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

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



XV. BAILIE JOHN KENNEDY

'Die well.'—Rutherford.

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

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

Rutherford was always on the outlook for opportunities to employ his private pen for the conversion of sinners, and for the comfort, the upbuilding, and the holiness of God's people. From his manse at Anwoth, from his prison at Aberdeen, from his class-room at St. Andrews, and from the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster, his letter-bag went out full of those messages, so warm, so tender, so powerful, to his multitudinous correspondents. Public events, domestic joys and sorrows, personal matters, special providences,—to turn them all to a good result Rutherford was always on the watch.

News had come to Rutherford's ears of an almost fatal accident that Kennedy had had through his boat being swept out to sea; and that was too good a chance to lose of trying to touch his correspondent's heart yet more deeply about death, and the due preparation for it. Read his letter to John Kennedy on his deliverance from shipwreck. See with what apostolic dignity and sweetness he salutes Kennedy. See how he lifts up Kennedy's accident out of the hands of winds and waves, and traces it all up to the immediate hand of God. See how he speaks of Kennedy's reprieve from death; and how the spared man should make use of his lengthened days. Altogether, a noble, powerful, apostolic letter; a letter that must have had a great influence in making Bailie Kennedy the choice Christian that he was and that he became. We have only three letters preserved of Rutherford's to Kennedy. But we have sufficient evidence that they were fast and dear friends. Rutherford writes to Kennedy from Aberdeen, upbraiding him for forgetting him; and what a letter that also is! It stands well out among the foremost of his letters for fulness of all the great qualities of Rutherford's intellect and heart.

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

Writing to another old man, Rutherford points out to him the gracious purpose of God in appointing him his death in old age. 'It is,' says Rutherford, 'that you may have full leisure to look over all your accounts and papers before you take ship.' What a tangle our papers also are in as life goes on; and what need we have of a time of leisure to set things right before we hand them over. Rutherford, therefore, makes us see old Carlton on his bed with his pillows propping him up, and a drawer open on the bed, and bundles of old letters and bills spread out before him. Old love letters; old business letters; his mother's letters to him when he was a boy at Edinburgh College; letters in cipher that no human eye can read but those old, bleared, weeping eyes that fill that too late drawer with their tears. The old voyager is looking over his papers before he takes ship. And he comes on things he had totally forgotten: debts he had thought paid; petitions he had thought answered; promises he had thought fulfilled; till he calls young Carlton, his son, to his bedside, and tells him things that break both men's hearts to say and to hear; and commits to his son and heir sad duties that should never have been due; debts, promises, obligations, reparations, such that, to remember them, is a terrible experience on an old man's deathbed. But what mercy that he was not carried off, and his drawer unopened!

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

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

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



XVI. JAMES GUTHRIE

'The short man who could not bow.'—Cromwell.

James Guthrie was the son of the laird of that ilk in the county of Angus. St. Andrews was his alma mater, and under her excellent nurture young Guthrie soon became a student of no common name. His father had destined him for the Episcopal Church, and, what with his descent from an ancient and influential family, his remarkable talents, and his excellent scholarship, it is not to be wondered at that a bishop's mitre sometimes dangled before his ambitious eyes. 'He was then prelatic,' says Wodrow in his Analecta, 'and strong for the ceremonies.' But as time went on, young Guthrie's whole views of duty and of promotion became totally changed, till, instead of a bishop's throne, he ended his days on the hangman's ladder. After having served his college some time as regent or assistant professor in the Moral Philosophy Chair, Guthrie took licence, and was immediately thereafter settled as parish minister of Lauder, in the momentous year 1638. And when every parish in Scotland sent up its representatives to Edinburgh to subscribe the covenant in Greyfriars Churchyard, the parish of Lauder had the pride of seeing its young minister take his life in his hand, like all the best ministers and truest patriots in the land. But just as Guthrie was turning in at the gate of the Greyfriars, who should cross the street before him, so as almost to run against him, but the city executioner! The omen—for it was a day of omens—made the young minister stagger for a moment, but only for a moment. At the same time the ominous incident made such an impression on the young Covenanter's heart and imagination, that he said to some of his fellow-subscribers as he laid down the pen, 'I know that I shall die for what I have done this day, but I cannot die in a better cause.'

