  'One of my many races,' she would answer, with half a smile and
+half 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 it
+in hand, has a thousand and more keys wherewith to give poor creatures
+like me our rare outgates.'  There were few alive by that time who had
+known Lady Robertland in her early days, and she seldom spoke of those
+days; only, on the anniversary of her early marriage, she never forgot
+her feelings when her life as a Fleming came to an end and her new life
+as a Robertland began.  There was a famous preacher of her day who
+sometimes spoke familiarly of the 'keys of the cupboard, that the Master
+carried at His girdle,' and she used sometimes to take up his homely
+words and say that she had had all the sweetest morsels and most delicate
+dainties of earth's cupboard taken out from under lock and key and put
+into her mouth.  'He ties terrible knots,' she would say, 'just to have
+the pleasure of loosing them off from those He loves.  He lays nets and
+sets traps only that He may get a chance of healing broken bones and
+setting the terrified free.'  No wonder that Wodrow calls her 'a much-
+exercised woman,' with such ingates and outgates, and with such miracles
+of an interposing Providence filling her childhood, her youth, her
+married and her widowed life.  The _Analecta_ is full of remarkable
+providences, but Lady Robertland's exercises and outgates are too
+wonderful even for the pages of that always wonderful and sometimes too
+awful 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's
+prison in Aberdeen.'  Rutherford's letters are full of more or less
+mysterious allusions to the rare outgates that God in Christ had given
+him also from the snares and traps into which he had fallen by the sins
+and follies of his unregenerate youth.  Whatever trouble came on
+Rutherford all his days--the persecution of the bishop, his banishment to
+Aberdeen, the shutting of his mouth from preaching Christ, the loss of
+wife and child, and the poignant pains of sanctification--he gathered
+them 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 to
+my Lord, who, out of many possible crosses, hath given me this waled and
+chosen cross to suffer for the name of Jesus Christ.  Since I must have
+chains, He has put golden chains on me.  Seeing I must have sorrow, for I
+have sinned, O Preserver of mankind, Thou hast waled and selected out for
+me a joyful sorrow--an honest, spiritual, glorious sorrow.  Oh, what am
+I, such a rotten mass of sin, to be counted worthy of the most honourable
+rod in my Father's house, even the golden rod wherewith the Lord the Heir
+was Himself stricken.  Thou wast a God that forgavest them, though Thou
+tookest vengeance of their inventions.'  Rutherford also was forgiven,
+and the only vengeance that God took of his inventions, the
+irregularities of his youth, was taken in the form of a 'waled cross.'  'I
+might 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 not
+for my sin but for His name.'  What a life hid with Christ in God he must
+live, who, like Rutherford, takes all his trials on earth as a transmuted
+and substituted cross for his sins: and who is able to take all his
+deserved and demanded chastisements in the shape of inward and spiritual
+and sanctifying pain.  O sweet vengeance of grace on our sinful
+inventions!  O most intimate and most awful of all our secrets, the
+secrets of a love-waled, love-substituted cross!  O rare outgate from the
+scorn of the causeway to the smelting-house of 'Him who hath His fire in
+Zion!'
+
+'The sorrows of death compassed me,' sings the Psalmist, and 'the pains
+of hell gat hold upon me; I found trouble and sorrow.'  What, you may
+well ask, were those pains of hell that gat such hold of David while yet
+he was a living and unreprobated man?  Was it not too strong language to
+use about any earthly experience, however terrible, to call it the pains
+of hell?  Ask that man whose sin has found him out what he thinks the
+pains of hell were in David's case, and he will tell you that
+remorse--unsoftened, unsweetened, unquenchable remorse--is hell; at any
+rate, it is hell upon earth; and till he confessed his sin it was David's
+hell.  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 that
+Jehovah laid on our Surety the sin of us all till He was three hours in
+hell for us, and came out of it, as Rutherford says, with the keys of
+hell at His proud girdle?  And it is with those captured keys that He now
+unlocks 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 and
+remorse.
+
+   '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 has
+been.  The Judge of all the earth would not be a just judge unless hell
+were already kindled in your heart.  But He who is a just God is also a
+Saviour, and He has with His own hand hung the key of hell and of your
+self-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 very
+much, so far as you can understand, for David's sins, you, too, are in
+the pains of very hell.  Cast yourself, like John in the Revelation, at
+His feet, and see if He does not say to you what He said through Nathan
+to David, and what He said Himself to John, and what He said to Lady
+Robertland, and what He said to Samuel Rutherford.  Cast yourself at His
+feet, and see if you do not get at His hands as rare an outgate and as
+wonderfully 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 a
+history in you and to you of all kinds of rare outgates.  For, once He
+who has the keys has taken your case in hand, He will not let either rust
+or dust gather on His keys till He has opened every door for you and set
+you free from every snare.  There are many evil affections, evil habits,
+and evil practices that are still closely padlocked both on your outward
+and your inward life that you must be wholly delivered from.  And He who
+has all the keys of your body and your soul too at His girdle, will not
+consider that you have got your full outgate, or that He has at all
+discharged His duty by you, till, as Rutherford says, your sinful habits
+and practices are all loosened off from your life and are driven back
+into the inner world of your inclinations; and then, after that, He will
+only take up still more skilful and still more intricate keys wherewith
+to turn the locks of delight, desire, and inclination.  O blessed keys of
+hell and of death, of habit and inclination and evil affection!  O
+blessed 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 rare
+outgates from the Amen with the keys!  Who shall give me an outgate from
+this 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 intense
+love of life and service--nay, because of that intense love--felt
+sometimes that this present life at its very best was but a life of
+relaxed imprisonment rather than of true liberty.  Paul was, as we say, a
+kind of first-class misdemeanant, as Samuel Rutherford also was in his
+prison-palace in Aberdeen, and the Lady Robertland in Stewarton House;
+they had a liberty that was not to be despised; they had light and air
+and exercise; they were not in chains in the dungeon; they had pen and
+ink; they had books and papers, and their friends might on occasion visit
+them.  They might have better food also if they paid for it; and, best of
+all, they could, till their full release came, beguile and occupy the
+time in work for Christ and His Church.  But still they were present in
+this body of sin and death, and absent from the Lord, and they pined,
+and, I fear, sinfully murmured sometimes, for the last and the greatest
+and the best outgate of all.  'As for myself,' writes Rutherford, 'I
+think that if a poor, weak, dying sheep seeks for an old dyke, and the
+lee-side of a hill in a storm, I surely may be allowed to long for
+heaven.  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 miserable
+bondage it is to be at the nod of such a master as Sin!  But He who hath
+the keys hath sworn that our sin shall not loose the covenant bond, and
+therefore I wait in hope and in patience till His time shall come to take
+off all my fetters and make a hole in this cage of death that the
+imprisoned 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 Rutherford
+circle.  We do not know so much of Jean Brown outside of the Rutherford
+Letters as we would like to know, but her son, John Brown of Wamphray, is
+very well known to every student of the theology and ecclesiastical
+history of Scotland in the second half of the seventeenth century.  'I
+rejoice to hear about your son John.  I had always a great love to dear
+John Brown.  Remember my love to John Brown.  I never could get my love
+off that man.'  And all Rutherford's esteem and affection for Jean
+Brown's gifted and amiable son was fully justified in the subsequent
+history of the hard-working and well-persecuted parish minister of
+Wamphray.  Letter 84 is a very remarkable piece of writing even in
+Rutherford, and the readers of this letter would gladly learn more than
+even its eloquent pages tell them about the woman who could draw such a
+letter out of Samuel Rutherford's mind and heart, the woman who was also
+the honoured mother of such a student and such a minister as John Brown
+of Wamphray.  This letter has a _bite_ in it--to use one of Rutherford's
+own words in the course of it--all its own.  And it is just that profound
+and pungent element in this letter, that bite in it, that has led me to
+take this remarkable letter for my topic to-night.
+
+There had been some sin in Samuel Rutherford's student days, or some
+stumble sufficiently of the nature of sin, to secretly poison the whole
+of his subsequent life.  Sin is such a poisonous thing that even a
+mustard-seed of it planted in a man's youth will sometimes spring up into
+a thicket of terrible trouble both to himself and to many other people
+all his and all their days.  An almost invisible drop of sin let fall
+into the wellhead of life will sometimes poison the whole broad stream of
+life, as well as all the houses and fields and gardens, with all their
+flowers and fruits, that are watered out of it.  When any misfortune
+falls upon a Hebrew household, when any Jewish man or woman's sin finds
+them out, they say that there is an ounce of the golden calf on it.  They
+open their Exodus and they read there in their bitterness of how Moses in
+his hot anger took the calf, which the children of Israel had polluted
+themselves with, and burned it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and
+strewed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel to drink of
+it.  And, though God turned the poisoned, dust-laden waters of Samuel
+Rutherford's life into very milk and wine, yet to Rutherford's subtle and
+detective taste there was always a certain tang of the unclean and
+accursed thing in it.  The best waled and most tenderly substituted cross
+in Rutherford's chastised life had always a certain galling corner in it
+that recalled to him, as he bled inwardly under it, the lack of complete
+purity and strict regularity in his youth.  And it is to be feared that
+there are but too few men or women either who have not some Rutherford-
+like memory behind them that still clouds their now sheltered life and
+secretly poisons their good conscience.  Some disingenuity, some
+simulation or dissimulation of affection, some downright or constructive
+dishonesty, some lack towards some one of open and entire integrity, some
+breach of good faith in spirit if not in letter, some still stinging
+tresspass of the golden rule, some horn or hoof of the golden calf, the
+bitter dust of which they taste to this day in their sweetest cup and at
+their most grace-spread table.  There are more men and women in the
+Church of Christ than any one would believe who sing with a broken heart
+at every communion table: 'He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor
+rewarded us according to our iniquities.  As far as the east is from the
+west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us.'
+
+And even after such men and women might have learned a lesson, how soon
+we see all that lesson forgotten.  Even after God's own hand has so
+conspicuously cut the bars of iron in sunder; after He has made the
+solitary to dwell in families; we still see sin continuing in new shapes
+and in other forms to poison the sweetest things in human life.  What
+selfishness we see in family life, and that, too, after the vow and the
+intention of what self-suppression and self-denial.  What impatience with
+one another, what bad temper, what cruel and cutting words, what coldness
+and rudeness and neglect, in how many ways our abiding sinfulness
+continues to poison the sweetest springs of life!  And, then, how soon
+such unhappy men begin to see themselves reproduced and multiplied in
+their children.  How many fathers see, with a secret bitterness of spirit
+that never can be told, their own worst vices of character and conduct
+reproduced and perpetuated in their children!  One father sees his
+constitutional 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 one
+who is his very image.  While many a mother sees her own youthful
+shallowness, frivolity, untruthfulness, deceit and parsimony in her
+daughter, for whose morality and religion she would willingly give up her
+own 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.  They
+betake themselves, for no reason so much as just for intended
+disobedience and impudent independence, to other pursuits and pleasures,
+to other political and ecclesiastical parties than we have ever gone
+with.  And when it is too late we see how we have again mishandled and
+mismanaged our families as we had mishandled and mismanaged our own
+youth, till it is only one grey head here and another there that does not
+go down to the grave under a crushing load of domestic sorrow.  When the
+best 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 the
+sweetest things this earth can taste, then a circle of close and true and
+dear friendships does not come very far behind them.  Rutherford had
+plenty of trouble in his family life that he used to set down to the sins
+of his youth; and then the way he poisoned so many of his best
+friendships by his so poisonous party spirit is a humbling history to
+read.  He quarrelled irreconcilably with his very best friends over
+matters that were soon to be as dead as Aaron's golden calf, and which
+never had much more life or decency in them.  The matters were so small
+and miserable over which Rutherford quarrelled with such men as David
+Dickson and Robert Blair that I could not interest you in them at this
+time 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 those
+matters that have served under Satan to poison so often our own private
+and public and religious life.  Rutherford actually refused to assist
+Robert Blair at the Lord's Supper, so embittered and so black was his
+mind against his dearest friend.  'I would rather,' said sweet-tempered
+Robert Blair, 'have had my right hand hacked off at the cross of
+Edinburgh than have written such things.'  'My wife and I,' wrote dear
+John Livingstone, 'have had more bitterness together over these matters
+than we have ever had since we knew what bitterness was.'  And no one in
+that day had a deeper hand in spreading that bitterness than just the
+hand that wrote Rutherford's letters.  There is no fear of our calling
+any man master if we once look facts fair in the face.
+
+The precariousness of our best friendships, the brittle substance out of
+which they are all composed and constructed, and the daily accidents and
+injuries to which they are all exposed--all this is the daily distress of
+all true and loving hearts.  What a little thing will sometimes embitter
+and poison what promised to be a loyal and lifelong friendship!  A
+passing misunderstanding about some matter that will soon be as dead to
+us both as the Resolutions and Protestations of Rutherford's day now are
+to all men; an accidental oversight; our simple indolence in letting an
+absent friendship go too much out of repair for want of a call, or a
+written message, or a timeous gift: a thing that only a too-scrupulous
+mind would go the length of calling sin, will yet poison an old
+friendship and embitter it beyond all our power again to sweeten it.  And,
+then, how party spirit poisons our best enjoyments as it did
+Rutherford's.  How all our minds are poisoned against all the writers and
+the speakers, the statesmen and the journalists of the opposite camp, and
+even against the theologians and preachers of the opposite church.  And,
+then, inside our own camp and church how new and still more malignant
+kinds of poison begin to distil out of our incurably wicked hearts to eat
+out the heart of our own nearest and dearest friendships.  Envy, for one
+thing, which no preacher, not even Pascal or Newman, no moralist, no
+satirist, no cynic has yet dared to tell the half of the horrible truth
+about: drip, drip, drip, its hell-sprung venom soaks secretly into the
+oldest, the dearest and the truest friendship.  Yes, let it be for once
+said, the viper-like venom of envy--the most loyal, the most honourable,
+the most self-forgetting and self-obliterating friendship is never in
+this 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 still
+falls with its deadly damp.  What did you suppose Rutherford meant when
+he wrote as he did write about himself and about herself to that so
+capable and so saintly woman, Jean Brown?  Do you accuse Samuel
+Rutherford of unmeaning cant?  Was he mouthing big Bible words without
+any meaning?  Or, was he not drinking at that moment of the poison-filled
+cup of his own youthful, family, and friendship sins?  Nobody will
+persuade me that Rutherford was a canting hypocrite when he wrote those
+terrible and still unparaphrased words: 'Sin, sin, this body of sin and
+corruption embittereth and poisoneth all our enjoyments.  Oh that I were
+home where I shall sin no more!'
+
+Puritan was an English nickname rather than a Scottish, but our Scots
+Presbyterians were Puritans at bottom like their English brethren both in
+their statesmanship and in their churchmanship, as well as in their
+family and personal religion.  And they held the same protest as the
+English Puritans held against the way in which the scandalous corruptions
+of the secular court, and the equally scandalous corruptions of the
+sacred bench, were together fast poisoning the public enjoyments of
+England and of Scotland.  You will hear cheap, shallow, vinous speeches
+at public dinners and suchlike resorts about the Puritans, and about how
+they 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 to
+look an inch beneath the surface of things they would see that it was not
+the Puritans but their persecutors who really took away from the serious-
+minded people of Scotland and England both the dance and the drama, as
+well as so many far more important things in that day.  Had the Puritans
+and their fathers always had their own way, especially in England, those
+sources of public and private enjoyment would never have been poisoned to
+the people as they were and are, and that cleft would never have been cut
+between the conscience and some kinds of culture and delight which still
+exists for so many of the best of our people.  Charles Kingsley was no
+ascetic, and his famous _North British_ article, 'Plays and Puritans,'
+was but a popular admission of what a free and religious-minded England
+owes on one side of their many-sided service to the Puritans of that
+impure day.  Christina Rossetti is no Calvinist, but she puts the
+Calvinistic and Puritan position about the sin-poisoned enjoyments of
+this life in her own beautiful way: 'Yes, all our life long we shall be
+bound to refrain our soul, and keep it low; but what then?  For the books
+we now forbear to read we shall one day be endued with wisdom and
+knowledge.  For the music we will not now listen to we shall join in the
+song of the redeemed.  For the pictures from which we turn we shall gaze
+unabashed on the beatific vision.  For the companionship we shun we shall
+be welcomed into angelic society and the companionship of triumphant
+saints.  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 the
+rapture of heaven.'
+
+All through Rutherford's lifetime preaching was his chiefest enjoyment
+and his most exquisite delight.  He was a born preacher, and his
+enjoyment of preaching was correspondingly great.  Even when he was
+removed from Anwoth to St. Andrews, where, what with his professorship
+and principalship together, one would have thought that he had his hands
+full enough, he yet stipulated with the Assembly that he should be
+allowed to preach regularly every Sabbath-day.  But sin, again, that
+dreadful, and, to Rutherford, omnipresent evil, poisoned all his
+preaching also and made it one of the heaviest burdens of his conscience
+and his heart and his life.  There is a proverb to the effect that when
+the best things become corrupt then that is corruption indeed.  And so
+Rutherford discovered it to be in the matter of his preaching.  Do what
+he would, Rutherford, like Shepard, could not keep the thought of what
+men would think out of his weak and evil mind, both before, and during,
+but more especially after his preaching.  And that poisoned and corrupted
+and filled the pulpit with death to Rutherford, in a way and to a degree
+that nobody but a self-seeking preacher will believe or understand.
+Rutherford often wondered that he had not been eaten up of worms in his
+pulpit like King Herod on his throne, and that for the very same
+atheistical and blasphemous reason.
+
+Those in this house who have followed all this with that intense and
+intelligent sympathy that a somewhat similar experience alone will give,
+will not be stumbled to read what Rutherford says in his letter to his
+near 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 be
+at the nod and beck of Sin!'  Nor will they wonder to read in his letter
+to Lady Boyd, that she is to be sorry all her days on account of her
+inborn and abiding corruptions.  Nor, again, that he himself was sick at
+his heart, and at the very yolk of his heart, at sin, dead-sick with
+hatred and disgust at sin, and correspondingly sick with love and longing
+after Jesus Christ.  Nor, again, that he awoke ill every morning to
+discover that he had not yet awakened in his Saviour's sinless likeness.
+Nor will you wonder, again, at the seraphic flights of love and worship
+that Samuel Rutherford, who was so poisoned with sin, takes at the name
+and the thought of his divine Physician.  For to Rutherford that divine
+Physician has promised to come 'the second time without sin unto
+salvation.'  The first time He came He sucked the poison of sin out of
+the souls of sinners with His own lips, and out of all the enjoyments
+that He had sanctified and prepared for them in heaven.  And He is coming
+back--He has now for a long time come back and taken Rutherford home to
+that sanctification that seemed to go further and further away from
+Rutherford the longer he lived in this sin-poisoned world.  And, amongst
+all those who are now home in heaven, I cannot think there can be many
+who 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 tell
+us all that went on within its walls, what a treasure to us that story
+would be!  Even the sighs and the meanings that visit us from among its
+mouldering stones tell us things that we shall not soon forget.  They
+tell us how hard a task old John Gordon found salvation to be in that old
+house; and they tell us still, to deep sobs, how hard it was to him to
+see the sins and faults of his own youth back upon him again in the sins
+and faults of his son and heir.  Old John Gordon's once so wild heart was
+now somewhat tamed by the trials of life, by the wisdom and the goodness
+of his saintly wife, and not least by his close acquaintance with Samuel
+Rutherford; but the comfort of all that was dashed from his lips by the
+life his eldest son was now living.  Cardoness had always liked a good
+proverb, and there was a proverb in the Bible he often repeated to
+himself in those days as he went about his grounds: 'The fathers have
+eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.'  The
+miserable 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 a
+bad man entails on his eldest son than a burdened estate.  There was no
+American wheat or Australian wool to reduce the rents of Cardoness in
+that day; but he had learnt, as he rode in to Edinburgh again and again
+to raise yet another loan for pocket-money to his eldest son, that there
+are far more fatal things to a small estate than the fluctuations and
+depressions of the corn and cattle markets.  Gordon's own so expensive
+youth was now past, as he had hoped: but no, there it was, back upon him
+again in a most unlooked-for and bitter shape.  'The fathers have eaten
+sour grapes' was all he used to say as he rose to let in his drunken son
+at midnight; he scarcely blamed him; he could only blame himself, as his
+beloved boy reeled in and cursed his father, not knowing what he did.
+
+The shrinking income of the small estate could ill afford to support two
+idle and expensive families, but when young Cardoness broke it to his
+mother that he wished to marry, she and her husband were only too glad to
+hear it.  To meet the outlay connected with the marriage, and to provide
+an income for the new family, there was nothing for it but to raise the
+rents of the farms and cottages that stood on the estate.  Anxious as
+Rutherford was to see young Cardoness settled in life, he could not stand
+by in silence and see honest and hard-working people saddled with the
+debts and expenses of the Castle; and he took repeated opportunities of
+telling the Castle people his mind; till old Cardoness in a passion
+chased him out of the house, and rode next Sabbath-day over to Kirkdale
+and worshipped in the parish church of William Dalgleish.  The insolent
+young laird continued, at least during the time of his courtship, to go
+to church with his mother, but Rutherford could not shut his eyes to the
+fact that he studied all the time how he could best and most openly
+insult his minister.  He used to come to church late on the Sabbath
+morning; and he never remained till the service was over, but would rise
+and stride out in his spurs in the noisiest way and at the most unseemly
+times.  Rutherford's nest at Anwoth was not without its thorns.  And that
+such a crop of thorns should spring up to him and to his people from Lady
+Cardoness's house, was one of Rutherford's sorest trials.  The marriage-
+day, from which so much was expected, came and passed away; but what it
+did for young Cardoness may be judged from such expressions in
+Rutherford's Aberdeen letters as these: 'Be not rough with your wife.  God
+hath given you a wife, love her; drink out of your own fountain, and sit
+at your own fireside.  Make conscience of cherishing your wife.'  His
+marriage 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 he
+left her when he went to join his regiment: 'We are still ruffians and
+churls at home long after we are counted saints abroad.'
