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Samuel Rutherford and Some of His Correspondents

by Alexander Whyte · English · Gutenberg #16892 · 354,457 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Samuel Rutherford and Some of His Correspondents

Author: Alexander Whyte


        
Release date: October 17, 2005 [eBook #16892]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16892

Credits: Transcribed from the 1894 Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAMUEL RUTHERFORD AND SOME OF HIS CORRESPONDENTS ***





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

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