In the lack of better authorities we are compelled to trace the footsteps of James Guthrie through the Laodicean pages of Robert Baillie for several years to come. Baillie did not like Guthrie, and there was no love lost between the two men. The one man was all fire together in every true and noble cause, and the other we spew out of our mouth at every page of his indispensable book. As Carlyle says, Baillie contrived to 'carry his dish level' through all that terrible jostle of a time. And accordingly while we owe Baillie our very grateful thanks that he kept such a diary, and carried on such an extensive and regular correspondence during all that distracted time, we owe him no other thanks. He carried his dish level, and he had his reward.

As we trace James Guthrie's passionate footsteps for the years to come through Principal Baillie's sufficiently gossiping, but not unshrewd, pages, we soon see that he is travelling fast and sure toward the Nether Bow. We hear continually from our time-serving correspondent of Guthrie's 'public invective,' of his 'passionate debates,' of his 'venting of his mind,' of his 'peremptory letters,' of his 'sharp writing,' and of his being 'rigid as ever,' and so on. All that about his too zealous co-presbyter, and then his fulsome eulogy of the returning king—his royal wisdom, his moderation, his piety, and his grave carriage—as also what he says of 'the conspicuous justice of God in hanging up the bones of Oliver Cromwell, the disgracing of the two Goodwins, blind Milton, John Owen, and others of that maleficent crew,' all crowned with the naive remark that 'the wisest and best are quiet till they see whither these things will go'—it is plain that while our wise and good author is carrying his dish as level as the uneven roads will allow, Guthrie is as plainly carrying his head straight to the Cross of Edinburgh, and to the iron spikes of the Canongate.

All the untold woes of that so woful time came of the sword of the civil power being still grafted on the crook of the Church; as also of the insane attempt of so many of our forefathers to solder the crown of Charles Stuart to the crown of Jesus Christ. How those two so fatal, and not even yet wholly remedied, mistakes, brought Argyll to the block and Guthrie to the ladder in one day in Edinburgh, we read in the instructive and inspiriting histories of that terrible time; and we have no better book on that time for the mass of readers than just honest John Howie's Scots Worthies. There is a passage in our Scottish martyr's last defence of himself that has always reminded me of Socrates' similar defence before the judges of Athens. 'My lords,' said Guthrie, 'my conscience I cannot submit. But this old and crazy body I do submit, to do with it whatsoever you will; only, I beseech you to ponder well what profit there is likely to be in my blood. It is not the extinguishing of me, or of many more like me, that will extinguish the work of reformation in Scotland. My blood will contribute more for the propagation of the Covenant and the full reformation of the kirk than my life and liberty could do, though I should live on for many years.' One can hardly help thinking that Guthrie must have been reading The Apology in his manse in Stirling at the moment he was apprehended. But in the case of Guthrie, as in the case of Socrates, no truth, no integrity, and no eloquence could save him; for, as Bishop Burnet frankly says, 'It was resolved to make a public example of a Scottish minister, and so Guthrie was singled out. I saw him suffer,' the Bishop adds, 'and he was so far from showing any fear that he rather expressed a contempt of death.' James Cowie, his precentor, and beadle, and body-servant, also saw his master suffer, and, like Bishop Burnet, he used to tell the impression that his old master's last days made upon him. 'When he had received sentence of death,' Cowie told Wodrow's informant, 'he came forth with a kind of majesty, and his face seemed truly to shine.' It needed something more than this world could supply to make a man's face to shine under the sentence that he be hanged at the Cross of Edinburgh, his body dismembered, and his head fixed on an iron spike in the West Port of the same city. The disgraceful and ghastly story of his execution, and the hacking up of his body, may all be read in Howie, beside a picture of the Nether Bow as it still stands in our Free Church and Free State Day. 'Art not Thou from everlasting, O Lord my God?' were James Guthrie's last words as he stood on the ladder. 'O mine Holy One: I shall not die, but live. Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace; for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.'