+
+One day when Rutherford was in the Spirit in his silent prison, whether
+in the body or out of the body, he was caught up into Paradise to see the
+beauty of his Lord, and to hear his little daughter singing Glory.  And
+among the thousands of children that sang around the throne he told young
+Cardoness that he saw and heard little Barbara Gordon, whose death had
+broken every heart in Cardoness Castle.  'I give you my word for it,'
+wrote Rutherford to her broken-hearted father, 'I saw two Anwoth children
+there, and one of them was your child and one of them was mine.'  And
+when another little voice was silenced in the Castle to sing Glory in
+heaven, Rutherford could then write to young Cardoness all that was in
+his heart; he could not write too plainly now or too often.  Not that you
+are to suppose that they were all saints now at Cardoness Castle, or that
+all 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 death
+comes; but it was no little gain towards godliness when Rutherford could
+write to young Gordon, now old with sorrow, saying, 'Honoured and dear
+brother, I am refreshed with your letter, and I exhort you by the love of
+Christ to set to work upon your own soul.  Read this to your wife, and
+tell her that I am witness for Barbara's glory in heaven.'
+
+We would gladly shut the book here, and bring the Cardoness
+correspondence to a close, but that would not be true to the whole
+Cardoness history, nor profitable for ourselves.  We have buried
+children, like John Gordon; and, like him, we have said that it was good
+for us to be sore afflicted; but not even the assurance that we have
+children in heaven has, all at once, set our affections there, or made us
+meet for entrance there.  We feel it like a heavy blow on the heart, it
+makes us reel as if we had been struck in the face, to come upon a
+passage like this in a not-long-after letter to little Barbara Gordon's
+father: 'Ask yourself when next setting out to a night's drinking: What
+if my doom came to-night?  What if I were given over to God's sergeants
+to-night, to the devil and to the second death?'  And with the same post
+Rutherford wrote to William Dalgleish telling him that if young Cardoness
+came to see him he was to do his very best to direct and guide him in his
+new religious life.  But Rutherford could not roll the care of young
+Cardoness over upon any other minister's shoulders; and thus it is that
+we have the long practical and powerful letter from which the text is
+taken: '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 man
+before he began to curb his passionate heart; and long after he was
+really a man of God, the devil easily carried him captive with his
+besetting sin.  He bit his tongue till it bled as often as he recollected
+the shameful day when he swore at his minister in the rack-renting
+dispute.  And he never rode past Kirkdale Church without sinning again as
+he plunged the rowels into his mare's unoffending sides.  Cardoness did
+not read Dante, else he would have said to himself that his anger often
+filled his heart with hell's dunnest gloom.  The old Castle was never
+well lighted; but, with a father and a son in it like Cardoness and his
+heir, it was sometimes like the Stygian pool itself.  Rutherford had need
+to write to her ladyship to have a soft answer always ready between such
+a father and such a son.  If you have the Inferno at hand, and will read
+what it says about the Fifth Circle, you will see what went on sometimes
+in that debt-drained and exasperated house.  Rutherford was far away from
+Cardoness Castle, but he had memory enough and imagination enough to see
+what went on there as often as fresh provocation arose; and therefore he
+writes 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 or
+disobedient servant, let no sudden outburst of your father, let no
+peevish complaint of your wife make you angry.  Remember every day that
+sudden and savage anger is one of your besetting sins: and watch against
+it, and put a piece of it off every day.  Determine not to speak back to
+your father even if he is wrong and is doing a wrong to you and to your
+mother; your anger will not make matters better: hold your peace, till
+you can with decency leave the house, and go out to your horses and dogs
+till your heart is again quiet.'
+
+Rutherford was not writing religious commonplaces when he wrote to
+Cardoness Castle; if he had, we would not have been reading his letters
+here to-night.  He wrote with his eye and his heart set on his
+correspondents.  And thus it is that 'night-drinking' occurs again and
+again in his letters to young Gordon.  The Cardoness bill to Dumfries for
+drink was a heavy one; but it seems never to have occurred, even to the
+otherwise good people of those days, that strong drink was such a costly
+as well as such a dangerous luxury.  It distresses and shocks us to read
+about 'midnight drinking' in Cardoness Castle, and in the houses round
+about, after all they had come through, but there it is, and we must not
+eviscerate Rutherford's outspoken letters.  The time is not so far past
+yet with ourselves when we still went on drinking, though we were in debt
+for the necessaries of life, and though our sons reeled home from company
+we had made them early acquainted with.  If you will not even yet pass
+the wine altogether, take a little less every day, and the good
+conscience it will give you will make up for the forbidden bouquet; till,
+as Rutherford said to Gordon, 'You will more easily master the remainder
+of your corruptions.'
+
+Let us all try Samuel Rutherford's piecemeal way of reformation with our
+own anger; let us put a bridle on our mouths part of every day.  Let us
+do this if we can as yet go no further; let us bridle our mouths on
+certain subjects, and about certain people, and in certain companies.  If
+you 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 the
+name of, always brings hell's dunnest gloom into your heart--well, put
+off this piece of your sin concerning him; do not speak about him.  I do
+not say you can put the poison wholly out of your heart; you cannot: but
+you can and you must hold your peace about him.  And if that beats
+you--if, instead of all that making you more easily master of your
+corruption, it helps you somewhat to discover how deep and how deadly it
+is--then Samuel Rutherford will not have written this old letter in vain
+for 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 the
+truth of the promise that the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to
+everlasting upon them that fear Him, and His righteousness to children's
+children.  For the life of grace entered the Gordon house three long
+generations before it came to our Alexander of to-night, and it still
+descended upon his son and his son's son.  His great-grandfather,
+Alexander Gordon also, was early nicknamed 'Strong Sandy,' on account of
+his 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 the
+whole of Galloway, Gordon had occasion to cross the English border on
+some family business, to buy cattle or cutlery or what not, when he made
+a purchase he had not intended to make when he set out.  He brought home
+with him a copy of Wycliffe's contraband New Testament, and from the day
+he bought that interdicted book till the day of his death, Strong Sandy
+Gordon never let his purchase out of his own hands.  He carried his
+Wycliffe about with him wherever he went, to kirk and to market; he would
+as soon have thought of leaving his purse or his dirk behind him as his
+Wycliffe, his bosom friend.  And many were the Sabbath-days that the
+laird of Earlston read his New Testament in the woods of Earlston to his
+tenants and neighbours, the Testament in the one hand and the dirk in the
+other.  Tamed and softened as old Sandy Gordon became by that taming and
+softening book, yet there were times when the old Samson still came to
+the surface.  As the Sabbath became more and more sanctified in Reformed
+Scotland, the Saints' days of the Romish Calendar fell more and more into
+open neglect, till the Romish clergy got an Act passed for the enforced
+observance of all the fasts and festivals of the Romish Communion.  One
+of the enacted clauses forbade a plough to be yoked on Christmas Day, on
+pain of the forfeiture and public sale of the cattle that drew the
+plough.  Old Earlston, at once to protest against the persecution, and at
+the same time to save his draught-oxen, yoked ten of his stalwart sons to
+the mid-winter plough, and, after ploughing the whole of Christmas Day,
+openly defied both priest and bishop to distrain his team.  Christmas
+Day, whatever its claims and privileges might be, had no chance in
+Scotland till it came with better reasons than the threat of a Popish
+king and Parliament.  The Patriarch of Galloway, as the south of Scotland
+combined to call old Alexander Gordon of Earlston, lived to the ripe age
+of over a hundred years, and we are told that he kept family worship
+himself 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 saint
+that we have chiefly to do to-night.  And I may say of him, to begin
+with, that he was altogether worthy to inherit and to hand on the
+tradition of family grace and truth that had begun so early and so
+conspicuously with the head of the Earlston house.  'Alexander Gordon of
+Earlston,' says John Livingstone, in one of his priceless little
+etchings, 'was a man of great spirit, but much subdued by inward
+exercise, and who attained the most rare experiences of downcasting and
+uplifting.'  And in Rutherford's first letter to this Earlston, written
+from Anwoth in 1636, he says, in that lofty oracular way of his, 'Jesus
+Christ has said that Alexander Gordon must lead the ring in Galloway in
+witnessing a good conscience.'  This, no doubt, refers to the prosecution
+that Gordon was at that moment undergoing at the hands of the Bishop of
+Glasgow for refusing to admit a nominee of the Bishop into the pulpit of
+a reclaiming parish.  It would have gone still worse with Earlston than
+it did had not Lord Lorne, the true patron of the parish, taken his place
+beside Earlston at the Bishop's bar, and testified his entire approval of
+all that Earlston had done.  With all that, the case did not end till
+Earlston was banished beyond the Tay for his resistance to the will of
+the Bishop of Glasgow.  This all took place in the early half of the
+seventeenth century, so that Dr. Robert Buchanan might with more
+correctness have entitled his able book 'The Two Hundred Years' Conflict'
+than 'The Ten,' so early was the battle for Non-Intrusion begun in
+Galloway.  Alexander Gordon was a Free Churchman 200 years before the
+Disruption, and Lord Lorne was the forerunner of those evangelical and
+constitutional noblemen and gentlemen in Scotland who helped so much to
+carry through the Disruption of 1843.  We find both Lord Lorne, and
+Earlston his factor, sitting as elders beside one another in the Glasgow
+Assembly of 1638, and then we find Earlston the member for Galloway in
+the Parliament of 1641.
+
+We do not know exactly on what occasion it was that Earlston refused to
+accept the knighthood that was offered him by the Crown; but we seem to
+hear the old Wycliffite come back again in his great-grandson as he said,
+'No, your Majesty, excuse and pardon me; but no.'  Alexander Gordon felt
+that it would be an everlasting dishonour to him and to his house to let
+his shoulder be touched in knighthood by a sword that was wet, and that
+would soon be still more wet, with the best blood in Scotland.  'No, your
+Majesty, no.'
+
+Almost all that we are told about Earlston in the histories of his time
+bears out the greatness of his spirit; that, and the stories that gives
+rise to, take the eye of the ordinary historian; but good John
+Livingstone, though not a great historian in other respects, is by far
+the best historian of that day for our purpose.  John Livingstone's
+_Characteristics_ is a perfect gallery of spiritual portraits, and the
+two or three strokes he gives to Alexander Gordon make him stand out
+impressively and memorably to all who understand and care for the things
+of the Spirit.
+
+'A man of great spirit, but much subdued by inward exercise.'  I do not
+need to tell you what exercise is--at least bodily exercise.  All that a
+man does to draw out, develop, and healthfully occupy his bodily powers
+in walking, riding, running, wrestling, carrying burdens, and leaping
+over obstacles--all that is called bodily exercise, and some part of that
+is absolutely necessary every day for the health of the body and for the
+continuance and the increase of its strength.  But we are not all body;
+we are soul as well, and much more soul than body.  Bodily exercise
+profiteth little, says the Apostle,--compared, that is, with the exercise
+of the soul, of the mind, and of the heart.  Now, Alexander Gordon was
+such an athlete of the heart that all who knew him saw well what exercise
+he must have gone through before he was subdued in his high mind and
+proud spirit to be so humble, so meek, so silent, so unselfish, and so
+full of godliness and brotherly kindness--what a world of inward exercise
+all that bespoke!  Alexander Gordon's patience under wrong, his low
+esteem of himself and of all he did, his miraculous power over himself in
+the forgiveness of enemies and in the forgetfulness of injuries, his
+contentment amid losses and disappointments, his silence when other men
+were bursting to speak, and his openness to be told that when he did
+speak he had spoken rashly, unadvisedly, and offensively--in all that
+Earlston was a conspicuous example of what inward exercise carried on
+with sufficient depth and through a sufficiently long life will do even
+for a man of a hot temper and a proud heart.  Alexander Gordon had, to
+begin with, a large heart.  A large heart was a family possession of the
+Gordons; the fathers had it and the mothers had it; and whatever came and
+went in the family estate, the Gordon heart was always entailed
+unimpaired--increased indeed--upon the children.  And after some
+generations of true religion, inwardly and deeply exercising the Gordon
+heart, it almost came as a second nature to our Gordon to take to heart
+all that happened to him, and to exercise his large and deep heart yet
+more thoroughly with it.  The affairs of the family, the affairs of the
+estate, the affairs of the Church, his duties as a landlord, a farmer, a
+heritor, and a factor, and the persecutions and sufferings that all these
+things brought upon him, some of which we know--all that found its way
+into 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 men
+come to discover who live before God as Earlston lived, a provision that
+secures to such men's souls a depth, and an inwardness, and an increasing
+exercise that carries them on to reaches of inward sanctification that
+the ruck and run of so-called Christians know nothing about, and are
+incapable of knowing.
+
+Such men as Earlston, while the daily rush of outward things is let in
+deeply into their hearts, are not restricted to these things for the
+fulness of their inward exercise; their own hearts, though there were no
+outward world at all, would sufficiently exercise them to all the gifts
+and graces and attainments of the profoundest spiritual life.  For one
+thing, when once Earlston had begun to keep watch over his own heart in
+the 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 that
+day Rutherford and Livingstone, and all his family, and all his fellow-
+elders saw a change in their friend that almost frightened them.  There
+was after that such a far-off tone in his letters, and such a far-off
+look in his eyes, and such a far-off sound in his voice as they all felt
+must have come from some great, and, to them, mysterious advance in his
+spiritual life; but he never told even his son William what it was that
+had of late so softened and quieted his proud and stormy heart.  But, all
+the time, it was his motives.  The baseness of his motives even when he
+did what it was but his duty and his praise to do, that quite killed
+Earlston every day.  The loathsomeness of a heart that hid such motives
+in its unguessed depths made him often weep in the woods which his
+grandfather had sanctified by his Bible readings a century before.
+Rutherford saw with the glance of genius what was going on in his
+friend's heart, when, in one letter, not referring to himself at all,
+Earlston suddenly said, 'If Lucifer himself would but look deep enough
+and long enough into his own heart, the sight of it would make him a
+little child.'  'Did not I say,' burst out Rutherford, as he read, 'that
+Alexander Gordon would lead the ring in Galloway?'
+
+Earlston frightened into silence the Presbytery of Kirkcudbright on one
+occasion also, when at their first meeting after he had spoken out so
+bravely before the king and the Parliament, and they were to move him a
+vote of thanks, he cried out: 'Fathers and brethren, the heart is
+deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, and you do not know
+it.  For I had a deep, malicious, revengeful motive in my heart behind
+all my fine and patriotic speeches in Parliament.  I hated Montrose more
+than I loved the freedom of the Kirk.  Spare me, therefore, the sentence
+of putting that act of shame on your books!'  It was discoveries like
+this that accumulated in John Livingstone's note-book till he blotted out
+all his instances and left only the blessed result, 'Alexander Gordon, a
+man of great spirit, but much subdued by inward exercise, and who was
+visited with most rare experiences of downcasting and uplifting.'  No
+doubt, 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 him
+down all day after them; for he said, If my heart were not one of the
+chambers of hell itself, such hateful things would not stalk about in it
+when the watchman is asleep.  Downcastings! downcastings!  Yes, down to
+such depths of self-discovery and self-detestation and self-despair as
+compelled his Heavenly Master to give commandment that His prostrate
+servant should be lifted up as few men on the earth have ever been lifted
+up, or could bear to be.  Yes; they were rare experiences both of
+downcastings and of upliftings; when such downcastings and upliftings
+become common the end of this world will have come, and with it the very
+Kingdom of Heaven.
+
+The last sight we see of Alexander Gordon in this world is after his
+Master has given commandment that the last touch be put to His servant's
+subdued and childlike humility.  The old saint is sitting in his
+grandfather's chair and his wife is feeding him like a weaned child.  John
+Livingstone tells that Mr. John Smith, a minister in Teviotdale, had all
+the Psalms of David by heart, and that instead of a curtailed,
+monotonous, and mechanical grace before meat he always repeated a whole
+Psalm.  Earlston must have remembered once dining in the Manse of Maxton
+at a Communion time; for, as his tender-handed wife took her place beside
+his chair to feed her helpless husband, he always lifted up his palsied
+hand and always said to himself, to her, and above all, to God, the 131st
+Psalm--
+
+   'As child of mother weaned; my soul
+   Is like a weaned child;'
+
+till all the godly households in Galloway knew the 131st Psalm as
+Alexander 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 of
+his 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 that
+saying.  For old Alexander Gordon, the founder of the family, lifted up
+his brow for the cause of the Bible and the Sabbath-day when his brow was
+as yet alone in the whole of Galloway; his great-grandson Alexander also
+lifted up his brow in his day for the liberty of public worship and the
+freedom of the courts and congregations of the Church of Scotland, and
+paid heavily for his courage; and his son William, of whom we are to
+speak to-night, showed the same brow to the end.  The Gordons, as John
+Howie says, have all along made no small figure in our best Scottish
+history, and that because they had always a brow for the best causes of
+their respective days.  As Rutherford also says, the truth kept the
+causey 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 and
+factorships, young Earlston was already one of Rutherford's most intimate
+correspondents.  In a kind of reflex way we see what kind of head and
+heart and character young Earlston must already have had from the letters
+that Rutherford wrote to him.  If we are to judge of the character and
+attainments and intelligence of Rutherford's correspondents by the
+letters he wrote to them, then I should say that William Gordon of
+Earlston must have been a remarkable man very early in life, both in the
+understanding and the experience of divine things.  One of the Aberdeen
+letters especially, numbered 181 in Dr. Andrew Bonar's edition, for
+intellectual power, inwardness, and eloquence stands almost if not
+altogether at the head of all the 365 letters we have from Rutherford's
+pen.  He never wrote an abler or a better letter than that he wrote to
+William Gordon the younger of Earlston on the 16th of June 1637.  Not
+James Durham, not George Gillespie, not David Dickson themselves ever got
+a stronger, deeper, or more eloquent letter from Samuel Rutherford than
+did young William Gordon of Airds and Earlston.  William Gordon was but a
+young country laird, taken up twelve hours every day and six days every
+week with fences and farm-houses, with horses and cattle, but I think an
+examination paper on personal religion could be set out of Rutherford's
+letters to him that would stagger the candidates and the doctors of
+divinity for this year of grace 1891.  'William Gordon was a gentlemen,'
+says John Howie, 'of good parts and endowments; a man devoted to religion
+and godliness.'  Unfortunately we do not possess any of the letters young
+Earlston wrote to Rutherford.  I wish we did.  I would have liked to have
+seen that letter of Gordon's that so 'refreshed' Rutherford's soul; and
+that other letter of which Rutherford says that Gordon will be sure to
+'come speed' with Christ if he writes to heaven as well about his
+troubles as he had written to Rutherford in Aberdeen.  What a detestable
+time 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 last
+he was shot by the soldiers of the Crown and thrown into a ditch as if he
+had been a highwayman.
+
+The first thing that strikes me in reading Rutherford's letters to young
+Earlston and to several other young men of that day is the extraordinary
+frankness and self-forgetfulness of the writer.  He takes his young
+correspondents into his confidence in a remarkable way.  He opens up his
+whole heart to them.  He goes back with a startling boldness and
+unreserve and plainness of speech on his own youth, and he lays himself
+alongside of his youthful correspondents in a way that only a strong man
+and a humble could afford to do.  Let young men read Rutherford's letters
+to young William Gordon of Earlston, and to young John Gordon of
+Cardoness, and to young Lord Boyd, and such like, and they will be
+surprised to find that even Samuel Rutherford was once a young man
+exactly like themselves, and that he never forgot the days of his youth
+nor the trials and temptations and transgressions of those perilous days.
+Let them read his Letters, and they will see that Rutherford could not
+only write home to the deepest experiences of Lady Boyd and Lady Kenmure
+and Marion M'Naught, but that he was quite as much at home with their
+sons and daughters also.
+
+Rutherford told young Earlston how terribly he had 'ravelled his own
+hesp' in the days of his youth, and he tells another of his
+correspondents that after eighteen years he was not sure he had even yet
+got his ravelled hesp put wholly right.  Young Edinburgh gentlemen who
+have been born with the silver spoon in their mouth will not understand
+what 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 of
+some of their fellow-worshippers to-night.  They do not need to turn to
+Dr. Bonar's Glossary or to Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary to find out
+what a ravelled hesp is.  They well remember the stern yoke of their
+youth when they were sent supperless to bed because they had ravelled
+their hesp, and all the old times rush back on them as Rutherford
+confesses to Earlston how recklessly he ravelled his hesp when he was a
+student in Edinburgh, and how, twenty times a day, he still ravels it
+after he is Christ's prisoner in Aberdeen.
+
+When the hesp is ravelled the pirn is badly filled, and then the shuttle
+is choked and arrested in the middle of its flight, the web is broken and
+knotted and uneven, and the weaver is dismissed, or, at best, he is fined
+in half his wages.  And so, said Rutherford, is it with the weaver and
+the web of life, when a man's life-hesp is ravelled in the morning of his
+days.  I stood not long ago at the grave's mouth of a dear and intimate
+friend of mine who had fatally ravelled both his own hesp and that of
+other people, till we had to get the grave-diggers to take a cord and
+help us to bury him.  Horace said that in his day most men fled the empty
+cask; and all but two or three fled my poor friend's ravelled hesp.  He
+had recovered the lost thread before he died, but his tangled life was
+past unravelling in this world, and we wrapped his ragged hesp around him
+for a winding-sheet, and left him with Christ, who so graciously took the
+cumber of Rutherford's ill-ravelled life also.  Young men whose hesp
+still runs even, and whose web is not yet torn, as Rutherford says to
+Earlston, 'Make conscience of your thoughts and study in everything to
+mortify your lusts.  Wash your hands in innocency, and God, who knoweth
+what you have need of before you ask Him, will Himself lead you to
+encompass His holy altar, and thus to enter the harbour of a holy home
+and an unravelled life.'
+
+Rutherford's Letters are all gleaming with illustrations, some homely
+enough, like the ill-ravelled hesp, and some classically beautiful, like
+the arrow that has gone beyond the bowman's mastery.  Writing to young
+Lord Boyd about seeking Christ in youth, and about the manifold
+advantages of an early and a complete conversion, Rutherford says: 'It is
+easy to set an arrow right before the string is drawn, but when once the
+arrow is in the air the bowman has lost all power over it.'  Look around
+at the men and women beside you and see how true that is.  Look at those
+whose arrow is shot, and see how impossible it is for them, even when
+they wish it, either to call their arrow back or to correct its erring
+flight.  And thank God that you are still in your youth, and that the
+arrow of your future life is not yet shot.  And while your arrow still
+lies trembling on the string be sure your face is in the right direction
+and your aim well taken.  Rutherford, with all his experience and all his
+frankness and all his eloquence, could not tell his young correspondents
+half the advantages of an early conversion.  Nor can I tell you half of
+the changes for good that would immediately take place in you with an
+early, immediate, and complete conversion.  Perhaps the very first thing
+some of you would do would be to get a new minister and to join a new
+church.  Then on the week-day some of you would at once leave your
+present business, and seek a new means of livelihood in which you could
+at least keep your hands and your conscience clean.  Then you would
+choose a new friend and a new lover, or else you would get God to do for
+them what He has been so good as to do for you, give them a new heart
+with which to weave their hesp and shoot their arrow.  You would read new
+books and new journals, or, else, you would read the old books and the
+old journals in a new way.  The Sabbath-day would become a new day to
+you, the Bible a new book, and your whole future a new outlook to
+you;--but why particularise and specify, when all old things would pass
+away, 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 your
+arrow well winged, look well before you let go the string, for, once your
+arrow is shot, you cannot recall it so as to take a second aim.  With an
+early and a complete conversion you would have the advantage also of
+having your whole life for growth in grace and for the knowledge of
+yourself, of the word of God and of Jesus Christ; for the formation of
+your character also, and for the service of God and of your generation.