There is one fine outstanding feature that has always characterised and distinguished the whole of the Rutherford circle in our eyes, and that is their deep, keen Pauline sense of sin. Without this, all their patriotism, all their true statesmanship, and even all their martyrdom for the sake of the truth, would have had, comparatively speaking, little or no interest for us. What think ye of sin? is the crucial question we put to any character, scriptural or ecclesiastical, who claims our time and our attention. If they are right about sin, they are all the more likely to be right about everything else; and if they are either wrong or only shallow about sin, their teaching and their experience on other matters are not likely to be of much value or much interest to us. We have had written over our portals against all comers: Know thyself if thou wouldst either interest us or benefit us, or with the understanding and the spirit worship with us. And all the true Rutherford circle, without one exception, have known the true secret and have given the true password. Their keen sense and scriptural estimate of the supreme evil of sin first made them correspondents of Rutherford's; and as that sense and estimate grew in them they passed on into an inner and a still more inner circle of those Scottish saints and martyrs who corresponded with Rutherford, and closed, with so much honour and love, around him. And the two Guthries, James and William, as we shall see, were famous even in that day for their praying and for their preaching about sin.

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

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

But in nothing was good James Guthrie's tenderness to sin better seen than in the endless debates and dissensions of which that day was so full. So sensitive was he to the pride and the anger and the ill-will that all controversy kindles in our hearts that, as soon as he felt any unholy heat in his own heart, or saw it in the hearts of the men he debated with, he at once cut short the controversy with some such words as these: 'We have said too much on this matter already; let us leave it till we love one another more.' If hot-blooded Samuel Rutherford had sat more at James Guthrie's feet in the matter of managing a controversy, his name would have been almost too high and too spotless for this present life. Samuel Rutherford's one vice, temper, was one of James Guthrie's chief virtues.

We have only two, or at most three, of the many letters that must have passed between Rutherford and Guthrie preserved to us. And, as is usual with Rutherford when he writes to any member of his innermost circle, he writes to Guthrie so as still more completely to win his heart. And in nothing does dear Rutherford win all our hearts more than in his deep humility, and quick, keen sense of his own inability and utter unworthiness. 'I am at a low ebb,' he writes to Guthrie from the Jerusalem Chamber, 'yea, as low as any gracious soul can possibly be. Shall I ever see even the borders of the good land above?' I read that fine letter again last Sabbath afternoon in my room at hospitable Helenslee, overlooking the lower reaches of the Clyde, and as I read this passage, I recollected the opportune sea-view commanded by my window. I had only to rise and look out to see an excellent illustration of my much- exercised author; for the forenoon tide had just retreated to the sea, and the broad bed of the river was left by the retreated tide less a river than a shallow, clammy channel. Shoals of black mud ran out from our shore, meeting and mingling with shoals of black mud from the opposite shore. There was scarce clean water enough to float the multitude of buoys that dipped and dragged in their bed of mire. That any ship, to call a ship, could ever work its way up that sweltering sewer seemed an utter impossibility. There was Rutherford's low ebb, then, under my very eyes. There was low water indeed. And the low water seemed to laugh the waiting seamen's hopes to scorn. But next morning my heart rose high as I looked out at my window and saw all the richly-laden vessels lighting their fires and spreading their sails, and setting their faces to the replenished river. And I thought of Samuel Rutherford's ship, far past all her ebbing tides now, and for ever anchored in her haven above.

On the wall of my room in the same beautiful house there was a powerful cartoon of Peter's crucifixion, head downwards, for his Master's sake. The masterpiece of Filippino Lippi I felt to be an excellent illustration also of Rutherford's letter to James Guthrie and the rest of the ministers and elders who were imprisoned in the Castle of Edinburgh for daring to remind Charles Stuart of the contents of the Covenant to which both he and the whole nation had solemnly sworn. 'If Christ doth own me,' Rutherford wrote to the martyrs in the Castle, 'let me be laid in my grave in a bloody winding-sheet; let me go from the scaffold to the spikes in four quarters—grave or no grave, as He pleases, if only He but owns me.' And I seemed to see the crucified disciple's glorified Master appearing over his reversed cross and saying, 'Thou art Peter, and with this thy blood I will sow widespread my Church.' Yes, my brethren, if Christ but owns us, that will far more than make up to us in a moment for all our imprisonments, and all our martyrdoms, and all our ebbing tides down here. 'Angels, men, and Zion's elders eye us in all our suffering for Christ's sake, but what of all these? Christ is by us, and looketh on, and writeth it all up Himself.'

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



XVII. WILLIAM GUTHRIE

'A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.'—Solomon.

William Guthrie was a great humorist, a great sportsman, a great preacher, and a great writer. The true Guthrie blood has always had a drop of humour in it, and the first minister of Fenwick was a genuine Guthrie in this respect. The finest humour springs up out of a wide and a deep heart, and it always has its roots watered at a wellhead of tears. 'William Guthrie was a great melancholian,' says Wodrow, and as we read that we are reminded of some other great melancholians, such as Blaise Pascal and John Foster and William Cowper. William Guthrie knew, by his temperament, and by his knowledge of himself and of other men, that he was a great melancholian, and he studied how to divert himself sometimes in order that he might not be altogether drowned with his melancholy. And thus, maugre his melancholy, and indeed by reason of it, William Guthrie was a great humorist. He was the life of the party on the moors, in the manse, and in the General Assembly. But the life of the party when he was present was always pure and noble and pious, even if it was sometimes somewhat hilarious and boisterous. 'If a man's melancholy temperament is sanctified,' says Rutherford in his Covenant of Grace, 'it becomes to him a seat of sound mortification and of humble walking.' And that was the happy result of all William Guthrie's melancholy; it was always alleviated and relieved by great outbursts of good-humour; but both his melancholy and his hilarity always ended in a humbler walk. Samuel Rutherford confides in a letter to his old friend, Alexander Gordon, that he knows a man who sometimes wonders to see any one laugh or sport in this so sinful and sad life. But that was because he had embittered the springs of laughter in himself by the wormwood sins of his youth. William Guthrie had no such remorseful memories continually taking him by the throat as his divinity professor had, and thus it was that with all his melancholy he was known as the greatest humorist and the greatest sportsman in the Scottish Kirk of his day. No doubt he sometimes felt and confessed that his love of fun and frolic was a temptation that he had to watch well against. In his Saving Interest he speaks of some sins that are wrought up into a man's natural humour and constitution, and are thus as a right hand and a right eye to him. 'My merriment!' he confessed to one who had rebuked him for it, 'I know all you would say, and my merriment costs me many a salt tear in secret.' At the same time this was often remarked with wonder in Guthrie, that however boisterous his fun was, in one moment he could turn from it to the most serious things. 'It was often observed,' says Wodrow, 'that, let Mr. Guthrie be never so merry, he was presently in a frame for the most spiritual duty, and the only account I can give of it,' says wise Wodrow, 'is, that he acted from spiritual principles in all he did, and even in his relaxations.' Poor Guthrie had a terrible malady that preyed on his most vital part continually—a malady that at last carried him off in the mid- time of his days, and, like Solomon in the proverb, he took to a merry heart as an alleviating medicine.