+And then when your friends met around your grave, instead of hiding you
+and your ravelled hesp away in shame and silence, they would stand, a
+worshipping crowd, saying over you: 'Those that be planted in the house
+of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God.  They shall still
+bring forth fruit in old age, they shall be fat and flourishing.'
+
+And then, like the true and sure guide to heaven that Rutherford was, he
+led his young correspondents on from strength to strength, and from one
+degree and one depth of grace to another, as thus, 'Common honesty will
+not take a man to heaven.  Many are beguiled with this, that they are
+clear of scandalous sins.  But the man that is not born again cannot
+enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  The righteous are scarcely saved.  God save
+me from a disappointment, and send me salvation.  Speer at Christ the way
+to heaven, for salvation is not soon found; many miss it.  Say, I must be
+saved, cost me what it will.'  And to a nameless young man, supposed to
+be one of his Anwoth parishioners, he writes, 'So my real advice is that
+you acquaint yourself with prayer, and with searching the Scriptures of
+God, so that He may shew you the only true way that will bring rest to
+your soul.  Ordinary faith and country holiness will not save you.  Take
+to heart in time the weight and worth of an immortal soul; think of
+death, and of judgment at the back of death, that you may be saved.--Your
+sometime pastor, and still friend in God, S. R.'  The civility of the New
+Jerusalem, he is continually reminding his genteel and correct-living
+correspondents, is a very different thing from the civility of Edinburgh,
+or Aberdeen, or St. Andrews.  And so it is, else it would not be worth
+both 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 their
+early conversion, would not understand.  For, writing to Robert Stuart,
+the son of the Provost of Ayr, Rutherford says to him, 'Labour constantly
+for a sound and lively sense of sin,' and to the Laird of Cally, 'Take
+pains with your salvation, for without much wrestling and sweating it is
+not to be won.'  A sound and lively sense of sin.  As we read these sound
+and lively letters, we come to see and understand something of what their
+writer means by that.  He means that Stuart and Cally, Cardoness and
+Earlston, young laymen as they were, were to labour in sin and in their
+own hearts till they came to see something of the ungodliness of sin,
+something of its fiendishness, its malignity, its loathesomeness, its
+hell-deservingness, its hell-alreadyness.  'All his religious
+illuminations, affections, and comforts,' says Jonathan Edwards of David
+Brainerd, 'were attended with evangelical humiliation, that is to say,
+with a deep sense of his own despicableness and odiousness, his
+ignorance, pride, vileness, and pollution.  He looked on himself as the
+least and the meanest of all saints, yea, very often as the vilest and
+worst of mankind.'  But let Rutherford and Brainerd and Edwards pour out
+their blackest vocabulary upon sin, and still sin goes and will go
+without its proper name.  Only let those Christian noblemen and gentlemen
+to whom Rutherford wrote, labour in their own hearts all their days for
+some sound and lively and piercing sense of this unspeakably evil thing,
+and they will know, as Rutherford wrote to William Gordon, that they have
+got to some sound and lively sense of sin when they feel that there is no
+one on earth or in hell that has such a sinful heart as they have.  The
+nearer to heaven you get, the nearer will you feel to hell, said
+Rutherford to young Earlston, till, all at once, the door will open over
+you, and, or ever you are aware, you will be for ever with Christ and the
+blessed; as it indeed was with William Gordon at the end.  For as he was
+on his way to join the Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge, he was shot by a
+gang of English dragoons and flung into a ditch.  Jesus Christ, says
+Rutherford, went suddenly home to His father's house all over with his
+own blood, and it was surely enough for William Gordon that he went home
+like 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 combination
+of Old Honest and Mr. Fearing in the _Pilgrim's Progress_.  He was as
+single-hearted and straightforward as that worthy old gentleman was who
+early trysted one Good-Conscience to meet him and give him his hand over
+the river which has no bridge; and he was at the same time as troublesome
+to Samuel Rutherford, his minister and correspondent, as Greatheart's
+most troublesome pilgrim was to him.  In two well-chosen words John
+Livingstone tells us the deep impression that the laird of Knockbrex made
+on the men of his day.  With a quite Scriptural insight and terseness of
+expression, 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 be
+explained, as it is here applied to this good man, but everybody knows
+without any explanation what it is for any man to be 'single-hearted.'
+This was the fine character our Lord gave to Nathanael when He saluted
+him as an Israelite indeed in whom was no guile.  It is singleness of
+heart that so clears up the understanding and the judgment that, as our
+Lord said at another time, it fills a man's whole soul with light.  And
+Paul gives it as the best character that a servant can bring to or carry
+away 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 book
+called Roget's _Thesaurus_, which is a rich treasure-house of the English
+language.  And though I thought I knew what Livingstone meant when he
+called Robert Gordon a single-hearted man, at the same time I felt sure
+that Roget would help me to see Gordon better.  And so he did.  For when
+I had opened his book at the word 'single-hearted,' he at once told me
+that Knockbrex was an open, frank, natural, straightforward, altogether
+trustworthy man.  He was above-board, outspoken, downright, blunt even,
+and bald, always calling a spade a spade.  And with each new synonym
+Robert 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-hearted
+men like him in the public and the private life of our day.
+
+And then, as to his 'painfulness,' we have that so well expounded and
+illustrated in John Bunyan's Mr. Fearing, that all I need to do is to
+recall that inimitable character to your happy memory.  'He was a man
+that had the root of the matter in him, but at the same time he was the
+most troublesome pilgrim that ever I met with in all my days.  He lay
+roaring at the Slough of Despond for above a month together.  He would
+not go back neither.  The Celestial City, he said he should die if he
+came not to it, and yet was dejected at every difficulty and stumbled at
+every straw.  He had, I think, a Slough of Despond in his mind, a slough
+that he carried everywhere with him, or else he could never have been as
+he was.'  Yes, both Mr. Fearing and the laird of Knockbrex were painful
+Christians.  That is to say, they took pains, special and exceptional
+pains, with the salvation of their own souls.  They took their religion
+with tremendous earnestness.  They would have pleased Paul had they lived
+in his day, for they both worked out their own salvation with fear and
+trembling.  They looked on sin and death and hell with absorbing and
+overwhelming solemnity, and they set themselves with all their might to
+escape from these direst of evils.  Pardon of sin, peace with God, a
+clean heart and a Christian character, all these things were their daily
+prayer; for these things they wrestled many a night like Jacob at the
+Jabbok.  The day of death, the day of judgment, heaven and hell--these
+things were more present with them than the things they saw and handled
+every day.  And this was why they were such troublesome pilgrims.  This
+was why they sometimes stumbled at what their neighbours called a straw;
+and this was why they feared neither king nor bishop, man nor devil, they
+feared God and sin and death and hell so much.  This was why, while all
+other men were so full of torpid assurance, they still carried, to the
+annoyance and anger of all their serene-minded neighbours, such a Slough
+of Despond in their anxious minds.  This was why sin so poisoned all
+their possessions and enjoyments that Greatheart could not get Fearing,
+any more than Rutherford could get Gordon, out of the Valley of
+Humiliation.  And this was why Gordon so often turned upon Rutherford
+when he was exalted above measure, and reminded his minister, in the old
+Scottish proverb, that 'Hall-binks are slippery.'  Seats of honour, Mr.
+Samuel, are unsafe seats for unsanctified sinners.  Ecstasies do not
+last, and they leave the soul weaker and darker than they found it.  It
+is a comely thing even for a saint to be well-clothed about with
+humility, and the deepest valley is safer and seemlier walking for a lame
+man than the mountain-top; and so on, till Rutherford admitted that
+Robert 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 so
+timid and so troublesome pilgrim, remembering the proverb, stole away
+behind the screen and found his meat and his drink in overhearing the
+good conversation that went on in the banquet-hall.  Gordon could not
+understand all Rutherford's joy.  He did not altogether like it.  He did
+not answer the ecstatic letters so promptly as he answered those which
+were 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 not
+help reminding him after one of his specially enraptured letters that
+'Hall-binks are slippery seats.'  The golden mean lay somewhere between
+the hall-bink and the ash-pit; somewhere between Rutherford's ecstasy and
+Gordon's depression.  But as the Guide said in the exquisite
+conversation, the wise God will have it so, some must pipe and some must
+weep: and, for my part, I care not for that profession that begins not
+with heaviness of mind.  Only, here was the imperfection of Mr. Fearing
+and Robert Gordon, that they would play upon no other music but this to
+their latter end.  So much so, that the thick woods of Knockbrex are said
+to give out to this day the sound of the sackbut to those who have their
+ears set to such music; there are men in that country who say that they
+still hear it when they pass the plantations of Knockbrex alone at night.
+Knockbrex is now a fine modern mansion that is sometimes let for the
+summer to city people seeking solitude and rest.  Among these thick woods
+and along these silent sands Samuel Rutherford and Robert Gordon were
+wont to walk and talk together.  And here still a man who wishes it may
+be free from the noise and the hurrying of this life.  Here a man shall
+not be let and hindered in his contemplations as in other places he is
+apt to be.  There are woods here that he who loves a pilgrim's life may
+safely walk in.  The soil also all hereabouts is rich and fruitful, and,
+under good management, it brings forth by handfuls.  The very shepherd
+boys 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 a
+rich inheritance to the right heir is the old estate of Knockbrex!  What
+an opportunity, and what an education, it must be to tenant Knockbrex
+with recollection, with understanding, and with sympathy even for a
+season.
+
+Robert Gordon would very willingly have remained behind the screen all
+his days.  He would very willingly have given himself up to the care of
+his estate, to the upbringing of his children, and to the working out of
+his own salvation, but such a man as he now was could not be hid.  The
+stone that is fit for the wall is not let lie in the ditch.  We have a
+valuable letter of Rutherford's addressed to Marion M'Naught about the
+impending election of a commissioner for Parliament for the town of
+Kirkcudbright.  In that letter he urges her to try to get her husband,
+William Fullarton, to stand for the vacant seat.  'It is an honourable
+and necessary service,' he says.  And speaking of one of the candidates,
+he further says: 'I fear he has neither the skill nor the authority for
+the post.'  Now, it was either at this election, or it was at the next
+election, that an influential deputation of the gentry and burgesses and
+ministers and elders of the district waited on Robert Gordon to get him
+to stand for one of the vacant seats in Galloway; and once he was chosen
+and had shown himself to the world he was never let return again to his
+home occupations.  'He was much employed in those years,' says
+Livingstone, 'in parliaments and public meetings.'
+
+There are some good men among us who think that the world is so bad that
+it is fit for nothing but to be abandoned to the devil and his angels
+altogether, and that a genuine man of God is too good to be made a member
+of 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 36th
+Letter.  And such was not Robert Gordon's judgment, when he left the
+woods and fields of Knockbrex and gave himself wholly up to the politics
+of his entangled and distressful day.  What he would have said to the
+summons had the marches been already redd between Lex and Rex, and had
+the affairs of the Church of Christ not been still too much mixed up with
+the affairs of the State, I do not know.  Only, as long as the Crown and
+the Parliament had their hands so deeply in the things of the Church,
+Knockbrex was not hard to persuade to go to Parliament to watch over
+interests that were dearer to him than life, or family, or estate.  Robert
+Gordon carried the old family brow with him into all the debates and
+dangers of that day; and he added to all that a singleness of heart and a
+painstaking mind all his own.  And it was no wonder that such a man was
+much in demand at such a time.  In our own far happier time what a mark
+does 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 with
+himself and with all his duties.  It is at bottom our doubleness of heart
+and our lack of sufficient pains with ourselves and with the things of
+truth and righteousness that so divide us up into bitter factions,
+hateful and hating one another.  And when all our public men are like
+Robert Gordon in the singleness of their aims and their motives, and when
+they are at their utmost pains to get at the truth about all the subjects
+they are called to deal with, party, if not parliamentary government,
+with all its vices and mischiefs, will have passed away, and the absolute
+Monarchy of the Kingdom of Heaven will have come.
+
+So much, then, is told us of Robert Gordon in few words: 'A
+single-hearted and painful Christian, much employed in parliaments and
+public meetings.'  To which may be added this extract taken out of the
+Minute Book of the Covenanters' War Committee: 'The same day there was
+delyverit to the said commissioners by Robert Gordoun of Knockbrax sex
+silver spoones Scots worke, weightan vi. unce xii. dropes.'  Had
+Knockbrex also, like the Earlstons, been fined by the bishops and harried
+by the dragoons till he had nothing left to deliver to the Commissioners
+but six silver spoons and a single heart?  It would seem so.  Like the
+woman in the Gospel, Gordon gave to the Covenant all that he had.  Had
+Robert Gordon been a Highlander instead of a Lowlander; had he been a
+Ross-shire crofter instead of a small laird in Wigtown, he would have
+been one of the foremost of the well-known 'men.'  His temperament and
+his experiences would have made him a prince among the ministers and the
+men of the far north.  Were it nothing else, the pains he spent on the
+growth of the life of grace in his own soul,--that would have canonised
+him among the saintliest of those saintly men.  He would have set the
+Question on many a Communion Friday, and the Question in his hands would
+not have concerned itself with surface matters.  Was it because
+Rutherford had now gone nearer that great region of experimental
+casuistry that he started that excellent Friday problem in a letter from
+Aberdeen to Knockbrex in 1637?  With Rutherford everything,--the most
+doctrinal, experimental, ecclesiastical, political, all--ran always up
+into Christ, His love and His loveableness.  'Is Christ more to be loved
+for gaining for us justification or sanctification?'  Such was one of the
+questions Rutherford set to his correspondent in the south.  Did any of
+you north-country folk ever hear that question debated out before one of
+your Highland communions?  If you care to see how Rutherford the minister
+and Knockbrex the man debated out their debt to Jesus Christ, read the
+priceless correspondence that passed between them, and especially, read
+the 170th Letter.  But first, and before that, do you either know, or
+care to know, what either justification or sanctification is?  When you
+do know and do care for these supreme things, then you too will in time
+become a single-hearted and painstaking Christian like Robert Gordon, or
+else an ecstatic and enraptured Christian like Samuel Rutherford.  And
+that again will be very much according to your natural temperament, your
+attainments, and your experiences.  And nothing in this world will
+thereafter interest and occupy you half so much as just those questions
+that are connected first with all that Christ is in Himself and all that
+He has done for you, and then with the signs and the fruits of the life
+of 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, in
+Kirkcudbright in John Gordon's day, but the laird of Rusco was not one of
+them.  Rusco Castle was too near Anwoth Kirk and Anwoth Manse, and its
+owner had had Samuel Rutherford too long for his minister and his near
+neighbour to make it possible for him to be 'ane cold covenanter quha did
+not do his dewtie in everything committed to his charge thankfullie and
+willinglie.'  We find Gordon of Rusco giving good reasons indeed, as he
+thought, why he should not be sent out of the Stewartry on the service of
+the covenant, but the war committee 'expelled his resounes' and instantly
+commanded his services.  And from all we can gather out of the old Minute
+Book, Rusco played all the noble part that Rutherford expected of him in
+the making of Scotland and in the salvation of her kirk.
+
+Like the Psalmist in the hundred and second Psalm, we take pleasure in
+the stones of Rusco Castle, and we feel a favour to the very dust
+thereof.  Even in Rutherford's day that rugged old pile was sacred and
+beautiful to the eyes of Rutherford and his people, because of what the
+grace of God had wrought within its walls; and, both for that, and for
+much more like that, both in Rutherford's own day and after it, we also
+look with awe and with desire at the ruined old mansion-house.  A hundred
+years before John Gordon bade Rusco farewell for heaven, we find a friend
+of John Knox's on his deathbed there, and having a departure from his
+deathbed administered to him there as confident and as full of a desire
+to 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 with
+his wife and children and farm-tenants, all warm Covenanters, and all
+continuing the Rusco tradition of godliness and virtue.  At the same time
+Samuel Rutherford was not the man to take it for granted that John Gordon
+and his household were all saved and home in heaven because they lived
+within such sacred walls and were all church members and warm
+Covenanters.  He was only the more anxious about the Gordon family
+because they had such an ancestry and were all bidding so fair to leave
+behind them such a posterity.  And thus it is that, from his isle of
+Patmos, Samuel Rutherford, like the apostle John to his seven churches,
+sends to John Gordon seven things that are specially to be remembered and
+laid to heart by the laird of Rusco.
+
+1.  Remember, in the first place, my dear brother, those most solemn and
+too much forgotten words of our Lord, that there are but few that be
+saved.  Is that really so? said a liberal-minded listener to our Lord one
+day.  Is that really so, that there are but few that be saved?  Mind your
+own business, was our Lord's answer.  For there are many lost by making
+their own and other men's salvation a matter of dialectic and debate in
+the study and in the workshop rather than of silence, and godly fear, and
+a 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 may
+go there, even if it has to be alone, love your enemies and stand to the
+truth 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 for
+sin, for, otherwise, you may seek Him all your days, but you will never
+find Him.  And it is not in our New Testament only, and in such books as
+Rutherford's _Letters_ only, that we are reminded of the loneliness of
+our road to heaven; in a hundred places in the wisest and deepest books
+of the heathen world we read the same warning; notably in the Greek
+Tablet of Cebes, which reads almost as if it had been cut out of the
+Sermon 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 are
+going along it, it is so difficult of access, so rough, and so stony?'
+'Yes,' answers the stranger.  'And does there not seem,' subjoins the old
+man, 'to be a high hill and the road up it very narrow, with precipices
+on 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 out
+of a whole tribe, but they go to hell in their thousands.  The way to
+heaven is overgrown with grass; there are the traces of but few feet on
+that way, only you may see here and there on it the footprints of
+Christ's bloody feet to let you know that you are not gone wrong but are
+still on the right way.'
+
+2.  Remember also that other word of our Lord,--that heaven is like a
+fortress in this, that it must be taken by force.  Only our Lord means
+that the force must not be done to the gates or the walls of heaven, but
+to our own hard hearts and evil lives.  'I find it hard to be a
+Christian,' writes Rutherford to Rusco.  'There is no little thrusting
+and thringing to get in at heaven's gates.  Heaven is a strong castle
+that has to be taken by force.'  'Oh to have one day more in my pulpit in
+Aberdeen!' cried a great preacher of that day when he was dying.  'What
+would you do?' asked another minister who sat at his bedside.  'I would
+preach to the people the difficulty of salvation,' said the dying man.
+'Remember,' wrote Rutherford to Rusco from the same city, 'Remember that
+it is violent sweating and striving that alone taketh heaven.'
+
+3.  Remember also that there are many who start well at the bottom of the
+hill who never get to the top.  We ministers and elders know that only
+too well; we do not need to be reminded of that.  There are the names of
+scores and scores of young communicants on our session books of whom we
+well remember how we boasted about them when they took the foot of the
+hill, but we never mention their names now, or only with a blush and in a
+whisper.  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, a
+sickness--their own or that of some one dear to them--another; a
+disappointment in love or in business will sometimes do it; a fall into
+sin will also do it; a good book, a good sermon, a conversation with a
+friend who has been some way up the hill; many things may be made use of
+to make men and women, and young men and women, take a start toward a
+better life and a better world.  But for ten, for twenty, who so start
+not two ever come to the top.  'Heaven is not next door,' writes
+Rutherford to Rusco; 'if it were we would all be saved.'  There was a
+well-known kind of Christians in Rutherford's day that the English
+Puritans called by the nickname of the Temporaries; and it is to pluck
+Rusco from among them that Rutherford writes to him this admonitory
+letter.  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 the
+Christian I refer to is self-beguiled with the very best things in the
+Scriptures.  The cross is always in his mouth, but you will never find it
+on his back.  He has got, at least in language, as far as the cross, but
+he remains there.  He says the burden is off his back, and he takes care
+that 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 strove
+hard till he was converted, and he sometimes strives hard to get other
+men brought to the same conversion.  But his conversion has been all
+exhausted in the mere etymology of the act, for he has only turned round
+in his religious life, he has not made one single step of progress.  But
+let one of the greatest masters of true religion that ever taught the
+Church of Christ speak to us on the subject of this gin-horse Christian.
+'The Scriptures,' says Jonathan Edwards, 'everywhere represent the
+seeking, the striving, and the labour of a Christian as being chiefly to
+be gone through _after_ his conversion, and his conversion as being but
+the beginning of the work.  And almost all that is said in the New
+Testament of men's watching, giving earnest heed to themselves, running
+the race that is set before them, striving and agonising, pressing
+forward, reaching forth, crying to God night and day; I say, almost all
+that is said in the New Testament of these things is spoken of and is
+directed to God's saints.  Where these things are applied once to sinners
+seeking salvation, they are spoken of the saint's prosecution of their
+high calling ten times.  But many have got in these days into a strange
+anti-scriptural way of having all their striving and wrestling over
+_before_ they are converted, and so having an easy time of it
+afterwards.'
+
+4.  Remember, also, wrote Rutherford, to look up the Scriptures and read
+and lay to heart the lessons of Esau's life and Judas's, of the life of
+Balaam, and Saul, and Pharaoh, and Simon Magus, and Caiaphas, and Ahab,
+and Jehu, and Herod, and the man in Matthew viii. 19, and the apostates
+in Hebrews vi.  For all these were at best but watered brass and
+reprobate silver.  'One day,' writes Mrs. William Veitch of Dumfries in
+her autobiography, 'having been at prayer, and coming into the room where
+one was reading a letter of Mr. Rutherford's directed to one John Gordon
+of Rusco--giving an account of how far one might go and yet prove a
+hypocrite 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 caused
+that God-fearing woman, fresh from her knees, so great exercise.  Let us
+share her great exercise, and in due time we shall share her great
+salvation.  Not otherwise.