Like our own Thomas Guthrie, too, William Guthrie was a great angler. He could gaff out a salmon in as few minutes as the deftest-handed gamekeeper in all the country, and he could stalk down a deer in as few hours as my lord himself who did nothing else. When he was composing his Saving Interest, he somehow heard of a poor countryman near Haddington who had come through some extraordinary experiences in his spiritual life, and he set out from Fenwick all the way to Haddington to see and converse with the much-experienced man. All that night and all the next day Guthrie could not tear himself away from the conversation of the man and his wife. But at last, looking up and down the country, his angling eye caught sight of a trout-stream, and, as if he had in a moment forgotten all about his book at home and all that this saintly man had contributed to it, Guthrie asked him if he had a fishing-rod, and if he would give him a loan of it. The old man felt that his poor rough tackle was to be absolutely glorified by such a minister as Guthrie condescending to touch it, but his good wife did not like this come-down at the end of such a visit as his has been, and she said so. She was a clever old woman, and I am not sure but she had the best of it in the debate that followed about ministers fishing, and about their facetious conversation. The Haddington stream, and the dispute that rose out of it, recall to my mind a not unlike incident that took place in the street of Ephesus, in the far East, just about 1800 years ago. John, the venerable Apostle, had just finished the fourteenth chapter of his great Gospel, and felt himself unable to recollect and write out any more that night. And coming out into the setting sun he began to amuse himself with a tame partridge that the Bactrian convert had caught and made a present of to his old master. The partridge had been waiting till the pen and the parchment were put by, and now it was on John's hand, and now on his shoulder, and now circling round his sportful head, till you would have thought that its owner was the idlest and foolishest old man in all Ephesus. A huntsman, who greatly respected his old pastor, was passing home from the hills and was sore distressed to see such a saint as John was trifling away his short time with a stupid bird. And he could not keep from stopping his horse and saying so to the old Evangelist. 'What is that you carry in your hand?' asked John at the huntsman with great meekness. 'It is my bow with which I shoot wild game up in the mountains,' replied the huntsman. 'And why do you let it hang so loose? You cannot surely shoot anything with your bow in that condition!' 'No,' answered the amused huntsman, 'but if I always kept my bow strung it would not rebound and send home my arrow when I needed it. I unstring my bow on the street that I may the better shoot with it when I am up among my quarry.' 'Good,' said the Evangelist, 'and I have learned a lesson from you huntsmen. For I am playing with my partridge to-night that I may the better finish my Gospel to-morrow. I am putting everything out of my mind to-night that I may to-morrow the better recollect and set down a prayer I heard offered up by my Master, now more than fifty years ago.' We readers of the Fourth Gospel do not know how much we owe to the Bactrian boy's tame partridge, and neither John Owen nor Thomas Chalmers knew how much they owed to the fishing-rods and curling-stones, the fowling-pieces and the violins that crowded the corners of the manse of Fenwick. I do not know that William Guthrie made a clean breast to the Presbytery of all the reasons that moved him to refuse so many calls to a city charge, though I think I see that David Dickson, the Moderator, divined some of them by the joke he made about the moors of Fenwick to one of the defeated and departing deputations.

William Guthrie, the eldest son and sole heir of the laird of Pitforthy, might have had fishing and shooting to his heart's content on his own lands of Pitforthy and Easter Ogle had he not determined, when under Rutherford at St. Andrews, to give himself up wholly to his preaching. But, to put himself out of the temptation that hills and streams and lochs and houses and lands would have been to a man of his tastes and temperament, soon after his conversion William made over to a younger brother all his possessions and all his responsibilities connected therewith, in order that he might give himself up wholly to his preaching. And his reward was that he soon became, by universal consent, the greatest practical preacher in broad Scotland. He could not touch Rutherford, his old professor, at pure theology; he had neither Rutherford's learning, nor his ecstatic eloquence, nor his surpassing love of Jesus Christ, but for handling broken bones and guiding an anxious inquirer no one could hold the candle to William Guthrie. Descriptions of his preaching abound in the old books, such as this: A Glasgow merchant was compelled to spend a Sabbath in Arran, and though he did not understand Gaelic, he felt he must go to the place of public worship. Great was his delight when he saw William Guthrie come into the pulpit. And he tells us that though he had heard in his day many famous preachers, he had never seen under any preacher so much concern of soul as he saw that day in Arran, under the minister of Fenwick. There was scarcely a dry eye in the whole church. A gentleman who was well known as a most dissolute liver was in the church that day, and could not command himself, so deeply was he moved under Guthrie's sermon. That day was remembered long afterwards when that prodigal son had become an eminent Christian man. We see at one time a servant girl coming home from Guthrie's church saying that she cannot contain all that she has heard to-day, and that she feels as if she would need to hear no more on this side heaven. Another day Wodrow's old mother has been at Fenwick, and comes home saying that the first prayer was more than enough for all her trouble without any sermon at all. 'He had a taking and a soaring gift of preaching,' but it was its intensely practical character that made Guthrie's pulpit so powerful and so popular. The very fact that he could go all the way in those days from Fenwick to Haddington, just to have a case of real soul-exercise described to him by the exercised man himself, speaks volumes as to the secret of Guthrie's power in the pulpit. His people felt that their minister knew them; he knew himself, and therefore he knew them. He did not pronounce windy orations about things that did not concern or edify them. He was not learned in the pulpit, nor eloquent, or, if he was—and he was both—all his talents, and all his scholarship, and all his eloquence were forgotten in the intensely practical turn that his preaching immediately took. All the broken hearts in the west country, all those whose sins had found them out, all those who had learned to know the plague of their own heart, and who were passing under a searching sanctification—all such found their way from time to time from great distances to the Kirk of Fenwick. From Glasgow they came, and from Paisley, and from Hamilton, and from Lanark, and from Kilbride, and from many other still more distant places. The lobbies of Fenwick Kirk were like the porches of Bethesda with all the blind, halt, and withered from the whole country round about. After Hutcheson of the Minor Prophets had assisted at the communion of Fenwick on one occasion, he said that, if there was a church full of God's saints on the face of the earth, it was at Fenwick communion-table. Pitforthy and Glen Ogle, and all the estates in Angus, were but dust in the balance compared with one Sabbath-day's exercise of such a preaching gift as that of William Guthrie. 'There is no man that hath forsaken houses and lands for My sake and the Gospel's, but shall receive an hundredfold now in this life, and in the world to come life everlasting.'

But further, besides being a great humorist and a great sportsman and a great preacher, William Guthrie was a great writer. A great writer is not a man who fills our dusty shelves with his forgotten volumes. It is not given to any man to fill a whole library with first-rate work. Our greatest authors have all written little books. Job is a small book, so is the Psalms, so is Isaiah, so is the Gospel of John, so is the Epistle to the Romans, so is the Confessions, so is the Comedy, so is the Imitation, so are the Pilgrim and the Grace Abounding, and though William Guthrie's small book is not for a moment to be ranked with such master-pieces as these, yet it is a small book on a great subject, and a book to which I cannot find a second among the big religious books of our day. You will all find out your own favourite books according to your own talents and tastes. My calling a book great is nothing to you. But it may at least interest you for the passing moment to be told what two men like John Owen, in the seventeenth century, and Thomas Chalmers, in the nineteenth, said about William Guthrie's one little book. Said John Owen, drawing a little gilt copy of The Great Interest out of his pocket, 'That author I take to be one of the greatest divines that ever wrote. His book is my vade mecum. I carry it always with me. I have written several folios, but there is more divinity in this little book than in them all.' Believe John Owen. Believe all that he says about Guthrie's Saving Interest; but do not believe what he says about his own maligned folios till you have read twenty times over his Person and Glory of Christ, his Holy Spirit, his Spiritual-mindedness, and his Mortification, Dominion, and Indwelling of Sin. Then hear Dr. Chalmers: 'I am on the eve of finishing Guthrie, which I think is the best book I ever read.' After you have read it, if you ever do, the likelihood is that you will feel as if somehow you had not read the right book when you remember what Owen and Chalmers have said about it. Yes, you have read the right enough book; but the right book has not yet got in you the right reader. There are not many readers abroad like Dr. John Owen and Dr. Thomas Chalmers.