+
+5.  'And remember,' he proceeds, 'what your besetting sin may cost you in
+the end.  I beseech you therefore and obtest you in the Lord, to make
+conscience of all rash and passionate oaths, of raging and avenging
+anger, of night-drinking, of bad company, of Sabbath-breaking, of hurting
+any under you by word or deed, of hurting your very enemies.  Except you
+receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, you cannot enter it.  That
+is a word that should make your great spirit fall.'  'If men allow
+themselves in malice and envy,' writes Thomas Shepard, a contemporary of
+Rutherford's, 'or in wanton thoughts, that will condemn them, even though
+their corruptions do not break out in any scandalous way.  Such thoughts
+are quite sufficient evidence of a rotten heart.  If a man allows himself
+in malice or in envy, though he thinks he does it not, yet he is a
+hypocrite; if in his heart he allows it he cannot be a saint of God.  If
+there be one evil way, though there have been many reformations, the man
+is an ungodly man.  One way of sin is exception enough against any man's
+salvation.  A small shot will kill a man as well as a large bullet, a
+small leak let alone will sink a ship, and a small, and especially a
+secret and spiritual sin, will cost a man his soul.'
+
+6.  'Remember, also, your shortening sand-glass.'  On the day when John
+Gordon 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 how
+long it was filled God who filled it alone knew.  Whether it was filled
+to run out in an hour, or to run till Gordon was cut down in mid-time of
+his days, or till he had attained to his threescore years and ten, or
+whether 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 that
+sand-glass a leaf, taken out of the seven-sealed book, was laid open, on
+the 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 Gordon
+was 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 on
+Rusco; his friendship with Samuel Rutherford; his duties to his family,
+to his tenants, to his Church, and to the Scottish Covenant; the inward
+life he was commanded and expected to live alone with God; the seven
+things he was every day to remember; the evangelical graces of heart and
+life and character he was to be told and to be enabled to put on; the
+death he was to die, and the 'freehold' he was after all these things to
+enter on in heaven.  And it is of that sand-glass that was at that moment
+running so fast and so low within the veil that Rutherford writes so
+often and so earnestly to the so-forgetful laird of Rusco.  And how
+solemnising it is, if anything would solemnise our hard hearts, that we
+all 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.  We
+shall 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 pity
+and without remorse will slit our thin-spun life with her abhorred
+shears.  And that whether our life-work is finished or no, half-finished
+or no, or not even begun.  The night cometh, and the shears with it, when
+no man can work.  Our family must then be left behind us, however they
+have been brought up; our farm also, however it has been worked; our
+estate also, however it has been managed; our pulpit, our pew, our
+church, our character, and even our salvation, and we must, all alone
+with God, face and account for the empty sand-glass and the accusing
+book.  Is it any wonder that John Gordon's minister, when he was in the
+spirit in Patmos, should write him as we here read?  What kind of a
+minister would he have been, and what a sand-glass, and what a book of
+angry account he would have had soon to face himself, if he had let all
+his people in Anwoth live on and suddenly die in total forgetfulness of
+the 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, and
+your 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 laying
+out the accounts of your life and the grounds of your death alone before
+God.'
+
+7.  And, above all, remember that after you have done all, it is the
+blood of Christ alone that will set you down safely as a freeholder in
+Heaven.  But His blood, and your everyday remembrance of His blood, and
+your everyday obligation to it, will surely set you, John Gordon of Rusco
+on 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 remarkable
+father.  Old Hugh Kennedy's death-bed was for long a glorious tradition
+among the godly in the West of Scotland.  The old saint was visited in
+his last hours on earth with a joy that was unspeakable and full of
+glory: the mere report of it made an immense impression both on the
+Church and the world.  And his son John, who stood entranced beside his
+father's chariot of fire, never forgot the transporting sight.  He did
+not need Rutherford's warning never to forget his father's example and
+his 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 were
+many 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?  I
+do not believe there ever were.  Next to that favoured land that produced
+the Psalmists and the Prophets, I know no land that, for its numbers,
+possessed so many men and women of a profoundly spiritual experience, and
+of an adoring and heavenly mind, as Scotland possessed in the sixteenth
+and seventeenth centuries.  The Wodrow volumes should be studied
+throughout by every lover of his church and his country, and especially
+by every student of divinity and church history.
+
+But we need go no further than Samuel Rutherford's letter-bag; for, when
+we 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 up
+their whole mind and heart to the life of godliness in the land, and to
+the life of God in their own hearts!  How thin and poor our religious
+life appears beside theirs!  What minister in Scotland to-day could write
+such letters?  And to whom could he address them after they were written?
+Was it the persecution?  Was it the new reformation doctrines?  Was it
+the masculine and Pauline preaching: preaching, say, like Robert Bruce's
+and Rutherford's that did it?  What was it that raised up in Scotland
+such a crop of ripe and rich saints?  Who are these, and whence came
+they?
+
+Rutherford was always on the outlook for opportunities to employ his
+private pen for the conversion of sinners, and for the comfort, the
+upbuilding, 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 from
+the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster, his letter-bag went out full of
+those messages, so warm, so tender, so powerful, to his multitudinous
+correspondents.  Public events, domestic joys and sorrows, personal
+matters, special providences,--to turn them all to a good result
+Rutherford was always on the watch.
+
+News had come to Rutherford's ears of an almost fatal accident that
+Kennedy had had through his boat being swept out to sea; and that was too
+good a chance to lose of trying to touch his correspondent's heart yet
+more deeply about death, and the due preparation for it.  Read his letter
+to John Kennedy on his deliverance from shipwreck.  See with what
+apostolic dignity and sweetness he salutes Kennedy.  See how he lifts up
+Kennedy's accident out of the hands of winds and waves, and traces it all
+up to the immediate hand of God.  See how he speaks of Kennedy's reprieve
+from death; and how the spared man should make use of his lengthened
+days.  Altogether, a noble, powerful, apostolic letter; a letter that
+must have had a great influence in making Bailie Kennedy the choice
+Christian that he was and that he became.  We have only three letters
+preserved of Rutherford's to Kennedy.  But we have sufficient evidence
+that they were fast and dear friends.  Rutherford writes to Kennedy from
+Aberdeen, upbraiding him for forgetting him; and what a letter that also
+is!  It stands well out among the foremost of his letters for fulness of
+all the great qualities of Rutherford's intellect and heart.
+
+But it is with the shipwreck letter that we have to do to-night; and with
+the expressions in it we have taken for our text: 'Die well, for the last
+tide will ebb fast.'  'It is appointed to all men once to die,' says the
+Apostle, 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 opens
+the Book, and finds the place, He reads our name, and all that is
+appointed us till death, and after death.  The exact and certain time of
+our death is all appointed; the place of it also; and all the
+circumstances.  Just when it is to happen; to-night, to-morrow, this
+year, next year, perhaps not this dying century; we shall perhaps live to
+write 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 should
+say 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 or
+night clothes; whether like Dr. Andrew Thomson, our first minister, in
+Melville Street, and with his hand on the latchkey of his own door; or,
+like Dr. Candlish, his successor, in his bed, and repeating, now
+Shakespeare, and now the Psalmist; by the upsetting of a boat, the shape
+in which death came near to Kennedy, or by the upsetting of a coach, as I
+escaped 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 to
+meet 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 in
+thick 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 that
+is 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 hand
+in is this: whether our death, when it comes, is to be a success or a
+failure; that is to say, whether we shall die well or ill.  Since we die
+but once, then, and since so much turns upon it, let us take advice how
+we are to do it well.  We cannot come back to make a second attempt; if
+we do not shoot the gulf successfully, we cannot climb back and try the
+leap again; we die once, and, after death, the judgment.  Now, when we
+have 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 a
+race, or wrestling in a match, or playing a tune, or shooting at a
+target, do we not assiduously practise it?  Yes, every sensible man is
+careful to have his hand and his foot accustomed to the trial before the
+appointed day comes.  Practice makes perfect: practise dying, then, as
+Rutherford 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, as
+Rutherford says.  Act it over beforehand; die speculatively, as Goodwin
+says.  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, and
+what would he say to me?  Make acquaintance with death, Rutherford writes
+to Lady Kenmure also.  Learn his ways, his manner of approach, his
+language, and his look.  Conjure him up, practise upon him, have your
+part rehearsed and ready to be performed.  Let not a heathen be
+beforehand with you in dying.  Seneca said that every night after his
+lamp was out, and the house quiet, he went over all his past day, and
+looked at it all in the light of death.  What he did after that he does
+not tell us; but Rutherford will tell you if you consult him what you
+should do.  Well, that is one way of practising dying.  For Sleep is the
+brother of Death.  And to meet the one brother right will prepare us to
+meet the other.  Speculate at night, then--speculate and say, Suppose
+this 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 on
+their coffin, think yourself inside of it.  When you see the undertaker's
+man screwing down the lid, suppose it yours.  Take your own way of doing
+it; only, practise dying, and let not death spring upon you unawares.  Die
+daily, for, as Dante says, 'The arrow seen beforehand slacks its flight.'
+
+Writing to another old man, Rutherford points out to him the gracious
+purpose of God in appointing him his death in old age.  'It is,' says
+Rutherford, 'that you may have full leisure to look over all your
+accounts and papers before you take ship.'  What a tangle our papers also
+are in as life goes on; and what need we have of a time of leisure to set
+things right before we hand them over.  Rutherford, therefore, makes us
+see old Carlton on his bed with his pillows propping him up, and a drawer
+open on the bed, and bundles of old letters and bills spread out before
+him.  Old love letters; old business letters; his mother's letters to him
+when he was a boy at Edinburgh College; letters in cipher that no human
+eye can read but those old, bleared, weeping eyes that fill that too late
+drawer with their tears.  The old voyager is looking over his papers
+before he takes ship.  And he comes on things he had totally forgotten:
+debts he had thought paid; petitions he had thought answered; promises he
+had thought fulfilled; till he calls young Carlton, his son, to his
+bedside, and tells him things that break both men's hearts to say and to
+hear; and commits to his son and heir sad duties that should never have
+been due; debts, promises, obligations, reparations, such that, to
+remember them, is a terrible experience on an old man's deathbed.  But
+what mercy that he was not carried off, and his drawer unopened!
+
+Now, speaking of taking ship, when we are preparing for a voyage, and a
+visit 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 our
+Horace, our Gibbon and our Merivale.  If it is Florence we take down
+Vasari and Dante, Lord Lindsay and Mrs. Jamieson, and so on.  Now, if
+Eternity holds for us a new world, with cities and peoples that are all
+new 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, you
+will be lying waiting at the water-side?  What books do you read when you
+wish to put on the mind of a man who intends to die well?  'Read to me
+where I first cast my anchor,' said John Knox, when dying, to his weeping
+wife.  Does your wife know where you first cast your anchor?  Does she
+know already what to read to you when you are preparing for the last
+voyage?
+
+And then, having prepared for, and practised dying well, play the man and
+perform it well when the day comes.  'Die as your father died,' says
+Rutherford to Kennedy.  Now, that is too much to ask of any man, because
+old 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 not
+mean that, as he is careful to explain.  He means, as he says, 'die
+believing.'  It will be your last act as a believer, therefore do it
+well.  You have been practising faith all your days; show that practice
+makes perfection at the end.  As Rutherford said to George Gillespie when
+he was on his deathbed, 'Hand over all your bills, paid and unpaid, to
+your surety.  Give him the keys of the drawer, and let him clear it out
+for himself after you are gone.'  And then, with the ruling passion
+strong in death, he added, 'Die not on sanctification but on
+justification, die not on inherent but on imputed righteousness.'  And
+then, to come to the very last act of all, there is what we call the
+death-grip.  A dying man feels the whole world giving way under him.  All
+he built upon, leaned upon, looked to, is like sliding sand, like sinking
+water; 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 of
+Angus.  St. Andrews was his _alma mater_, and under her excellent nurture
+young Guthrie soon became a student of no common name.  His father had
+destined him for the Episcopal Church, and, what with his descent from an
+ancient and influential family, his remarkable talents, and his excellent
+scholarship, it is not to be wondered at that a bishop's mitre sometimes
+dangled before his ambitious eyes.  'He was then prelatic,' says Wodrow
+in his _Analecta_, 'and strong for the ceremonies.'  But as time went on,
+young Guthrie's whole views of duty and of promotion became totally
+changed, till, instead of a bishop's throne, he ended his days on the
+hangman's ladder.  After having served his college some time as regent or
+assistant professor in the Moral Philosophy Chair, Guthrie took licence,
+and was immediately thereafter settled as parish minister of Lauder, in
+the momentous year 1638.  And when every parish in Scotland sent up its
+representatives to Edinburgh to subscribe the covenant in Greyfriars
+Churchyard, the parish of Lauder had the pride of seeing its young
+minister take his life in his hand, like all the best ministers and
+truest patriots in the land.  But just as Guthrie was turning in at the
+gate of the Greyfriars, who should cross the street before him, so as
+almost to run against him, but the city executioner!  The omen--for it
+was a day of omens--made the young minister stagger for a moment, but
+only for a moment.  At the same time the ominous incident made such an
+impression on the young Covenanter's heart and imagination, that he said
+to some of his fellow-subscribers as he laid down the pen, 'I know that I
+shall die for what I have done this day, but I cannot die in a better
+cause.'
+
+In the lack of better authorities we are compelled to trace the footsteps
+of James Guthrie through the Laodicean pages of Robert Baillie for
+several years to come.  Baillie did not like Guthrie, and there was no
+love lost between the two men.  The one man was all fire together in
+every true and noble cause, and the other we spew out of our mouth at
+every page of his indispensable book.  As Carlyle says, Baillie contrived
+to 'carry his dish level' through all that terrible jostle of a time.  And
+accordingly while we owe Baillie our very grateful thanks that he kept
+such a diary, and carried on such an extensive and regular correspondence
+during all that distracted time, we owe him no other thanks.  He carried
+his dish level, and he had his reward.
+
+As we trace James Guthrie's passionate footsteps for the years to come
+through Principal Baillie's sufficiently gossiping, but not unshrewd,
+pages, we soon see that he is travelling fast and sure toward the Nether
+Bow.  We hear continually from our time-serving correspondent of
+Guthrie's 'public invective,' of his 'passionate debates,' of his
+'venting of his mind,' of his 'peremptory letters,' of his 'sharp
+writing,' and of his being 'rigid as ever,' and so on.  All that about
+his too zealous co-presbyter, and then his fulsome eulogy of the
+returning king--his royal wisdom, his moderation, his piety, and his
+grave carriage--as also what he says of 'the conspicuous justice of God
+in hanging up the bones of Oliver Cromwell, the disgracing of the two
+Goodwins, blind Milton, John Owen, and others of that maleficent crew,'
+all crowned with the naive remark that 'the wisest and best are quiet
+till they see whither these things will go'--it is plain that while our
+wise and good author is carrying his dish as level as the uneven roads
+will allow, Guthrie is as plainly carrying his head straight to the Cross
+of Edinburgh, and to the iron spikes of the Canongate.
+
+All the untold woes of that so woful time came of the sword of the civil
+power being still grafted on the crook of the Church; as also of the
+insane attempt of so many of our forefathers to solder the crown of
+Charles Stuart to the crown of Jesus Christ.  How those two so fatal, and
+not even yet wholly remedied, mistakes, brought Argyll to the block and
+Guthrie to the ladder in one day in Edinburgh, we read in the instructive
+and inspiriting histories of that terrible time; and we have no better
+book 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 last
+defence of himself that has always reminded me of Socrates' similar
+defence before the judges of Athens.  'My lords,' said Guthrie, 'my
+conscience I cannot submit.  But this old and crazy body I do submit, to
+do with it whatsoever you will; only, I beseech you to ponder well what
+profit there is likely to be in my blood.  It is not the extinguishing of
+me, or of many more like me, that will extinguish the work of reformation
+in Scotland.  My blood will contribute more for the propagation of the
+Covenant and the full reformation of the kirk than my life and liberty
+could do, though I should live on for many years.'  One can hardly help
+thinking that Guthrie must have been reading _The Apology_ in his manse
+in Stirling at the moment he was apprehended.  But in the case of
+Guthrie, as in the case of Socrates, no truth, no integrity, and no
+eloquence could save him; for, as Bishop Burnet frankly says, 'It was
+resolved to make a public example of a Scottish minister, and so Guthrie
+was singled out.  I saw him suffer,' the Bishop adds, 'and he was so far
+from showing any fear that he rather expressed a contempt of death.'
+James Cowie, his precentor, and beadle, and body-servant, also saw his
+master suffer, and, like Bishop Burnet, he used to tell the impression
+that his old master's last days made upon him.  'When he had received
+sentence of death,' Cowie told Wodrow's informant, 'he came forth with a
+kind of majesty, and his face seemed truly to shine.'  It needed
+something more than this world could supply to make a man's face to shine
+under the sentence that he be hanged at the Cross of Edinburgh, his body
+dismembered, and his head fixed on an iron spike in the West Port of the
+same city.  The disgraceful and ghastly story of his execution, and the
+hacking up of his body, may all be read in Howie, beside a picture of the
+Nether Bow as it still stands in our Free Church and Free State Day.  'Art
+not Thou from everlasting, O Lord my God?' were James Guthrie's last
+words as he stood on the ladder.  'O mine Holy One: I shall not die, but
+live.  Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace; for mine eyes have
+seen Thy salvation.'
+
+There is one fine outstanding feature that has always characterised and
+distinguished the whole of the Rutherford circle in our eyes, and that is
+their deep, keen Pauline sense of sin.  Without this, all their
+patriotism, all their true statesmanship, and even all their martyrdom
+for the sake of the truth, would have had, comparatively speaking, little
+or no interest for us.  What think ye of sin? is the crucial question we
+put to any character, scriptural or ecclesiastical, who claims our time
+and our attention.  If they are right about sin, they are all the more
+likely to be right about everything else; and if they are either wrong or
+only shallow about sin, their teaching and their experience on other
+matters are not likely to be of much value or much interest to us.  We
+have had written over our portals against all comers: Know thyself if
+thou wouldst either interest us or benefit us, or with the understanding
+and the spirit worship with us.  And all the true Rutherford circle,
+without one exception, have known the true secret and have given the true
+password.  Their keen sense and scriptural estimate of the supreme evil
+of sin first made them correspondents of Rutherford's; and as that sense
+and estimate grew in them they passed on into an inner and a still more
+inner circle of those Scottish saints and martyrs who corresponded with
+Rutherford, and closed, with so much honour and love, around him.  And
+the two Guthries, James and William, as we shall see, were famous even in
+that day for their praying and for their preaching about sin.
+
+There is an excellent story told of James Guthrie's family worship in the
+manse of Stirling, that bears not unremotely on the matter we have now on
+hand.  Guthrie was wont to pray too much, both at the family altar and in
+the pulpit, as if he had been alone with his own heart and God.  And he
+carried that bad habit at last to such a length in his family, that he
+almost drove poor James Cowie, his man-servant, out of his senses, till
+when Cowie could endure no longer to be singled out and exposed and
+denounced before the whole family, he at last stood up with some boldness
+before his master and demanded to be told out, as man to man, and not in
+that cruel and injurious way, what it was he had done that made his
+master 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 own
+heart and its pollutions to think enough of you and the rest.'  'It was
+that, and the like of that,' witnessed Cowie, 'that did me and my wife
+more good than all my master's well-studied sermons.'  The intimacy and
+tenderness 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 the
+Epistle to the Romans, and when the reader came to the passage, 'I will
+have mercy on whom I will have mercy,' the listener burst into tears, and
+exclaimed, 'James, James, halt there, for I have nothing but that to
+lippen to.'  And then, on the ladder, and before a great crowd of
+Edinburgh citizens: 'I own that I am a sinner--yea, and one of the vilest
+that ever made a profession of religion.  My corruptions have been strong
+and many, and they have made me a sinner in all things--yea, even in
+following my duty.  But blessed be God, who hath showed His mercy to such
+a wretch, and hath revealed His Son unto me, and made me a minister of
+the everlasting Gospel, and hath sealed my ministry on the hearts of not
+a 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 comparing
+experiences and confessing to one another their 'predominant sins,' and
+when it came to Guthrie's turn he told them that he was much too eager to
+die a violent death.  For, said he, I would like to die with all my wits
+about me.  I would not like eyesight and memory and reason and faith all
+to die out on my deathbed and leave me to tumble into eternity bereft of
+them all.  Guthrie was greatly afraid at the thought of death, but it was
+the premature death of his reason, and even of his faith, that so much
+alarmed and horrified him to think of.  He envied the men who kneeled
+down on the scaffold, or leaped off the ladder, in full possession at the
+last moment of all their senses and all their graces.  'Give me a direct
+answer, 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 be
+able to render up my soul to God unclouded.'  And when pressed by his
+attendants to take some generous nourishment, he replied almost with his
+last breath, 'I will take anything but inebriating sustenance.'
+
+But in nothing was good James Guthrie's tenderness to sin better seen
+than in the endless debates and dissensions of which that day was so
+full.  So sensitive was he to the pride and the anger and the ill-will
+that all controversy kindles in our hearts that, as soon as he felt any
+unholy heat in his own heart, or saw it in the hearts of the men he
+debated with, he at once cut short the controversy with some such words
+as these: 'We have said too much on this matter already; let us leave it
+till we love one another more.'  If hot-blooded Samuel Rutherford had sat
+more at James Guthrie's feet in the matter of managing a controversy, his
+name would have been almost too high and too spotless for this present
+life.  Samuel Rutherford's one vice, temper, was one of James Guthrie's
+chief virtues.
+
+We have only two, or at most three, of the many letters that must have
+passed between Rutherford and Guthrie preserved to us.  And, as is usual
+with Rutherford when he writes to any member of his innermost circle, he
+writes to Guthrie so as still more completely to win his heart.  And in
+nothing does dear Rutherford win all our hearts more than in his deep
+humility, and quick, keen sense of his own inability and utter
+unworthiness.  'I am at a low ebb,' he writes to Guthrie from the
+Jerusalem 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 that
+fine letter again last Sabbath afternoon in my room at hospitable
+Helenslee, overlooking the lower reaches of the Clyde, and as I read this
+passage, I recollected the opportune sea-view commanded by my window.  I
+had 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 a
+river than a shallow, clammy channel.  Shoals of black mud ran out from
+our shore, meeting and mingling with shoals of black mud from the
+opposite shore.  There was scarce clean water enough to float the
+multitude of buoys that dipped and dragged in their bed of mire.  That
+any ship, to call a ship, could ever work its way up that sweltering
+sewer seemed an utter impossibility.  There was Rutherford's low ebb,
+then, under my very eyes.  There was low water indeed.  And the low water
+seemed to laugh the waiting seamen's hopes to scorn.  But next morning my
+heart rose high as I looked out at my window and saw all the richly-laden
+vessels lighting their fires and spreading their sails, and setting their
+faces to the replenished river.  And I thought of Samuel Rutherford's
+ship, far past all her ebbing tides now, and for ever anchored in her
+haven above.