In its style William Guthrie's one little book is clear, spare, crisp, and curt. Indeed, in some places it is almost too spare and too curt in its bald simplicity. True students will not be deterred from it when I say that it is scientifically and experimentally exact in its treatment of the things of the soul. They will best understand and appreciate this statement of Guthrie's biographer that 'when he was working at his Saving Interest he endeavoured to inform himself of all the Christians in the country who had been under great depths of exercise, or were still under such depths, and endeavoured to converse with them.' Guthrie is almost as dry as Euclid himself, and almost as severe, but, then, he demonstrates almost with mathematical demonstration the all-important things he sets out to prove. There is no room for rhetoric on a finger- post; in a word, and, sometimes without a word, a finger-post tells you the right way to take to get to your journey's end. And many who have wandered into a far country have found their way home again under William Guthrie's exact marks, clear evidences, and curt directions. You open the little book, and there is a sentence of the plainest, directest, and least entertaining or attractive prose, followed up with a text of Scripture to prove the plain and indisputable prose. Then there is another sentence of the same prose, supported by two texts, and thus the little treatise goes on till, if you are happy enough to be interested in the author's subject-matter, the eternal interests of your own soul, a strong, strange fascination begins to come off the little book and into your understanding, imagination, and heart, till you look up again what Dr. Owen and Dr. Chalmers said about your favourite author, and feel fortified in your valuation of, and in your affection for, William Guthrie and his golden little book.



XVIII. GEORGE GILLESPIE

'Our apprehensions are not canonical.'—Rutherford.

George Gillespie was one of that remarkable band of statesmanlike ministers that God gave to Scotland in the seventeenth century. Gillespie died while yet a young man, but before he died, as Rutherford wrote to him on his deathbed, he had done more work for his Master than many a hundred grey-headed and godly ministers. Gillespie and Rutherford got acquainted with one another when Rutherford was beginning his work at Anwoth. In the good providence of God, Gillespie was led to Kenmure Castle to be tutor in the family of Lord and Lady Kenmure, and that threw Rutherford and Gillespie continually together. Gillespie was still a probationer. He was ready for ordination, and many congregations were eager to have him, but the patriotic and pure-minded youth could not submit to receive ordination at the hands of the bishops of that day, and this kept him out of a church of his own long after he was ready to begin his ministry. But the time was not lost to Gillespie himself, or to the Church of Christ in Scotland,—the time that threw Rutherford and Gillespie into the same near neighbourhood, and into intimate and affectionate friendship. The mere scholarship of the two men would at once draw them together. They read the same deep books; they reasoned out the same constitutional, ecclesiastical, doctrinal, and experimental problems; till one day, rising off their knees in the woods of Kenmure Castle, the two men took one another by the hand and swore a covenant that all their days, and amid all the trials they saw were coming to Scotland and her Church, they would remain fast friends, would often think of one another, would often name one another before God in prayer, and would regularly write to one another, and that not on church questions only and on the books they were reading, but more especially on the life of God in their own souls. Of the correspondence of those two remarkable men we have only three letters preserved to us, but they are enough to let us see the kind of letters that must have frequently passed between Kenmure Castle and Aberdeen, and between St. Andrews and Edinburgh during the next ten years.

Gillespie was born in the parish manse of Kirkcaldy in 1613; he was ordained to the charge of the neighbouring congregation of Wemyss in 1638, was translated thence to Edinburgh in 1642, and then became one of the four famous deputies who were sent up from the Church of Scotland to sit and represent her in the Westminster Assembly in 1643. Gillespie's great ability was well known, his wide learning and his remarkable controversial powers had been already well proved, else such a young man would never have been sent on such a mission; but his appearance in the debates at Westminster astonished those who knew him best, and won for him a name second to none of the oldest and ablest statesmen and scholars who sat in that famous house. 'That noble youth,' Baillie is continually exclaiming, after each new display of Gillespie's learning and power of argument; 'That singular ornament of our Church'; 'He is one of the best wits of this isle,' and so on. And good John Livingstone, in his wise and sober Characteristics, says that, being sent as a Commissioner from the Church of Scotland to the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, Gillespie, 'promoted much the work of reformation, and attained to a gift of clear, strong, pressing, and calm debating above any man of his time.'