+
+On the wall of my room in the same beautiful house there was a powerful
+cartoon of Peter's crucifixion, head downwards, for his Master's sake.
+The masterpiece of Filippino Lippi I felt to be an excellent illustration
+also of Rutherford's letter to James Guthrie and the rest of the
+ministers and elders who were imprisoned in the Castle of Edinburgh for
+daring to remind Charles Stuart of the contents of the Covenant to which
+both he and the whole nation had solemnly sworn.  'If Christ doth own
+me,' Rutherford wrote to the martyrs in the Castle, 'let me be laid in my
+grave in a bloody winding-sheet; let me go from the scaffold to the
+spikes in four quarters--grave or no grave, as He pleases, if only He but
+owns me.'  And I seemed to see the crucified disciple's glorified Master
+appearing over his reversed cross and saying, 'Thou art Peter, and with
+this thy blood I will sow widespread my Church.'  Yes, my brethren, if
+Christ but owns us, that will far more than make up to us in a moment for
+all our imprisonments, and all our martyrdoms, and all our ebbing tides
+down here.  'Angels, men, and Zion's elders eye us in all our suffering
+for Christ's sake, but what of all these?  Christ is by us, and looketh
+on, and writeth it all up Himself.'
+
+James Guthrie was hanged and dismembered at the Cross of Edinburgh on the
+first day of June, 1661.  His snow-white head was cut off, and was fixed
+on a spike in the Nether Bow.  James Guthrie got that day that which he
+had so often prayed for--a sudden plunge into everlasting life with all
+his senses about him and all his graces at their brightest and their
+keenest exercise.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.  WILLIAM GUTHRIE
+
+
+   'A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.'--_Solomon_.
+
+William Guthrie was a great humorist, a great sportsman, a great
+preacher, and a great writer.  The true Guthrie blood has always had a
+drop of humour in it, and the first minister of Fenwick was a genuine
+Guthrie in this respect.  The finest humour springs up out of a wide and
+a 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 read
+that we are reminded of some other great melancholians, such as Blaise
+Pascal and John Foster and William Cowper.  William Guthrie knew, by his
+temperament, and by his knowledge of himself and of other men, that he
+was a great melancholian, and he studied how to divert himself sometimes
+in order that he might not be altogether drowned with his melancholy.  And
+thus, maugre his melancholy, and indeed by reason of it, William Guthrie
+was a great humorist.  He was the life of the party on the moors, in the
+manse, and in the General Assembly.  But the life of the party when he
+was present was always pure and noble and pious, even if it was sometimes
+somewhat hilarious and boisterous.  'If a man's melancholy temperament is
+sanctified,' says Rutherford in his _Covenant of Grace_, 'it becomes to
+him a seat of sound mortification and of humble walking.'  And that was
+the happy result of all William Guthrie's melancholy; it was always
+alleviated and relieved by great outbursts of good-humour; but both his
+melancholy and his hilarity always ended in a humbler walk.  Samuel
+Rutherford confides in a letter to his old friend, Alexander Gordon, that
+he knows a man who sometimes wonders to see any one laugh or sport in
+this so sinful and sad life.  But that was because he had embittered the
+springs of laughter in himself by the wormwood sins of his youth.  William
+Guthrie had no such remorseful memories continually taking him by the
+throat as his divinity professor had, and thus it was that with all his
+melancholy he was known as the greatest humorist and the greatest
+sportsman in the Scottish Kirk of his day.  No doubt he sometimes felt
+and confessed that his love of fun and frolic was a temptation that he
+had to watch well against.  In his _Saving Interest_ he speaks of some
+sins 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!' he
+confessed 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 time
+this was often remarked with wonder in Guthrie, that however boisterous
+his fun was, in one moment he could turn from it to the most serious
+things.  'It was often observed,' says Wodrow, 'that, let Mr. Guthrie be
+never 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 he
+acted from spiritual principles in all he did, and even in his
+relaxations.'  Poor Guthrie had a terrible malady that preyed on his most
+vital 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 merry
+heart as an alleviating medicine.
+
+Like our own Thomas Guthrie, too, William Guthrie was a great angler.  He
+could gaff out a salmon in as few minutes as the deftest-handed
+gamekeeper in all the country, and he could stalk down a deer in as few
+hours as my lord himself who did nothing else.  When he was composing his
+_Saving Interest_, he somehow heard of a poor countryman near Haddington
+who had come through some extraordinary experiences in his spiritual
+life, and he set out from Fenwick all the way to Haddington to see and
+converse with the much-experienced man.  All that night and all the next
+day Guthrie could not tear himself away from the conversation of the man
+and his wife.  But at last, looking up and down the country, his angling
+eye caught sight of a trout-stream, and, as if he had in a moment
+forgotten all about his book at home and all that this saintly man had
+contributed to it, Guthrie asked him if he had a fishing-rod, and if he
+would give him a loan of it.  The old man felt that his poor rough tackle
+was to be absolutely glorified by such a minister as Guthrie
+condescending to touch it, but his good wife did not like this come-down
+at the end of such a visit as his has been, and she said so.  She was a
+clever old woman, and I am not sure but she had the best of it in the
+debate that followed about ministers fishing, and about their facetious
+conversation.  The Haddington stream, and the dispute that rose out of
+it, recall to my mind a not unlike incident that took place in the street
+of Ephesus, in the far East, just about 1800 years ago.  John, the
+venerable Apostle, had just finished the fourteenth chapter of his great
+Gospel, and felt himself unable to recollect and write out any more that
+night.  And coming out into the setting sun he began to amuse himself
+with a tame partridge that the Bactrian convert had caught and made a
+present of to his old master.  The partridge had been waiting till the
+pen and the parchment were put by, and now it was on John's hand, and now
+on his shoulder, and now circling round his sportful head, till you would
+have thought that its owner was the idlest and foolishest old man in all
+Ephesus.  A huntsman, who greatly respected his old pastor, was passing
+home from the hills and was sore distressed to see such a saint as John
+was trifling away his short time with a stupid bird.  And he could not
+keep from stopping his horse and saying so to the old Evangelist.  'What
+is that you carry in your hand?' asked John at the huntsman with great
+meekness.  'It is my bow with which I shoot wild game up in the
+mountains,' 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 it
+would not rebound and send home my arrow when I needed it.  I unstring my
+bow on the street that I may the better shoot with it when I am up among
+my quarry.'  'Good,' said the Evangelist, 'and I have learned a lesson
+from you huntsmen.  For I am playing with my partridge to-night that I
+may the better finish my Gospel to-morrow.  I am putting everything out
+of my mind to-night that I may to-morrow the better recollect and set
+down a prayer I heard offered up by my Master, now more than fifty years
+ago.'  We readers of the Fourth Gospel do not know how much we owe to the
+Bactrian boy's tame partridge, and neither John Owen nor Thomas Chalmers
+knew how much they owed to the fishing-rods and curling-stones, the
+fowling-pieces and the violins that crowded the corners of the manse of
+Fenwick.  I do not know that William Guthrie made a clean breast to the
+Presbytery of all the reasons that moved him to refuse so many calls to a
+city 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 to
+one 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 own
+lands of Pitforthy and Easter Ogle had he not determined, when under
+Rutherford at St. Andrews, to give himself up wholly to his preaching.
+But, to put himself out of the temptation that hills and streams and
+lochs and houses and lands would have been to a man of his tastes and
+temperament, soon after his conversion William made over to a younger
+brother all his possessions and all his responsibilities connected
+therewith, in order that he might give himself up wholly to his
+preaching.  And his reward was that he soon became, by universal consent,
+the greatest practical preacher in broad Scotland.  He could not touch
+Rutherford, his old professor, at pure theology; he had neither
+Rutherford's learning, nor his ecstatic eloquence, nor his surpassing
+love of Jesus Christ, but for handling broken bones and guiding an
+anxious inquirer no one could hold the candle to William Guthrie.
+Descriptions of his preaching abound in the old books, such as this: A
+Glasgow merchant was compelled to spend a Sabbath in Arran, and though he
+did not understand Gaelic, he felt he must go to the place of public
+worship.  Great was his delight when he saw William Guthrie come into the
+pulpit.  And he tells us that though he had heard in his day many famous
+preachers, he had never seen under any preacher so much concern of soul
+as he saw that day in Arran, under the minister of Fenwick.  There was
+scarcely a dry eye in the whole church.  A gentleman who was well known
+as a most dissolute liver was in the church that day, and could not
+command himself, so deeply was he moved under Guthrie's sermon.  That day
+was remembered long afterwards when that prodigal son had become an
+eminent Christian man.  We see at one time a servant girl coming home
+from Guthrie's church saying that she cannot contain all that she has
+heard to-day, and that she feels as if she would need to hear no more on
+this 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 all
+her trouble without any sermon at all.  'He had a taking and a soaring
+gift of preaching,' but it was its intensely practical character that
+made Guthrie's pulpit so powerful and so popular.  The very fact that he
+could go all the way in those days from Fenwick to Haddington, just to
+have a case of real soul-exercise described to him by the exercised man
+himself, speaks volumes as to the secret of Guthrie's power in the
+pulpit.  His people felt that their minister knew them; he knew himself,
+and therefore he knew them.  He did not pronounce windy orations about
+things that did not concern or edify them.  He was not learned in the
+pulpit, nor eloquent, or, if he was--and he was both--all his talents,
+and all his scholarship, and all his eloquence were forgotten in the
+intensely practical turn that his preaching immediately took.  All the
+broken hearts in the west country, all those whose sins had found them
+out, all those who had learned to know the plague of their own heart, and
+who were passing under a searching sanctification--all such found their
+way from time to time from great distances to the Kirk of Fenwick.  From
+Glasgow they came, and from Paisley, and from Hamilton, and from Lanark,
+and from Kilbride, and from many other still more distant places.  The
+lobbies of Fenwick Kirk were like the porches of Bethesda with all the
+blind, halt, and withered from the whole country round about.  After
+Hutcheson of the _Minor Prophets_ had assisted at the communion of
+Fenwick on one occasion, he said that, if there was a church full of
+God'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 in
+the balance compared with one Sabbath-day's exercise of such a preaching
+gift as that of William Guthrie.  'There is no man that hath forsaken
+houses and lands for My sake and the Gospel's, but shall receive an
+hundredfold now in this life, and in the world to come life everlasting.'
+
+But further, besides being a great humorist and a great sportsman and a
+great preacher, William Guthrie was a great writer.  A great writer is
+not a man who fills our dusty shelves with his forgotten volumes.  It is
+not given to any man to fill a whole library with first-rate work.  Our
+greatest authors have all written little books.  Job is a small book, so
+is the Psalms, so is Isaiah, so is the Gospel of John, so is the Epistle
+to the Romans, so is the _Confessions_, so is the _Comedy_, so is the
+_Imitation_, so are the _Pilgrim_ and the _Grace Abounding_, and though
+William Guthrie's small book is not for a moment to be ranked with such
+master-pieces as these, yet it is a small book on a great subject, and a
+book to which I cannot find a second among the big religious books of our
+day.  You will all find out your own favourite books according to your
+own talents and tastes.  My calling a book great is nothing to you.  But
+it may at least interest you for the passing moment to be told what two
+men like John Owen, in the seventeenth century, and Thomas Chalmers, in
+the nineteenth, said about William Guthrie's one little book.  Said John
+Owen, drawing a little gilt copy of _The Great Interest_ out of his
+pocket, 'That author I take to be one of the greatest divines that ever
+wrote.  His book is my _vade mecum_.  I carry it always with me.  I have
+written several folios, but there is more divinity in this little book
+than in them all.'  Believe John Owen.  Believe all that he says about
+Guthrie's _Saving Interest_; but do not believe what he says about his
+own maligned folios till you have read twenty times over his _Person and
+Glory 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 the
+best book I ever read.'  After you have read it, if you ever do, the
+likelihood is that you will feel as if somehow you had not read the right
+book 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 got
+in you the right reader.  There are not many readers abroad like Dr. John
+Owen 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 in
+its bald simplicity.  True students will not be deterred from it when I
+say that it is scientifically and experimentally exact in its treatment
+of the things of the soul.  They will best understand and appreciate this
+statement of Guthrie's biographer that 'when he was working at his
+_Saving Interest_ he endeavoured to inform himself of all the Christians
+in the country who had been under great depths of exercise, or were still
+under such depths, and endeavoured to converse with them.'  Guthrie is
+almost as dry as Euclid himself, and almost as severe, but, then, he
+demonstrates almost with mathematical demonstration the all-important
+things 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 you
+the right way to take to get to your journey's end.  And many who have
+wandered into a far country have found their way home again under William
+Guthrie's exact marks, clear evidences, and curt directions.  You open
+the little book, and there is a sentence of the plainest, directest, and
+least entertaining or attractive prose, followed up with a text of
+Scripture to prove the plain and indisputable prose.  Then there is
+another sentence of the same prose, supported by two texts, and thus the
+little treatise goes on till, if you are happy enough to be interested in
+the author's subject-matter, the eternal interests of your own soul, a
+strong, strange fascination begins to come off the little book and into
+your understanding, imagination, and heart, till you look up again what
+Dr. Owen and Dr. Chalmers said about your favourite author, and feel
+fortified in your valuation of, and in your affection for, William
+Guthrie and his golden little book.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.  GEORGE GILLESPIE
+
+
+   'Our apprehensions are not canonical.'--_Rutherford_.
+
+George Gillespie was one of that remarkable band of statesmanlike
+ministers that God gave to Scotland in the seventeenth century.  Gillespie
+died while yet a young man, but before he died, as Rutherford wrote to
+him on his deathbed, he had done more work for his Master than many a
+hundred grey-headed and godly ministers.  Gillespie and Rutherford got
+acquainted with one another when Rutherford was beginning his work at
+Anwoth.  In the good providence of God, Gillespie was led to Kenmure
+Castle to be tutor in the family of Lord and Lady Kenmure, and that threw
+Rutherford and Gillespie continually together.  Gillespie was still a
+probationer.  He was ready for ordination, and many congregations were
+eager to have him, but the patriotic and pure-minded youth could not
+submit to receive ordination at the hands of the bishops of that day, and
+this kept him out of a church of his own long after he was ready to begin
+his ministry.  But the time was not lost to Gillespie himself, or to the
+Church of Christ in Scotland,--the time that threw Rutherford and
+Gillespie into the same near neighbourhood, and into intimate and
+affectionate friendship.  The mere scholarship of the two men would at
+once draw them together.  They read the same deep books; they reasoned
+out the same constitutional, ecclesiastical, doctrinal, and experimental
+problems; till one day, rising off their knees in the woods of Kenmure
+Castle, the two men took one another by the hand and swore a covenant
+that all their days, and amid all the trials they saw were coming to
+Scotland and her Church, they would remain fast friends, would often
+think of one another, would often name one another before God in prayer,
+and would regularly write to one another, and that not on church
+questions only and on the books they were reading, but more especially on
+the life of God in their own souls.  Of the correspondence of those two
+remarkable men we have only three letters preserved to us, but they are
+enough to let us see the kind of letters that must have frequently passed
+between Kenmure Castle and Aberdeen, and between St. Andrews and
+Edinburgh during the next ten years.
+
+Gillespie was born in the parish manse of Kirkcaldy in 1613; he was
+ordained to the charge of the neighbouring congregation of Wemyss in
+1638, was translated thence to Edinburgh in 1642, and then became one of
+the four famous deputies who were sent up from the Church of Scotland to
+sit and represent her in the Westminster Assembly in 1643.  Gillespie's
+great ability was well known, his wide learning and his remarkable
+controversial powers had been already well proved, else such a young man
+would never have been sent on such a mission; but his appearance in the
+debates at Westminster astonished those who knew him best, and won for
+him a name second to none of the oldest and ablest statesmen and scholars
+who sat in that famous house.  'That noble youth,' Baillie is continually
+exclaiming, after each new display of Gillespie's learning and power of
+argument; 'That singular ornament of our Church'; 'He is one of the best
+wits of this isle,' and so on.  And good John Livingstone, in his wise
+and sober _Characteristics_, says that, being sent as a Commissioner from
+the Church of Scotland to the Assembly of Divines at Westminster,
+Gillespie, 'promoted much the work of reformation, and attained to a gift
+of clear, strong, pressing, and calm debating above any man of his time.'
+
+Many stories were told in Scotland of the debating powers of young
+Gillespie as seen on the floor of the Westminster Assembly.  Selden was
+one of the greatest lawyers in England, and he had made a speech one day
+that both friend and foe felt was unanswerable.  One after another of the
+Constitutional and Evangelical party tried to reply to Selden's speech,
+but failed.  'Rise, George, man,' said Rutherford to Gillespie, who was
+sitting 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 to
+some one who was sitting beside him, 'That young man has swept away the
+learning and labour of ten years of my life.'  Gillespie's Scottish
+brethren seized upon his note-book to preserve and send home at least the
+heads of his magnificent speech, but all they found in his little book
+were these three words: _Da lucem_, _Domine_; Give light, O Lord.
+Rutherford had foreseen all this from the days when Gillespie and he
+talked over Aquinas and Calvin and Hooker and Amesius and Zanchius as
+they 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 the
+composition of the Shorter Catechism, and had come to the question, What
+is God? like the able men they were, they all shrank from attempting an
+answer to such an unfathomable question.  In their perplexity they asked
+Gillespie to offer prayer for help, when he began his prayer with these
+words: 'O God, Thou art a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in
+Thy being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.'  As
+soon as he said Amen, his opening sentences were remembered, and taken
+down, and they stand to this day the most scriptural and the most
+complete answer to that unanswerable question that we have in any creed
+or catechism of the Christian Church.
+
+As her best tribute to the talents and services of her youngest
+Commissioner, the Edinburgh Assembly of 1648 appointed Gillespie her
+Moderator; but his health was fast failing, and he died in the December
+of that year, in the thirty-sixth year of his age.  The inscription on
+his tombstone at Kirkcaldy ends with these sober and true words: 'A man
+profound in genius, mild in disposition, acute in argument, flowing in
+eloquence, 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 and
+work of George Gillespie, one of the most intimate and confidential
+correspondents of Samuel Rutherford;--for it was to him that Rutherford
+wrote 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 and
+judges talking to one another in a professional speech that the learned
+layman no more than the ignorant can understand.  Our doctors, again,
+have a shorthand symbolism that only themselves and the chemists
+understand.  And so it is with every business and profession; each
+several trade strikes out a language for itself.  And so does divinity,
+and, especially, experimental divinity, of which Rutherford's letters are
+full.  We not only need a glossary for the obsolete Scotch, but we need
+the most simple and everyday expressions of the things of the soul
+explained to us till once we begin to speak and to write those
+expressions ourselves.  There are judges and advocates and doctors and
+specialists of all kinds among us who will only be able to make a far-off
+guess at the meaning of my text, just as I could only make a far-off
+guess 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 has
+it 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 put
+its proper name upon it.  We all know what a forecast of evil is--a
+secret fear that evil is coming upon us.  It lays hold of our heart, or
+of our conscience, as the case may be, and will not let go its hold.  And
+then the heart and the conscience run out continually and lay hold of the
+future evil and carry it home to our terrified bosoms.  We apprehend the
+coming 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 his
+fears and his sinkings of heart about his past sins, and about the
+unsettled wages of his sins.  His conscience makes him a coward, till he
+thinks every bush an officer.  But then he reasons and remonstrates with
+himself in his deep and intimate letter to Gillespie, and says that these
+his doubts, and terrors, and apprehensions are not canonical.  He is
+writing to a divine and a scholar, as well as to an experienced Christian
+man, and he uses words that such scholars and such Christian men quite
+well understand and like to make use of.  The canon that he here refers
+to is the Holy Scriptures; they are the rule of our faith, and they are
+also the rule of God's faithfulness.  What God has said to us in His
+word, that we must believe and hold by; that, and not our deserts or our
+apprehensions, must rule and govern our faith and our trust, just as
+God's word will be the rule and standard of His dealings with us.  His
+word rules us in our faith and life; and again it rules Him also in His
+dealings with our faith and with our life.  God does not deal with us as
+we deserve; He does not deal with us as we, in our guilty apprehensions,
+fear He will.  He deals with the apprehensive, penitent, believing sinner
+according to the grace and the truth of His word.  His promises are
+canonical to Him, not our apprehensions.
+
+Thomas Goodwin, that perfect prince of pulpit exegetes, lays down this
+canon, and continually himself acts upon it, that 'the context of a
+scripture is half its interpretation; . . . if a man would open a place
+of scripture, he should do it rationally; he should go and consider the
+words before and the words after.'  Now, let us apply this rule to the
+interpretation 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 entry
+on my banishment here my apprehensions worked despairingly upon my
+cross.'  By that he means, and Gillespie would quite well understand his
+meaning, that his banishment from his work threw him in upon his
+conscience, and that his conscience whispered to him that he had been
+banished from his work because of his sins.  God is angry with you, his
+conscience said; He does not love you, He has not forgiven you.  But his
+sanctified good sense, his deep knowledge of God's word, and of God's
+ways with His people, came to his rescue, and he went on to say to
+Gillespie that our apprehensions are not canonical.  No, he says, our
+apprehensions tell lies of God and of His grace.  So they do in our case
+also.  When any trouble falls upon us, for any reason,--and there are
+many reasons other than His anger why God sends trouble upon
+us,--conscience is up immediately with her interpretation and explanation
+of our troubles.  This is your wages now, conscience says.  God has been
+slow to wrath, but His patience is exhausted now.  As Rutherford says in
+another letter, our tearful eyes look asquint at Christ and He appears to
+be angry, when all the time He pities and loves us.  Is there any man
+here to-night whose apprehensions are working upon his cross?  Is there
+any man of God here who has lost hold of God in the thick darkness, and
+who 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 my
+unbelieving thoughts slander Christ.  Let them say to me "there is no
+hope," yet I will die saying, It is not so; I shall yet see the salvation
+of God.  I will die if it must be so, under water, but I will die
+gripping at Christ.  Let me go to hell, I will go to hell believing in
+and loving Christ.'  Rutherford's worst apprehensions, his best-grounded
+apprehensions, could not survive an assault of faith like that.  Imitate
+him, and improve upon him, and say, that with a thousand times worse
+apprehensions than ever Rutherford could have, yet, like him, you will
+make 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 you
+out, and all heaven will rise up and carry you in.
+
+'Challenges' is another of Rutherford's technical terms that he
+constantly uses to his expert correspondents.  'I was under great
+challenges,' he says, in this same letter; and in a letter written the
+same month of March to William Rigg, of Athernie, he says, 'Old
+challenges revive, and cast all down.'  Dr. Andrew Bonar, Rutherford's
+expert editor, gives this glossary upon these passages: 'Charges, self-
+upbraidings, self-accusations.'  Challenges of conscience came to
+Rutherford like these: 'Why art thou writing letters of counsel to other
+men?  Counsel thyself first.  Why art thou appealed to and trusted and
+loved by God's best people in Scotland, when thou knowest that thou art a
+Cain in malice and a Judas in treachery, all but the outbreaks?  Why art
+thou taking thy cross so easily, when thou knowest the unsettled
+controversy the Lord still has with thee?'  'Hall binks are slippery,'
+wrote stern old Knockbrex, challenging his old minister for his too great
+joy.  'Old challenges now and then revive and cast all down again.'  That
+reminds me of a fine passage in that great book of Rutherford's, _Christ
+Dying_, where he shows us how to take out a new charter for all our
+possessions, and for the salvation of our souls themselves when our
+salvation, or our possessions and our right to them, is challenged.  It
+is better, he says, to hold your souls and your lands by prayer than by
+obedience, 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 that
+you hold them by an unchallengeable charter, even by prayer, and then by
+grace.  And if you hold these things by any other charter, hasten to get
+a new conveyance made and a new title drawn out.  And thus old, and
+angry, and threatening challenges will work out a charter that cannot be
+challenged.
+
+And, then, when George Gillespie was lying on his deathbed in Edinburgh,
+with his pillow filled with stinging apprehensions, as is often the case
+with God's best servants and ripest saints, hear how his old friend, now
+professor of divinity in St. Andrews, writes to him:--
+
+'My reverend and dear brother, look to the east.  Die well.  Your life of
+faith is just finishing.  Finish it well.  Let your last act of faith be
+your best act.  Stand not upon sanctification, but upon justification.
+Hand all your accounts over to free grace.  And if you have any bands of
+apprehension in your death, recollect that your apprehensions are not
+canonical.'  And the dying man answered: 'There is nothing that I have
+done 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 John
+Fergushill falling back for their own souls on a Scripture like this.  We
+naturally think of Scriptures like this as specially sent out to the
+chief 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 think
+of great divines and famous preachers like Rutherford, or of godly and
+able pastors like Fergushill, as at all either needing such Scriptures as
+this, or as finding their own case at all met in them.  But it is surely
+a great lesson to us all--a great encouragement and a great rebuke--to
+find two such saintly men as the ministers of Anwoth and Ochiltree
+reassuring and heartening one another about the poor man's market as they
+do in their letters to one another.  And their case is just another
+illustration of this quite familiar fact in the Church of Christ, that
+the preachers who press their pulpits deepest into the doctrines of
+grace, and who, at the same time, themselves make the greatest
+attainments in the life of grace, are just the men, far more than any of
+their 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 not
+accept 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 been
+repeated in the preaching of the Gospel since the days of Peter and John!
+How often have our best preachers preached their best sermons to
+themselves!  'I preached the following Lord's Day,' says Boston in his
+diary, 'on "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" and my sermon was mostly
+on my own account.'  And it was just because Boston preached so often in
+that egoistical way that the people of Ettrick were able to give such a
+good account of what they heard.  Weep yourselves, if you would have your
+readers weep, said the shrewd old Roman poet to the shallow poetasters of
+his Augustan day.  And the reproof and the instruction come up from every
+pew to every pulpit still.  'Feel what you say, if you would have us feel
+it.  Believe what you say, if you would have us believe it.  Flee to the
+refuge yourselves, if you would have us flee.  And let us see you selling
+all in the poor man's market, if you would see us also selling all and
+coming after you.'  The people of Anwoth and Ochiltree were very well off
+in this respect also that their ministers did not bid them do anything
+that they did not first do themselves.  The truest and best apostolical
+succession had come to those two parishes in that their two pastors were
+able, with a good conscience before God and before their people, to say
+with 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 be
+with you.'
+
+As to the merchandise of the poor man's market,--that embraces everything
+that any man can possibly need or find any use for either in this world
+or in the next.  Absolutely everything is found in the poor man's
+market--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 this
+market, both by the seller and by the purchaser.  The seller holds
+nothing back from this market, and the purchaser comes to this market for
+everything.  Even what he already possesses; even what he bought and paid
+for but yesterday; even what everybody else would call absolutely the
+poor man's own, he throws it all back again upon God every day, and thus
+holds all he has as his instant purchase of the great Merchantman.  The
+poor man's market is as far as possible from being a Vanity Fair, but the
+catalogues and the sale-lists of that fair may be taken as a specimen of
+the 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 men
+come to His market for them.  And, as has been said, even after they have
+got possession of any or all of these things, as if the market had an
+absolute fascination for them, like gamblers who cannot stay away from
+the 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 or
+by gift, you would think they would die rather than part with--a
+patrimony in ancient lands and houses, a possession they had toiled and
+prayed and waited for all their days, Christ on His cross, their own
+child in his cradle--absolutely everything they possess, or would die to
+possess, they part with again, just that they may have the excitement,
+the debate, the delight, the security, and the liberty of purchasing it
+all over again every day in the poor man's market.
+
+Over all this merchandise God Himself is the Master Merchant.  It all
+belongs to Him, and He has put it all into the poor man's purchase.  He
+owns all the merchandise, and He has opened the market: He invites and
+advertises the purchasers, fixes the prices, and settles the conditions
+of sale.  And the first condition of sale is that all intending
+purchasers shall come to Himself immediately for whatever they need.  All
+negotiation here must be held immediately with God.  There are no
+middlemen here.  They have their own place in the markets of earth; but
+there is no room and no need for them here.  The producer and the
+purchaser meet immediately here.  He employs whole armies of servants to
+distribute and deliver His goods, but the bargain itself must be struck
+with God alone.  The price must be paid directly to Him; and then, with
+His 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 no
+money: incline your ear, and come to Me: hear, and your soul shall live!
+
+Now, surely, one of the most remarkable things about the purchasers in
+this market is just their fewness.  We find Isaiah in his day canvassing
+the whole of Jerusalem, high and low, and glad to get even one purchaser
+here and another there.  And Rutherford, looking back to Anwoth from
+Aberdeen, was not sure that he had got even so much as one really earnest
+purchaser brought near to God.  And thus it was that, while at Anwoth, he
+was so much in that market himself.  Partly on the principle that
+preachers are bidden to take to themselves for their trouble what their
+proud people refuse, and partly because Rutherford was out of all sight
+the poorest man in all Anwoth.
+
+Now, what made Isaiah and Rutherford and Fergushill such poor men
+themselves, was just this, that they came out of every money-making
+enterprise in the divine life far poorer men than they entered it.  There
+are some unlucky men in life who never prosper in anything.  Everything
+goes against them.  Everything makes shipwreck into which they adventure
+their time and their money and their hope.  They go into one promising
+concern after another with flying colours and a light heart.  Other men
+have made great fortunes here, and so will they; but before long their
+old evil luck has overtaken them, and they are glad that they are not all
+their life in prison for the uttermost farthing.  And so on, till at last
+they have to go to the poor man's market for the last decencies of their
+death and burial; for their winding-sheet, and their coffin, and their
+grave.  And so was it with the ministers of Anwoth and Ochiltree; and so
+it is with all that poverty-stricken class of ministers to which they
+belonged.  For, whatever their attainments and performances in preaching
+or in pastoral work may do to enrich others, one thing is certain: all
+they do only impoverishes to pennilessness the men who put their whole
+life and their whole heart into the performance of such work.  Their
+whole service of God, both in the public ministry of the word, and in
+their more personal submission to His law, has this fatal and hopeless
+principle ruling it, that the better it is done, and the more completely
+any man gives himself up to the doing of it, the poorer and the weaker it
+leaves him who does it.  So much so, that while he leads other men into
+the way of the greatest riches, he himself sinks deeper and deeper into
+poverty of spirit every day.  Till, out of sheer pity, and almost
+remorse, that His service should entail such poverty on all His servants,
+Christ sends them out continually less with an invitation to their people
+than to themselves, saying always to them, 'Take the invitation to
+yourselves; and he of My servants who hath no money let him buy without
+money and bear away what he will.'  'My dear Fergushill, our Lord is not
+so cruel as to let a poor man see salvation and never let him touch it
+for want of money; indeed, the only thing that commendeth sinners to
+Christ 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 and
+like to die, he called in his man, James Cowie, to read in the Epistle to
+the Romans to him, and when Cowie came to these words, 'I will have mercy
+on 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's
+market.  And, paradoxical and past all understanding as are so many of
+the things connected with this matter, the most paradoxical and past all
+understanding of them all is the price that is always asked, and that is
+sometimes paid, in that market.  When any man comes here to buy, it is
+not the value of the article on sale that is asked of him; but the first
+question that is asked of him is, How much money have you got?  And if it
+turns out that he is rich and increased with goods, then, to him, the
+price, even of admittance to this market, is all that he has.  The very
+entrance-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 is
+why so few purchasers are found in this market; they do not feel able or
+willing to pay down the impoverishing entrance-price.  As a matter of
+fact, it is a very unusual thing to find a young man who has been so well
+taught about this market by his parents, his schoolmasters, or even by
+his ministers, that he is fit to enter early on its great transactions.
+And increasing years do not tend of themselves to reconcile him to the
+terms on which God sells His salvation.  The price in the poor man's
+market is absolutely everything that a rich man possesses; and then, when
+he has nothing left, when he has laid down all that he has, or has lost
+all, or has been robbed of all, only then the full paradox of the case
+comes into his view; for then he begins to discover that the price he
+could not meet or face so long as he was a rich and a well-to-do man is
+such a price that, in his absolute penury, he can now pay it down till
+all the market is his own.  Multitudes of poor men up and down the land
+remember well, and will never forget, this poor man Rutherford's so
+Isaiah-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 the
+promises, and Christ is yours,' he wrote to Lady Kenmure.  'This is
+surely an easy market.  You need but to look to Him in faith; for Christ
+suffered 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, both
+its exceeding difficulty and its exceeding ease also just consist in
+that.  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, as
+just desire.  Desire sounds easy, but how few among us have that capacity
+and that preparation for Christ and His salvation that stands in desire.
+Have you that desire?  Really and truly, in your heart of hearts, have
+you that desire?  Then how well it is with you!  For that is all that God
+looks for in him who comes to the poor man's market; indeed, it is the
+only currency accepted there.  Isaiah's famous invitation is drawn out
+just to meet the case of a man who has desire, and nothing but desire, in
+his heart.  All the encouragements and assurances that his evangelical
+genius can devise are set forth by the prophet to attract and to win the
+desiring heart.  The desiring heart says to itself, I would give the
+whole world if I had it just to see Christ, just to be near Christ, and
+just, if it were but possible, that I should ever be the least thing like
+Christ.  Now, that carries God.  God, the Father of our Lord Jesus
+Christ, cannot resist that.  No true father could, and least of all a
+father who loves his son, and who has such a son to love as God has in
+Christ.  Well, He says; if you love and desire, honour and estimate My
+Son like that, I cannot deny Him the reward and the pleasure of
+possessing you and your love.  And thus, without any desert in you--any
+desert but sheer desire--you have made the greatest, the easiest, the
+speediest, the most splendid purchase that all the poor man's market
+affords.  No, William Guthrie; faith is not so very difficult to the
+sinner who has desire.  For where desire of the right quality is, and the
+right quantity, there is everything.  And all the merchandise of God is
+at that sinner's nod and bid.
+
+Ho, then, he that hath no money, but only the _desire_ for money, and for
+what money can, and for what money cannot, buy, come and buy, without
+money and without price.  Instead of money, instead of merit, even if you
+have nothing but Rutherford's only fitness for Christ, 'My loathsome
+wretchedness,' then come with that.  Come boldly with that.  Come as if
+you had in and on you the complete opposite of that.  The opposite of
+loathsomeness is delightsomeness; and the opposite of wretchedness is
+happiness.  Yes! but you will search all the Book of God and all its
+promises, and you will not find one single letter of them all addressed
+to the abounding and the gladsome and the self-satisfied.  It is the poor
+man's market; and this market goes best when the poor man is not only
+poor, but poor beyond all ordinary poverty: poor, as Samuel Rutherford
+always 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 only
+misery, 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 the
+difficulties of the best of his future people.  A divinity student's
+difficulties are usually academic and speculative, whereas the
+difficulties of the best people in his coming congregation will be
+difficulties of the most intensely real and practical kind.  And thus it
+is that we so often hear lately-ordained ministers confessing that they
+have come to the end of their resources and experiences, and have nothing
+either fresh or certain left to preach to the people about.  Just as, on
+the other hand, so many congregations complain that they look up to the
+pulpit from Sabbath to Sabbath and are not fed.  It is not much to be
+wondered at that a raw college youth cannot all at once feed and guide
+and extricate an old saint; or that a minister, whose deepest
+difficulties hitherto have been mostly of the debating society kind,
+should not be able to afford much help to those of his people who are
+wading through the deep and drowning waters of the spiritual life.  And
+whether something could not be done by the institution of chairs of
+genuine pastoral and experimental theology for the help of our students
+and the good of our people is surely a question that well deserves the
+earnest attention of all the evangelical churches.  Meantime we are to be
+introduced to a divinity student of the middle of the seventeenth century
+who was early and deeply exercised in those intensely real problems of
+the soul which occupied such a large place both in the best religious
+literature and in the best pulpit work of that intensely earnest day.
+James Bautie, or Beattie, as we shall here call him on Dr. Bonar's
+suggestion, was a candidate for the ministry such that the ripest and
+most deeply exercised saints in Scotland might well have rejoiced to have
+had such an able and saintly youth for their preacher on the Sabbath-day
+as well as for their pastor all the week.  As James Beattie's college
+days drew on to an end he became more and more exercised about his mental
+deficiencies, and still more about his spiritual unfitness to be
+anybody's minister.  Beattie had, to begin with, this always infallible
+mark of an able man--an increasing sense of his own inability: and he
+had, along with that, this equally infallible mark of a
+spiritually-minded man--an overwhelming sense of his utter lack of
+anything like a spiritual mind.  No man but a very able man could have
+written the letter that Beattie wrote about himself to Samuel Rutherford;
+and Rutherford's letter back to Beattie will not be a bad test of a
+divinity student whether he has enough of the true divinity student mind
+in him to read that letter, to understand it, and to translate it.
+Beattie had an excellent intellect, and his excellent intellect had not
+been laid out at college on those windy fields that so puff up a beginner
+in knowledge and in life; his whole mind had been given up already to
+those terrible problems of the soul that both humble and exalt the man
+who spends his life among them.  Beattie's future congregation will not
+vaunt themselves about their minister's ability or scholarship or
+eloquence; his sermons will soon push his people back behind all such
+superficial matters.  Beattie's preaching and his whole pastorate will
+soon become another illustration of the truth that it is not gifts but
+graces in a minister that will in the long-run truly edify the body of
+Christ.  You have James Beattie's portrait as a divinity student in
+Rutherford's 249th letter, and you will find a complementary portrait of
+Beattie as a grey-haired pastor in Dr. Stalker's _Preacher and his
+Models_.  'He was a man of competent scholarship, and had the reputation
+of having been in early life a powerful and popular preacher.  But it was
+not to those gifts that he owed his unique influence.  He moved through
+the town, with his white hair and somewhat staid and dignified demeanour,
+as a hallowing presence.  His very passing in the street was a kind of
+benediction; the people, as they looked after him, spoke of him to each
+other with affectionate reverence.  Children were proud when he laid his
+hand on their heads, and they treasured the kindly words which he spoke
+to them.  They who laboured along with him in the ministry felt that his
+mere existence in the community was an irresistible demonstration of
+Christianity and a tower of strength to every good cause.  Yet he had not
+gained this position of influence by brilliant talents or great
+achievements 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 forty
+years a blameless life, and was known by everybody to be a godly and a
+prayerful 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 than
+other truths.  This is a common difficulty with many of our modern
+students also, and how best to advise with them under this real
+difficulty constantly puts their professors and their pastors to the
+test.  Whatever Beattie may have got, I confess I do not get much help in
+this difficulty out of Rutherford's letter back to Beattie.  Rutherford,
+with all his splendid gifts of mind and heart, had sometimes a certain
+dogmatic and dictatorial way with him, and this is just the temper that
+our 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 it
+has done on too many of the old.  There was a modest, a genuine, and an
+every way reasonable difficulty in this part of Beattie's letter to
+Rutherford, and I wish much that Rutherford had felt himself put upon his
+quite capable mettle to deal with the difficulty.  Or, if he had not time
+to 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 a
+well-read student--to a great sermon by the greatest of English
+Churchmen--a sermon that a reader like Rutherford must surely have had by
+heart, entitled, 'A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certainty and
+Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect.'  But, unfortunately for England and
+Scotland both, England was thrusting that sermon and all the other
+writings of its author on the Church of Christ in Scotland at the point
+of the bayonet, and that is the very worst instrument that can be
+employed in the interests of truth and of ecclesiastical comprehension
+and conformity.  And among the many things we have to be thankful for in
+our more emancipated and more catholic day, it is not the least that
+Rutherford and Hooker lie in peace and in complemental fulness beside one
+another on the tables of all our students of divinity.
+
+Coming still closer home to himself, our divinity student puts this acute
+difficulty to his spiritual casuist: Whether a man of God, and especially
+a minister of Christ, can be right who does not love God for Himself, for
+His nature and for His character solely and purely, and apart altogether
+from all His benefactions both in nature and in grace.  James Beattie had
+been brought up with such a love for the Kirk of Scotland, and for her
+ministers and her people; he had of late grown into such a love for his
+books also, and for the work of the ministry, that in examining himself
+in prospect of his approaching licence he had felt afraid that he loved
+the thought of a study, and a pulpit, and a manse, and its inhabitants,
+and, indeed, the whole prospective life of a minister, with more keenness
+of affection than he loved the souls of men, or even his Master Himself.
+And he put that most distressing difficulty also before Rutherford.  Now
+there was an expression on that matter that was common in the pulpits of
+Rutherford's school in that day that Rutherford would be sure to quote in
+his second letter to Beattie, if not in his first.  It was a Latin
+proverb, but all the common people of that day quite well understood it,
+not to speak of a student like Beattie.  _Aliquid in Christo formosius
+Salvatore_, wrote Rutherford to distressed Beattie; that is to say, There
+is that in Christ which is far more fair and sweet than merely His being
+a Saviour.  Never be content, that is, till you can rise up above manses
+and pulpits and books and sermons, and even above your own salvation, to
+see the pure and infinite loveliness of Christ Himself.  Dost thou, O my
+soul, 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 in
+Christ that is far more amiable than merely in His being thy Saviour.  And
+yet the two kinds of love may quite well stand together, writes
+Rutherford, 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 the
+same time, to love Christ for Himself alone is the last end of a true
+believer's love.
+
+It was one of the great experimental problems much agitated among the
+greater evangelical divines of that deep, clear-eyed, and honest day, Why
+the truly regenerate are all left so full of all manner of indwelling
+sin.  We never hear that question raised nowadays, nor any question at
+all like that.  The only difficulty in our day is why any man should have
+any 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 as
+we.  And as for the Antinomian, perfectionist, and higher-life preachers
+of that day, they are all so dead and forgotten that you would not know
+their names even if I repeated them.  Beattie, as a beginner in the
+spiritual life, had made this still not uncommon mistake.  He had taken
+those New Testament passages in which the apostles portray an ideal
+Christian man as he stands in the election and calling of God, and as he
+will be found at last and for ever in heaven, and he had prematurely and
+inconsequently applied all that to himself as a young man under
+sanctification 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 and
+all hope.  Now, that was just the kind of difficulty with which
+Rutherford could deal with all his evangelical freedom and fulness, depth
+and insight.  No preacher or writer of that day held up the absolute
+necessity of holiness better than Rutherford did; but then, that only the
+more compelled him to hold up also such comfort as he conveys in his
+consoling and reassuring letter to despairing Beattie: 'Comparing the
+state of one truly regenerate, whose heart is a temple of the Holy Ghost,
+with your own, which is full of uncleanness and corruption, you stand
+dumb and dare not call Christ heartsomely your own.  But, I answer, the
+best regenerate have their defilements, and, wash as they will, there
+will be the filth of sin in their hearts to the end.  Glory alone will
+make our hearts pure and perfect, never till then will they be absolutely
+sinless.'  And if we, Rutherford's so weak-kneed successors, preached the
+law of God and true holiness as he preached those noble doctrines, the
+sheer agony of our despairing people would compel us to preach also the
+true nature, the narrow limits, and the whole profound laws of
+evangelical sanctification as we never preach, and scarce dare to preach,
+those things now.  They who preach true holiness best are just thereby
+the more compelled to preach its partial, tentative, elementary, and
+superficial character in this life.  And the hearer who knows in the word
+of God and in his own heart what indeed true holiness is, will insist on
+having its complementary truths frequently preached to him to keep him
+from despair; or else he will turn continually to those great divines
+who, though dead, yet preach such things in their noble books.  And that
+those books are not still read and preached among us, and that the need
+for them and their doctrines is so little felt, is only another
+illustration of the true proverb that where no oxen are the crib is
+clean.
+
+James Beattie was in very good company when he said that he must have
+more assurance, both of his gifts and his graces, before he could enter
+on his ministry.  For Moses, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and many another
+minister who could be named, have all felt and said the same thing.  Now
+that he is near the door of the pulpit, Beattie feels that he cannot
+enter it till he has more certainty that it is all right with himself.
+But our young ministers will attain to assurance not so much by
+consulting Rutherford, skilled casuist in such matters as he is, as by
+themselves going forward in a holy life and a holy ministry.  'It is not
+God's design,' says Jonathan Edwards, 'that men should obtain assurance
+in any other way than by mortifying corruption, increasing in grace, and
+obtaining the lively exercises of it.  Assurance is not to be obtained so
+much by self-examination as by action.  Paul obtained assurance of
+winning the prize more by running than by reflecting.  The swiftness of
+his pace did more toward his assurance of the goal than the strictness of
+his self-examination.'  'I wish you a share of my feast,' replies
+Rutherford.  'But, for you, hang on our Lord, and He will fill you with a
+sense of His love, as He has so often filled me.  Your feast is not far
+off.  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, yet
+come not away, albeit you should fall aswoon at His feet.'  Pray, says
+Rutherford, and you will not long lack assurance.  Work, says Edwards,
+and assurance of God's love will be an immediate earnest of your full
+wages.
+
+
+
+
+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 the
+time of his student life in Edinburgh.  Young Rutherford had got an
+introduction to the Canongate shopkeeper from one of the elders of
+Jedburgh, and the old shopkeeper and the young student at once took to
+one another, and remained fast friends all their days.  John Meine's shop
+was so situated at a corner of the Canongate that Rutherford could see
+the Tolbooth and John Knox's house as he looked up the street, and
+Holyrood Palace as he looked down, and the young divine could never hear
+enough of what the old shopkeeper had to tell him of Holyrood and its
+doings on the one hand, and of the Reformer's house on the other.  The
+very 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 he
+came to live near my father's shop,' John Meine would say to the eager
+student.  'But, even as an errand boy, taking parcels up his stair, I
+felt what a good man's house I was in, and I used to wish I was already a
+man, that I might either be a soldier or a minister.'  The divinity
+student often sat in the shopkeeper's pew on Sabbath-days, and after
+sermon they never went home till they had again visited John Knox's
+grave.  And as they turned homeward, old Meine would lay his hand on
+young Rutherford's shoulder and say: 'Knoxes will be needed in Edinburgh
+again, before all is over, and who knows but you may be elect, my lad, to
+be one of them?'
+
+Barbara Hamilton, who lived above her husband's shop, was almost more
+young Rutherford's intimate friend than even her intimate husband.
+Barbara Hamilton was both a woman of eminent piety and of a high and bold
+public spirit.  And stories are still told in the Wodrow Books of her
+interest and influence in the affairs of the Kirk and its silenced
+ministers.  The godly old couple had two children: John, called after his
+father, and Barbara, called after her mother, and Barbara assisted her
+mother in the house, while John ran errands and assisted his father.
+Rutherford and the little boy had made a great friendship while the
+latter was still a boy; and one of Rutherford's fellow-students had made
+a still deeper friendship upstairs than any but the two friends
+themselves suspected.  Twenty years after this Barbara Hume will receive
+a letter from Samuel Rutherford, written in the Jerusalem Chamber at
+Westminster, consoling and sanctifying her for the death of his old
+friend William Hume, lately chaplain in the Covenanters' army at
+Newcastle.
+
+By the time that Rutherford was minister at Anwoth, and then prisoner in
+Aberdeen, John Meine, junior, had grown up to be almost a minister
+himself.  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 hour
+every afternoon to let his father have a rest.  The old merchant used to
+rise at all hours in the morning, and spend the early summer mornings on
+Arthur's Seat with his Psalm-book in his hand, and the winter mornings at
+his shop fire, reading translations from the Continental Reformers,
+comparing them with his Bible, singing Psalms by himself and offering
+prayer.  Till his student son felt, as he stood behind the counter for an
+hour in the afternoon, that he was like Aaron and Hur holding up his
+father's praying and prevailing hands.
+
+There have always been speculative difficulties and animated debates in
+our Edinburgh Theological Societies, and, from the nature of the study,
+from the nature of the human mind, and from the nature of the Scottish
+mind, there will always be.  John Meine's difficulties were not the same
+difficulties that exercise the minds of the young divines in our day, but
+they were anxious and troublesome enough to him, and he naturally turned
+to his old friend at Anwoth for counsel and advice.  When Rutherford came
+in to Edinburgh, there was always a prophet's chamber in Barbara
+Hamilton's house ready for him; and when the winter session came to a
+close her young son would set off to Anwoth with a thousand questions in
+his head.  But Aberdeen was too far away, and, though the posts of that
+day were expensive and uncertain, the old merchant did not grudge to see
+his son's letters sent off to Samuel Rutherford.  Samuel Rutherford knew
+that John Meine, junior, was not shallow in his divinity, young as he
+was, nor an entire stranger to sanctification, else he would not have
+written that still extant letter back to him:--'I have little of Christ
+in this prison, little but desires.  All my present stock of Christ is
+some 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 in
+His year, and shall we insist on two?  My love to your father.  And, for
+yourself, if you would be a deep divine, I recommend you to
+sanctification.'  What with his father and his mother, his books, his
+acquaintance with Rutherford and Hume, and, best of all, his acquaintance
+with his own evil heart, young John Meine must have been a somewhat deep
+divine already, else Rutherford would not have cast such pearls of
+experience down before him.
+
+A divine, according to our division of labour, is a man who has chosen as
+his life-work to study the things of God; the things, that is, of God in
+Christ, 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 became
+divines when Christ said to them 'Follow me.'  And after seventy years of
+sanctification the second son of Zebedee had at last attained to divinity
+enough to receive the Revelation, to write it out, and to be called by
+the early Church John the Divine.
+
+But what is this process of sanctification that makes a young man already
+a deep divine?  What is sanctification?  Rutherford had a deep hand in
+drawing up the well-known definition, and, therefore, we may take it as
+not 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 are
+enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness.'  That,
+or something like that, was the recipe that Samuel Rutherford sent south
+to John Meine, student of divinity, with the assurance that, if he
+followed it close enough and long enough, it would result in making him a
+deep 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, I
+know, how he felt as he submitted his whole man--body, soul, and
+spirit--to the renewing of the Holy Ghost.  And did he begin and continue
+to die more and more unto sin, till he died altogether to this sinful
+world, and live more and more unto righteousness, till he went to live
+with Knox, and Rutherford, and Hume, and his father and mother in the
+Land 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 full
+of praise of a sermon she had just heard on sanctification.  Dr. Duncan
+was perhaps the deepest divine this century has seen in Edinburgh; and
+his divinity took its depth from the same study and the same exercise
+that Rutherford recommended to John Meine.  Dr. Duncan was a great
+scholar, but it was not his scholarship that made him such a singularly
+deep divine.  He was a profound philosopher also; but neither was it his
+philosophy.  He was an immense reader also; but neither was it the piles
+of books; it was, he tells us, first the new heart that he got as a
+student in Aberdeen, and then it was the lifelong conflict that went on
+within him between the old heart and the new.  And it is this that makes
+sanctification rank and stand out as the first and the oldest of all the
+experimental sciences.  Long before either of the Bacons were born, the
+humblest and most obscure of God's saints were working out their own
+salvation on the most approved scientific principles and methods.  Long
+before science and philosophy had discovered and set their seal to that
+method, the Church of Christ had taught it to all her true children, and
+all her best divines had taken a deep degree by means of it.  What
+experimentalists were David and Asaph and Isaiah and Paul; and that, as
+the subtlest and deepest sciences must be pursued, not upon foreign
+substances 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 judgment
+is employed upon individual facts, and these are learned only by
+experience, and a youth has not experience, for experience is gained only
+by a course of years.'
+
+'A truly great divine,' was Jonathan Edwards' splendid certificate to our
+own 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 deep
+divine.  It was not the number of his books, for he tells us how he was
+pained when a brother minister opened his book-press and smiled at its
+few shelves.  'I may be a great bookman,' writes Rutherford to Lady
+Kenmure, 'and yet be a stark idiot in the things of Christ.'  It was not
+his knowledge of Hebrew, though he almost discovered that hidden language
+in Ettrick.  No, but it was his discovery of himself, and his
+experimental study of his own heart.  'My duties, the best of them, would
+damn 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 be
+welcome to make havoc of all my lusts to-night, and to make me holy.  I
+know no lust I would not be content to part with to-night.  The first
+impression on my spirit this morning was my utter inability to put away
+sin.  I saw that it was as possible for a rock to raise itself as it was
+for me to raise my heart from sin to holiness.'
+
+But the study of divinity is not a close profession: a profession for men
+only, and from which women are shut out; nor is the method of it shut off
+from any woman or any man.  'I counsel you to study sanctification,'
+wrote Rutherford, the same year to the Lady Cardoness.  And if you think
+that Rutherford was a closet mystic and an unpractical and head-carried
+enthusiast, too good for this rough world, read his letter to Lady
+Cardoness, and confess your ignorance of this great and good man.  'Deal
+kindly with your tenants,' he writes, 'and let your conscience be your
+factor'; and again, 'When your husband's passion overcomes him, my
+counsel to your ladyship is, that a soft answer putteth away wrath.'  And
+lastly, 'Let it not be said that the Lord hath forsaken your house
+because of your neglect of the Sabbath-day and its exercises.  I counsel
+you 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 year
+1617.  That was the same year that saw Samuel Rutherford matriculate in
+the 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 his
+personal and family life, yet, unfortunately, Brodie did not begin to
+keep that diary till he was well advanced in middle age.  Young Brodie's
+father died when his son and heir was but fourteen years old, and after
+taking part of the curriculum of study in King's College, Aberdeen, the
+young laird married a year before he had come to his majority.  His
+excellent wife was only spared to be with him for two years when she was
+taken away from him, leaving him the widowed father of one son and one
+daughter.
+
+As time goes on we find the laird of Brodie a member of Parliament, a
+member of General Assembly, and a Lord of Session.  He was one of the
+commissioners also, who were sent out to the Hague to carry on
+negotiations with Charles, and during the many troubled years that
+followed that mission, we find Brodie corresponding from time to time
+with Cromwell and his officers, and with Charles and his courtiers, both
+about public and private affairs.  Brodie was one of the ablest men of
+his day in Scotland, and he should have stood in the very front rank of
+her statesmen and her saints; but, as it is, he falls very far short of
+that.  We search the signatures of the National Covenant in vain for the
+name of Alexander Brodie, and the absence of his name from that noble
+roll is already an ill-omen for his future life.  David Laing, in his
+excellent preface to Brodie's _Diary_, is good enough to set down the
+absence of Brodie's name from the Covenant to his youth and retired
+habits.  I wish I could take his editor's lenient view of Brodie's
+absence from Greyfriars church on the testing day of the Covenant.  It
+would be an immense relief to me if I could persuade myself to look at
+Brodie 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 the
+Greyfriars churchyard that day, and far more modest men than he was.  And
+I cannot shut my eyes to what appears to me, after carefully studying his
+life and his character, a far likelier if a far less creditable reason.
+After the Restoration Brodie's life, if life it could be called, was
+spent in a constant terror lest he should lose his estates, his liberty,
+and his life in the prelatic persecution; but, with his sleepless
+management of men, if not with the blessing of God and the peace of a
+good 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 the
+apostle's expression; in some things, indeed, no man of his day ran
+better.  To begin with, Brodie had an excellent intellect.  If he did not
+always run well it was not for want of a sound head or a sharp eye.  In
+reading Brodie's diary you all along feel that you are under the hand of
+a very able man, and a man who all his days does excellent justice to his
+excellent mind, at least on its intellectual side.  The books he enters
+as having read on such and such a date, the catalogues of books he buys
+on his visits to Edinburgh and London, and the high planes of thought on
+which his mind dwells when he is at his best, all bespeak a very able man
+doing full justice to his great ability.  The very examinations he puts
+himself under as to his motives and mainsprings in this and that action
+of his life; the defences and exculpations he puts forward for this and
+that part of his indefensible conduct; the debate he holds now with the
+presbyterian party and now with the prelatist; the very way he puts his
+finger down on the weak and unsound places in both of the opposing
+parties; and, not least, his power of aphoristic thought and expression
+in the running diary of his spiritual life, all combine to leave the
+conviction on his reader's mind that Lord Brodie was one of the very
+ablest men of a very able day in Scotland.  I open his voluminous diary
+at random, and I at once come on such passages as these: 'If substantial
+duties are neglected or slighted it is a shrewd suspicion, be the
+repentance what it will, that all is not right.  Lord, discover Thyself
+in the duties of the time, and in every substantial duty.  At the same
+time, hang not the weight of our wellbeing on our duties, but on Christ
+by faith.  I am a reeling, unstable, staggering, unsettled, lukewarm
+creature.  For Thy compassion's sake forgive and heal, warm, establish,
+enlighten, draw me and I will follow.  I am full of self-love, darkness
+in my judgment, fear to confess Thee, or hazard myself, or my estate, or
+my peace. . . .  We poor creatures are commanded by our affections and
+our passions; they are not at our command; but the Holy One doth exercise
+all His attributes at His own will; they are all at His command; they are
+not passions or perturbations in His mind, though they transport us.  When
+I would hate, I cannot.  When I would love, I cannot.  When I would
+grieve, I cannot.  When I would desire, I cannot.  But it is the better
+for us that all is as He wills. . . .  Another of the deep deceits of my
+heart is this, that I have more affection in prayer than I have
+corresponding holiness in my walk or conversation.  I wondered not to see
+the 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 heart
+are.  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 make
+use of poison to expel poison.  Oh, if I were examined and brought to the
+light, what a monstrous creature I would be seen to be!  For as I see
+myself I am no better than a devil, void of sincerity and of uprightness
+in what I do myself, and yet judge others, condemning in another man what
+I 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 myself
+and for my relations.'  And then a passage which might have been taken
+from _The Confessions_ itself: 'Ere I come to glory and to my journey's
+end, I shall have spent so much of Thy free grace--what in pardoning,
+what in preventing, what in convincing, what in enlightening, what in
+strengthening, and confirming, and upholding; what in watering and making
+me 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 the
+right 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 can
+write about sin and grace in himself in that fashion!  And that is not
+all he wrote on that subject and in that style.  You have no idea of the
+wealth of personal and experimental matter there lies buried in Alexander
+Brodie'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 of
+Scotland's statesmen, scholars, and eminent saints.  Here, I thought, is
+an author on the inward life to be set beside Brae and Halyburton, if not
+beside Shepard and Edwards themselves.
+
+In the religious upbringing also, and lifelong care of his orphaned son
+and daughter, Brodie was all we could wish to see.  In the sanctification
+and wise occupation of the Sabbath-day; in the family preparation for
+communion seasons; in the personal and private covenants he encouraged
+his children to make with God in their own religious life; in the company
+he brought to his house and to his table; in his own devotional habits at
+home--in all these all-important matters Brodie was all that a father of
+children too early bereft of their mother ought to be.  Till we do not
+wonder to find his son commencing his diary on the day of his father's
+death in this way: 'My precious, worthy, and dear father!  I can hardly
+apprehend the consequence of it to the land, and the Church, and his
+family.  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 has
+been won to God by his example.'  A complete directory, indeed, for a
+Highland gentleman's household religion might easily be collected out of
+Alexander Brodie's domestic diary.
+
+Another thing that greatly drew me to Brodie when I first read his diary
+was his noble and truly Christian acknowledgment of God in all the
+manifold experiences and events of his daily life.  '23_rd_ _July_,
+1661.--Came through the fells in England to Alsbori and dined there, saw
+a country full of grass, plentiful in comparison of us, and acknowledged
+God in it. . . . Thus I saw a large beautiful country, not straitened
+with the poverty that my native soil labours under.  I desired to
+consider and understand this. . . . I saw a mighty city, London,
+numerous, many souls in it, great plenty of things, and thought him a
+great king that had so many things at his command; yet how much greater
+is He who hath at His command all things created in heaven and on earth.
+Who shall not fear Him? . . . _August_ 17.--Went this afternoon with
+Cassilis to the Bridge for natural refreshment, and I saw this populous
+city, and plenty in it.  I therein saw something of the Lord's
+providence, who hath divided the kingdoms of the earth and given them
+their habitations, not all alike, but as His wisdom hath seen fit.  I saw
+the copper-works also, and acknowledged the Lord in the gifts and the
+faculties He hath given to the children of men.  27.--I did see the Lord
+Mayor, his solemnities, and desired to be instructed by what I saw.  The
+variety of the Lord's creatures on other parts of the earth was
+represented.  In this I did acknowledge Him.  But all the glory of the
+city neither abides nor can make its owner any the happier.  It cannot be
+laid hold upon.  It is not solid; it is but in conceit.  Oh learn me to
+be 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 at
+Southwark, and the workers of glass, in all which I saw the manifold
+wisdom of God in all the gifts and faculties He hath given to the sons of
+men.  But alas!  I am so barren of any thoughts of God, and so have I
+found 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 of
+covetousness, and that sin in Alexander Brodie's heart and life blew
+almost, if not altogether, away all these and many more fences of his
+salvation.  Well as David Laing edits Alexander Brodie's _Diary_,
+unfortunately for some of his readers he leaves his index an index of
+names only, neglecting things.  And thus I have had to extemporise an
+index 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 that
+the 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 matter
+of his virtues, I shall let the singularly honest Diarist speak for
+himself.  I certainly would not dare, on any evidence, to characterise or
+condemn a man like Brodie as he will now characterise and condemn
+himself.  '_July_ 30, 1653.--I find covetousness getting deeper and
+deeper into my heart, insatiable desires of lands and riches, the desire
+of acquiring my neighbour's property, and many vain projects and want of
+contentment, albeit I have already what might satisfy and well content
+me.  I find that it is not ten hundred times what I possess that would
+content and stay my mind from greedy lusts and insatiable desires.  What
+avails prayer as long as these lusts remain?  I scarcely allow meat and
+fish 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 to
+tenants, 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 the
+Lord impute it!  9 _Oct_.--My heart challenged me that I could so freely
+lay out money on books, plenishing, clothes to myself, and was so loth to
+lay out for the Lord.  Oh, what does this presage and witness but that I
+am of the earth and that my portion is not blessed, but that my goods are
+rather accursed!  4 _Nov_.--Neil Campbell staid with me.  I found my
+niggardly nature still encroaching upon me, and made my supplication for
+escape.  _July_ 1.--Because I have not employed my wealth in charitable
+uses, therefore does the Lord take other ways more grievous to me to
+scatter what I have so sinfully kept back.'  And so on, alternately
+scrimping and confessing; filling his pockets with money, and praying
+that he may be enabled to open them, he goes on till we read such
+miserably self-deceiving entries as this almost at the end of his doleful
+diary: 'I purpose, if the Lord would give strength and grace and
+constancy, and an honest and sound heart, to lay by some money for such
+uses 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 the
+day 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 desired
+to reflect on giving titles, speaking fair, and complying.  I found
+Lauderdale changed to me, and I desired to spread this out before God.  I
+went 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, and
+my affairs, from the ill-will of those who govern.  May God keep me under
+the shadow of His wings.  _Oct_. 16.--Did see the Bishop, and in my
+discourse with him did go far in fair words and the like.  The 31.--James
+Urquhart was with me.  Oh that I could attain to his steadfastness and
+firmness!  But, alas! I am soon overcome; I soon yield to the least
+difficulty.  The 26.--Duncan Cuming was here, and I desired him to tell
+the honest men in the south that though I did not come up their length, I
+hoped they would not stumble at me.'  In other words, 'Tell the prisoners
+in the Bass and in Blackness, and the martyrs of the Grass-market and the
+Tolbooth, that Lord Brodie is a Presbyterian at heart, and ought to be a
+Covenanter and a sufferer with his fellows; but that he loves Brodie
+Castle and a whole skin better than he loves the Covenant and the
+Covenanters, or even the Surety of the better covenant.'  And having
+despatched his sympathetic message to the honest men in the South, he
+takes up his pen again to carry on his diary, which he carries on in
+these actual terms.  Believe me, I copy literally and scrupulously from
+the humiliating book.  'Die Dom.--I find great averseness in myself to
+suffering.  I am afraid to lose life or estate.  I hold it a duty not to
+abandon those honest ministers that have stuck to the Reformation.  And
+if the Lord would strengthen me, I would desire to confess the truth like
+them. . . . I questioned whether I might not safely use means to decline
+the 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 Seaforth
+and Argyll to ask them to clear and vindicate me?  Shall I forbear to
+hear that honest minister, James Urquhart, for a time, seeing the storm
+is 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 Thy
+will?  What is my duty?'  And then this able and honest hypocrite has the
+grace to add: 'A grain of sound faith would easily answer all these
+questions.'  I have a sheaf of such passages.  It is sickening work to
+speak 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 run
+well: 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 did
+so easily beset him--the love of money and the fear of man!  But under
+the arrest and overthrow that those two so mean and so contemptible vices
+brought on Brodie, we see his spiritual life, or what might have ripened
+into spiritual life, gradually but surely decaying, even in his diary,
+till we read this last entry on the day of his death: 'My darkness has
+not taken an end, nor my confusions.'
+
+Alexander Brodie being long dead yet speaketh with terrible power in
+every page of his solemnising diary.  Young men of Scotland, he says,
+young statesmen, young senators of the College of Justice, young
+churchmen, young magistrates, young landlords, and all young men of
+talent and of influence, sons of the Cavaliers and the Covenanters
+alike--seek the right and the true, the just and the honourable, in your
+day; choose it for your part, and take your stand firmly and boldly upon
+it.  Make hazards in order to stand upon it.  Read my humbling life, and
+take warning from me.  And when your times are confused and perplexed;
+when truth and duty are not wholly and commandingly clear; give a good
+conscience the benefit of the doubt, and suspect the side on which safety
+and promotion and public praise lie.  Pray without ceasing, and then live
+as you pray.  And then my diary shall not have been written and left open
+among 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 fast
+friends.  Away back in the happy days when Rutherford was still a
+student, and was still haunting the back-shop of old John Meine in the
+Canongate of Edinburgh, he had formed a fast friendship with the young
+wood-merchant of Leith.  And all the trials and separations of life,
+instead of deadening their love for one another, or making them forget
+one another, had only drawn the two men the closer to one another.  For
+when Rutherford's two great troubles came upon him,--first his dismissal
+from the Latin regency in Edinburgh University, and then his banishment
+from his pulpit at Anwoth,--John Fleming came forward on both occasions
+with money, and with letters, and with visits that were even better than
+money, 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 is
+laid up for you and remembered in heaven.'
+
+Robert M'Ward, the first editor of Rutherford's _Letters_, with all his
+assiduity, was only able to recover four letters out of the heap of
+correspondence that had passed between the rich timber-merchant of Leith
+and the exiled minister, but, those four tell us volumes, both about the
+intimacy of the two men and about the depth and the worth of the bailie's
+character.  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 ebbing
+away, and I am not yet begun aright to live.  I am in mid-time of my
+days.  I sometimes feel that I am coming near the end of them; and what
+evil days they have been!  My business that my father left me is
+prosperous.  I have a good and kind wife, as you know.  My children are
+not wholly without promise.  My place in this town is far too honourable
+for me, and I have many dear friends among the godly both in Leith and in
+Edinburgh.  But I feel bitterly that I have no business to mix myself
+among them, and to be counted one of them.  For, what with the burdensome
+affairs of this great seaport, and my own growing business, my days and
+my nights are like a weaver's shuttle.  I intend and I begin well, but
+another 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 a
+bankrupt before Him in my soul.  My inward life is a ravelled hesp, and I
+need guidance and direction if I am ever to come out of this confusion
+and to come to any good.  Protestant and Presbyterian as I am,' he goes
+on, 'if I could only find a director who would take trouble with me and
+command me as I take trouble with and command my servants, I vow to you
+that I would put the reins without reserve into his hands.  Will you not
+take me in hand?  You know me of old.  We used to talk in dear old John
+Meine's back-shop on week-nights and upstairs on Sabbath nights about
+these things.  And long as it is since we saw much of one another, I feel
+that you know me out and in, and through and through, as no one else
+knows me.  Tell me, then, what I am to do with myself.  I will try to do
+what you tell me, for I am wearied and worn out with my stagnant and
+miserable life.  Pity me, Mr. Samuel, my honoured and dear friend, for my
+pirn is almost run out, and I am not near saved.'
+
+'My worthy and dearly beloved brother in the Lord,' replied Rutherford to
+Fleming, 'I dare not take it upon me to lay down rules and directions for
+your inner life.  I have not the judiciousness, nor the experience, nor
+the success in the inner life myself that would justify me.  And,
+besides, there is no lack of such Directories as you ask me for.  Search
+the Scriptures.  Buy Daniel Rogers, and Richard Greenham, and especially
+William Perkins.  My own wall is too much broken down, my own garden is
+too much overrun with weeds; I dare not attempt to lay down the law to
+you.  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 a
+lantern 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 his
+friend John Fleming.
+
+1.  Now--would you believe it?--the first thing Samuel Rutherford found
+his own heart accusing him in before God was, of all things, the way he
+had wasted his time.  Would you believe it that the student who was
+summer and winter in his study at three o'clock in the morning, and the
+minister who, as his people boasted, was always preparing his sermons,
+always visiting his people, always writing books, and always entertaining
+strangers,--would you believe it that one of his worst consciences was
+for the bad improvement of his time?  What an insatiable thirst for
+absolute and unearthly perfection God has awakened in the truly gracious
+heart!  Give the truly gracious heart a little godliness and it cries out
+night 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 at
+all.  Samuel Rutherford gave all his time and all his strength to his
+pastoral and his professorial duties, and yet when he looked into his own
+heart to write a letter to Bailie Fleming out of it, his whole heart
+condemned him to his face because he had so mismanaged his time, and had
+not aright redeemed it.  'You complain that your time is fast speeding
+away, and that you have not even begun to employ it well.  So is mine.  I
+give 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 forgive
+me for the way I forget Him and neglect Him all the time that I am
+bustling about in the things of His house!  Let us both begin, and me
+especially, 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 back
+again upon Himself.  He values nothing so much as a little of our
+allotted time.  Let us meditate on Him more, and pray more to Him.  Let
+us throw up ejaculations of prayer to Him more and more while we are at
+our daily employments; you in the timber-yard, down among the ships, at
+the desk, and at the Council-table; and I among my books, and among my
+people, and in my pulpit.  These are always golden moments to me, and why
+they do not multiply themselves into hours and days and years is to me
+but another proof of my deep depravity.  And, John Fleming, sanctify you
+the Sabbath.  As you love and value your immortal soul, sanctify and do
+not waste and desecrate the Sabbath.  Let no man steal from you a single
+hour 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 to
+the sins of the tongue.  Rutherford himself was a great sinner by his
+tongue, and he seems to have taken it for granted that the bailies of
+Leith were all in the same condemnation.  'Observe your words well,' he
+writes out of the bitterness of his own heart.  'Make conscience of all
+your conversations.'  Cut off a right hand, pluck out a right eye, says
+Christ.  And I wonder that half of His disciples have not bitten out
+their offending tongues.  What a world of injury and of all kinds of
+iniquity has the tongue always and everywhere been!  In Jerusalem in
+David's day; and still in Jerusalem in James's day; in Anwoth and
+Aberdeen and St. Andrews in Rutherford's day; and in Leith in John
+Fleming's day; and still in all these places in our own day.  The tongue
+can no man tame, and no wonder, for it is set on fire of hell.  'I shall
+show you,' says Rutherford, 'what I would fain be at myself, howbeit I
+always come short of my purpose.'  Rutherford made many enemies both as a
+preacher and as a doctrinal and an ecclesiastical controversialist.  He
+was a hot, if not a bad-blooded man himself, and he raised both hot and
+bad 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 a
+fast and a high-beating heart.  And his passionate heart was not all
+spent in holy love to Jesus Christ, though much of it was.  For the dregs
+of it, the unholy scum and froth of it, came out too much in his books of
+debate and in his differences with his own brethren.  His high-mettled
+and almost reckless sense of duty brought him many enemies, and it was
+his lifelong sanctification to try to treat his enemies aright, and to
+keep his own heart and tongue and pen clean and sweet towards them.  And
+he divined that among the merchants and magistrates of Leith, anger and
+malice, rivalry and revenge were not unknown any more than they were
+among their betters in the Presbytery and the General Assembly.  He knew,
+for Fleming had told him, that his very prosperity and his father's
+prosperity had procured for Fleming many enemies.  The Norway timber
+trade was not all in the Fleming hands for nothing.  The late Council
+election also had left Fleming many enemies, and his simple duty at the
+Council-table daily multiplied them.  It was quite unaccountable to him
+how enemies sprang up all around him, and it was well that he had such an
+open-eyed and much-experienced correspondent as Rutherford was, to whom
+he could confide such ghastly discoveries, and such terrible shocks to
+faith 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 in
+Leith 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 that
+come on your enemies refresh and revive you.  Watch how their prosperity
+and their happiness depress and darken you.  Disentangle the desire for
+revenge and the delight in it out of the rank thickets of your wicked
+heart; 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 death
+and hell, and yourself on account of it.  Do you honestly wish, as you
+say 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 and
+find yourself out in your deep desire for revenge, and in your secret
+satisfaction 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 be
+enabled to begin to try to love your enemies, to bless them that curse
+you, to do good to them that hate you, and to pray for them that
+despitefully use you and persecute you.  You need no Directory for these
+things from me when you have the Sermon on the Mount in your own New
+Testament.'
+
+3.  And, still looking into his own heart and writing straight out of it,
+Rutherford says to Fleming, 'I have been much challenged in my
+conscience, and still am, for not referring all I do to God as my last
+and chiefest end.'  Which is just Samuel Rutherford's vivid way of taking
+home to himself the first question of the Shorter Catechism which he had
+afterwards such a deep hand in drawing up.  I do not know any other
+author who deals so searchingly with this great subject as that prince
+among experimental divines, Thomas Shepard, the founder of Yale in New
+England.  His insight is as good as his style is bad.  His English is
+execrable, but his insight is nothing short of divine.  'The pollution of
+the whole man, and of all his actions,' he says in his _Parable of the
+Ten Virgins_, 'consists chiefly in his self-seeking, in making ourselves
+our utmost end.  This makes our most glorious actions vile; this stains
+them all.  And so the sanctification of a sinner consists chiefly in
+making the Lord our utmost end in all that we do.  Every man living seeks
+himself as his last end and chiefest good, and out of this captivity no
+human power can redeem us. . . . Make this your last and best end--to
+live to Christ and to do His will.  This is your last end; this is the
+end of your being born again--nay, of your being redeemed by His
+blood--that you may live unto Christ.'  And in the same author's
+_Meditations and Spiritual Experiences_, he says, 'On Sabbath morning I
+saw that I had a secret eye to my own name in all that I did, and I
+judged myself to be worthy of death because I was not weaned from all
+created glory, from all honour and praise, and from the esteem of men. .
+. .  On Sabbath, again, when I came home, I saw into the deep hypocrisy
+of my own heart, because in my ministry I sought to comfort and quicken
+the people that the glory might reflect on me as well as on God. . . .  On
+the evening before the sacrament I saw it to be my duty to sequester
+myself from all other things and to prepare me for the next day.  And I
+saw that I must pitch first on the right end.  I saw that mine own ends
+were to procure honour to myself and not to the Lord.  There was some
+poor little eye in seeking the name and glory of Christ, yet I sought not
+it only, but my own glory, too.  After my Wednesday sermon I saw the
+pride of my heart acting thus, that when I had done public work my heart
+would 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 that
+made me vile in mine own eyes, and that more and more daily.'  'I have
+been much challenged,' writes Rutherford to Fleming, 'because I do not
+refer all I do to God as my last end: that I do not eat and drink and
+sleep and journey and speak and think for God.'  And, the fanatic that he
+is, he seems to think that that is the calling and chief end not only of
+ministers like himself and Shepard, but of the bailies and
+timber-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 in
+grace, sir, should be cared for by you above all other things.'  And so
+it should.  Literally and absolutely above all other things.  Above good
+health, above good name, above wealth, and station, and honour.  These
+things, take them all together, if need be, are to be counted loss in
+order to gain growth in grace.  But what is growth in grace?  It is
+growth in everything that is truly good; but Fleming, as he read his
+Directory daily, would always think of growth in grace as the right
+improvement of his remaining time, and, especially, its religious use and
+dedication to God; as also of the government of his own untamed tongue;
+the extinction of the desire for revenge, and of all delight in the
+injury of his enemies; and, above all, and including all, in making God
+his chief end in all that he did.  How all-important, then, is a sound
+and Scriptural Directory to instruct us how we are to grow in grace.  And
+how precious must that directory-letter have been to a man in dead
+earnest like John Fleming.  It was precious to his heart, you may be
+sure, above all his ships, and all his woodyards, and all his fine
+houses, and all his seats of honour.  And if his growth in grace in Leith
+has 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 in
+his 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 put
+Samuel Rutherford's letters; and, more especially, this very directory-
+letter we have read here for our own direction and growth in grace this
+Communion-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 the
+religious condition of the parish of Kilmacolm in the year 1639.  For the
+shepherd of that unhappy sheepfold also had climbed up some other way
+before he knew how to hold a sheephook, till, week after week, the hungry
+sheep looked up and were not fed.  The parishioners of Kilmacolm must
+have been fed to some purpose at one time, for the two letters they write
+to Rutherford in their present starvation bear abundant witness on every
+page to the splendid preaching and the skilful pastorate that this parish
+must at one time have enjoyed.  There must have been men of no common
+ability, as well as of no common profundity of spiritual life in
+Kilmacolm during those trying years, for the letters they wrote to
+Rutherford would have done credit to any of Rutherford's ablest and best
+correspondents--to William Guthrie, or David Dickson, or Robert Blair, or
+John Livingstone.  Indeed, the expert author of the _Therapeutica_
+himself would have been put to it to answer fully and satisfactorily
+those two so acute and so searching letters.  The Kilmacolm people had
+heard about the famous answers that Samuel Rutherford, now home again in
+Anwoth, had written both from Anwoth and from Aberdeen to all classes of
+people and on all kinds of subjects; copies, indeed, of some of those now
+already widespread letters had come to Kilmacolm itself, till, at one of
+their private meetings for conference and prayer, it was resolved that a
+small committee of their elders should gather up their painful
+experiences in the spiritual life that got no help from the parish
+pulpit, and should set them by way of submission and consultation before
+the great spiritual casuist.  Everybody else was getting what counsel and
+comfort they needed from the famous adviser of Anwoth, and why not they,
+the neglected parishioners of Kilmacolm?  And thus it was that two or
+three of the oldest and ablest men in the kirk-session so wrote to
+Rutherford, as, after some delay, to get back the elaborate letter from
+Anwoth numbered 286 in Dr. Bonar's edition.
+
+I am tempted to think it possible that the old, long-experienced, and
+much-exercised saints of Kilmacolm may have demanded a little too much of
+their minister: at any rate, I am quite as anxious to hear what
+Rutherford 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 some
+quite remarkable people in the parish church at that date, but that they
+must also have had some very special pulpit and pastoral work expended on
+them in former years.  Or, if not that, then their case is just another
+illustration 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 lips
+of their minister.  Which, again, is just another way of putting what the
+Psalmist says of himself in his humble and happy boast: 'I have more
+understanding than all my teachers, for Thy testimonies are my
+meditation.  I understand more than the ancients, because I keep Thy
+precepts.'
+
+1.  The first complaint that came to Anwoth from Kilmacolm was expressed
+in 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 never
+carried home to any man's conscience.  Nobody was ever disturbed.
+Nobody's feelings were ever hurt.  Nobody in all the parish had ever
+heard a voice of thunder saying, Thou art the man.  Toothless and timid
+generalities made up all the preaching they ever heard either on the
+ethical or on the evangelical side: and generalities disturb no man's
+peace of mind.  The pulpit of Kilmacolm was but too sib to the pew, and
+both pulpit and pew slept on together in undisturbed security.  And that
+supplied Samuel Rutherford with an excellent text for a sermon he was
+continually preaching in every utterance of his--the constant danger we
+all lie under as long as we are in this life.  Danger from sin, and, in
+its own still subtler way, as much danger from grace; danger from want,
+and danger from fulness; danger from our weakness, and danger from our
+strength.  So much danger is there that if any man in this life is in a
+state of security about himself he is surely the foolishest of all
+foolish 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 says
+she is, if she can lull us into security about ourselves in such a life
+as this!  And what a noble field does this snare-filled life supply for
+all a preacher's boldest and best powers!
+
+2.  They have some new beginners in Kilmacolm in spite of all its
+spiritual stagnation, and the older people are full of anxiety lest those
+new beginners should not be rightly directed.  'Tell them for one thing,'
+says Rutherford in reply, 'to dig deep while they are yet among their
+foundations.  Tell them that a sick night for sin is not so common either
+among young or old as I would like to see it.  Make them to understand
+what I mean by digging deep.  I mean deep into their own heart in order
+to discover and lay bare to themselves the corrupt motives from which
+they act every day even in the very best things they do.  And that of
+itself will give them many sufficiently sick days and nights too, both as
+new beginners and as old believers.  And tell them, also, from me, that
+once they have seen themselves in their own hearts, and Jesus Christ in
+His heart, it will be impossible for them ever to go back from Him.
+Absolutely impossible.  So much so that it is perfectly certain that he
+who goes back from Christ has never really seen himself or Christ either.
+He may have seen something somewhat more or less like Christ, but, all
+the time, it was not Christ.  Let your soul once come up to close
+quarters with Christ, and I defy you ever to forget Him again.  Tell all
+your new beginners that from me, Samuel Rutherford, who, after all, am
+not yet well begun myself.'
+
+3.  'You complain bitterly of a dead ministry in your bounds.  I have
+heard as much.  But I will reply that a living ministry is not
+indispensable to a parish.  All our parishes ought to have it, and we
+ought to see to it that they all get it; but neither the conversion of
+sinners, nor the sanctification and comfort of God's saints, is tied up
+to any man's lips.  You will read your unread Bibles more: you will buy
+more good books: you will meet more in private converse and prayer: and
+it will not be bad for you for a season to look above the pulpit, and to
+look Jesus Christ Himself more immediately in the face.'  As Fraser of
+Brea also said in a striking passage in his diary, so Rutherford says in
+his reply letter: 'in your sore famine of the water of life, run your
+pipe right up to the fountain.'
+
+4.  If the parishioners of Kilmacolm were severe on their minister it was
+not that they let themselves escape.  And there was something in their
+present letters that led Rutherford to warn them against a mistake that
+only people of the Kilmacolm type will ever fall into.  'Some of the
+people of God,' says their sharp-eyed censor, 'slander the grace of God
+in 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.  They
+are so possessed with penitence and humility; they have such high and
+inflexible and spiritual standards for measuring themselves by; the law
+has so fatally entered their innermost souls that they will not even
+admit or acknowledge what the grace of God has, to all other men's
+knowledge, done in them.  Seek out, says Rutherford, the signs of true
+grace in yourselves as well as the signs of secret sin.  And when you
+have found such and such an indubitable sign of grace, say so.  Say
+_this_, and _this_, and _this_, pointing it out, is assuredly the work of
+God in my soul.  When you, after all defeat, really discover your soul
+growing in grace; in patience under injuries; in meekness under reproofs
+and corrections; in love for, or at least in peace of heart toward, those
+you at one time did not like, but disliked almost to downright hatred; in
+silent and assenting acceptance, if not yet in actual and positive
+enjoyment, of another man's talents and success, gain and fame; in the
+decay and disappearance of party spirit, and in openness to all the good
+and 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 bank
+and their fat harvests make them liars.'  Rutherford thinks he has put
+his finger upon some such saintly liars in the kirk-session of Kilmacolm.
+
+5.  'Fear your light, my lord,' wrote Rutherford to Lord Craighall from
+Aberdeen; 'stand in awe of your light.'  But the poor Kilmacolm people
+did not need that sharp rebuke, for they had written to Rutherford at
+their own instance to consult him in their terror of conscience about
+this very matter, till Rutherford had to exhaust his vocabulary of
+comfort in trying to pacify his correspondents just in this sufficiently
+disquieting matter of light in the mind with great darkness in the heart
+and the life.  Our light in this world, he tells them, is a broad and
+shining field, whereas our life of obedience is at best but a short and
+straggling furrow.  Only in heaven shall the broad and basking fields of
+light and truth be covered from end to end with the songs of the
+rejoicing reapers.  And Rutherford is very bold in this matter, because
+he knows he has the truth about it.  A perfect life, he says, up to our
+ever-increasing light, is impossible to us here, if only because our
+light always increases with every new progress in duty.  The field of
+light expands to a new length and breadth every time the plough passes
+through it.  And, knowing well to whom he writes on this subject,
+Rutherford goes on to say that there is a sorrow for sin, and for
+shortcoming in service, that is as acceptable with God in the evangelical
+covenant as would be the very service itself.  But, then, it must be what
+Rutherford calls 'honest sorrow after a sincere aim.'  And let no man
+easily allow himself to take shelter under that, lest it turn out to him
+like taking shelter in a thunderstorm under a lightning rod.  For what an
+aim must that be, and then, what a sorrow, that is as good in the sight
+of 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, taken
+together with Christ's intercession, must be our best life before God
+till we be over in the other country where the law of God will get a
+perfect soul in which to fulfil itself.  Your complaint on this head is
+already booked in the New Testament (Rom. vii. 18).'
+
+6.  'The less sense of liberty and sweetness, the more true spirituality
+in 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 are
+dry and when we have no delight in what we do?  That is just the time to
+persevere, replies their evangelical guide, for it is in the absence of
+all sense of liberty and sweetness that our duties prove themselves to be
+truly spiritual.  A sweet service has often its sweetness from an
+altogether other source than the spiritual world.  Let a man be engaged
+in divine service, or in any other religious work, and let him have
+sensible support and success in it; let him have liberty and enjoyment in
+the performance of it; and, especially, let him have the praise of men
+after it, and he will easily be deceived into thinking that he has had
+God's Spirit with him, and the light of God's countenance, whereas all
+the time it has only been an outpouring on his deceived heart of his own
+lying 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 the
+wilderness, and all other men's spirits around him and toward him the
+same, yet a very rich score may be set down beside that unindulged
+servant's name against the day of the 'well-dones.'  'I believe that many
+think that obedience is lifeless and formal unless the wind be in the
+west, and all their sails are filled with the joys of sense.  But I am
+not of their mind who think so.'
+
+7.  The scrupulosity of the Kilmacolm people was surely singular and
+remarkable even in that day of tests and marks and scruples in the
+spiritual life.  The ministry may not have been wholly dead in and around
+Kilmacolm, though it could not keep pace and patience with those so eager
+and so anxious souls who would have Rutherford's mind on all possible
+points of their complicated case.  Six of their complaints we have just
+seen, but their troubles are not yet all told.  'Surely,' they wrote, 'a
+Master like our Lord, who gave such service when He was still a servant
+Himself,--surely He will have hearty and unfeigned service from us, or
+none at all.  Will He not spue the lukewarm servant out of His mouth?'  I
+grant you, wrote Rutherford, that our Master must have honesty.  The one
+thing He will unmask and will not endure is hypocrisy.  But if you mean
+to insinuate that our hearts must always be entirely given up to His
+service in all that we do, else He will cast us away, for all I am worth
+in the world I would not have that true of me.  I would not have that
+true, else where would my hope be?  An English contemporary of
+Rutherford's puts it memorably: 'Our Master tries His servants not with
+the balances of the sanctuary, but with the touchstone.'  Take that, says
+Rutherford, for my reply to your opinion that Christ must always have a
+perfect service at our hands, or none at all.
+
+8.  Again, hold by the ground-work when the outworks and the
+superstructure are assailed.  Fall back the more nakedly upon your sure
+foundation.  Keep the ground of your standing and acceptance clear, and
+take your stand on that ground at every time when despair assaults you.
+For great faults and for small, for formality in spiritual service, for
+cold-heartedness and for half-heartedness, you have always open to you
+your old and sure ground, the blood and the righteousness of your
+Covenant-surety.  'Seek still the blood of atonement for faults much and
+little.  Know the gate to the fountain, and lie about it.  Make much of
+assurance, for it keepeth the anchor fixed.'
+
+9.  The last paragraph of Rutherford's letter to the parishioners of
+Kilmacolm is taken up with the consolation that always comes to a
+Christian man's heart after every deed of true self-mortification.  That
+is an experience that all Christian men must often have, whether they
+take note sufficiently of it or no.  Let any man suffer for Christ's
+sake; let any man be evil-entreated and for Christ's sake take it
+patiently; let him be reviled and persecuted in public or in private for
+the truth; let him deny himself some indulgence--allowed, doubtful, or
+condemned--and all truly for the sake of Christ and other men; and
+immediately, and as a consequence of that, a peace, a liberty, a light as
+of God's countenance will infallibly visit his heart.  After temptation
+resisted and overcome angels will always visit us.  'Temptations,' says
+Bunyan in the fine preface to his _Grace Abounding_, 'when we meet them
+first 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 be
+comforted.'  'After my greatest mortifications,' said Edwards, 'I always
+find my greatest comforts.'  And even Renan tells us of a Roman lady who
+had 'the ineffable joy of renouncing joy.'  'A Christ bought with
+strokes,' says Rutherford in closing, 'is the sweetest of all Christs.'
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAMUEL RUTHERFORD***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 16892.txt or 16892.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/6/8/9/16892
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit:
+https://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+