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

As her best tribute to the talents and services of her youngest Commissioner, the Edinburgh Assembly of 1648 appointed Gillespie her Moderator; but his health was fast failing, and he died in the December of that year, in the thirty-sixth year of his age. The inscription on his tombstone at Kirkcaldy ends with these sober and true words: 'A man profound in genius, mild in disposition, acute in argument, flowing in eloquence, unconquered in mind. He drew to himself the love of the good, the envy of the bad, and the admiration of all.' Such was the life and work of George Gillespie, one of the most intimate and confidential correspondents of Samuel Rutherford;—for it was to him that Rutherford wrote the words now before us, 'Our apprehensions are not canonical.'

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering his covenant with young Gillespie in the woods of Kenmure, Rutherford wrote of himself to his friend, and said:—'At my first entry on my banishment here my apprehensions worked despairingly upon my cross.' By that he means, and Gillespie would quite well understand his meaning, that his banishment from his work threw him in upon his conscience, and that his conscience whispered to him that he had been banished from his work because of his sins. God is angry with you, his conscience said; He does not love you, He has not forgiven you. But his sanctified good sense, his deep knowledge of God's word, and of God's ways with His people, came to his rescue, and he went on to say to Gillespie that our apprehensions are not canonical. No, he says, our apprehensions tell lies of God and of His grace. So they do in our case also. When any trouble falls upon us, for any reason,—and there are many reasons other than His anger why God sends trouble upon us,—conscience is up immediately with her interpretation and explanation of our troubles. This is your wages now, conscience says. God has been slow to wrath, but His patience is exhausted now. As Rutherford says in another letter, our tearful eyes look asquint at Christ and He appears to be angry, when all the time He pities and loves us. Is there any man here to-night whose apprehensions are working upon his cross? Is there any man of God here who has lost hold of God in the thick darkness, and who fears that his cross has come to him because God is angry with him? Let him hear and imitate what Rutherford says when in the same distress: 'I will lay inhibitions on my apprehensions,' he says; 'I will not let my unbelieving thoughts slander Christ. Let them say to me "there is no hope," yet I will die saying, It is not so; I shall yet see the salvation of God. I will die if it must be so, under water, but I will die gripping at Christ. Let me go to hell, I will go to hell believing in and loving Christ.' Rutherford's worst apprehensions, his best-grounded apprehensions, could not survive an assault of faith like that. Imitate him, and improve upon him, and say, that with a thousand times worse apprehensions than ever Rutherford could have, yet, like him, you will make your bed in hell, loving, and adoring, and justifying Jesus Christ. And, if you do that, hell will have none of you; all hell will cast you out, and all heaven will rise up and carry you in.

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

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

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



XIX. JOHN FERGUSHILL

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

It makes us think when we find two such men as Samuel Rutherford and John Fergushill falling back for their own souls on a Scripture like this. We naturally think of Scriptures like this as specially sent out to the chief of sinners; to those men who have sold themselves for naught, or, at least, to new beginners in the divine life. We do not readily think of great divines and famous preachers like Rutherford, or of godly and able pastors like Fergushill, as at all either needing such Scriptures as this, or as finding their own case at all met in them. But it is surely a great lesson to us all—a great encouragement and a great rebuke—to find two such saintly men as the ministers of Anwoth and Ochiltree reassuring and heartening one another about the poor man's market as they do in their letters to one another. And their case is just another illustration of this quite familiar fact in the Church of Christ, that the preachers who press their pulpits deepest into the doctrines of grace, and who, at the same time, themselves make the greatest attainments in the life of grace, are just the men, far more than any of their hearers, both to need and to accept the simplest, plainest, freest, fullest offer of the Gospel. If the men of the house of Israel will not accept the peace you preach to them, said our Lord to His first apostles, then take that peace home to yourselves. And how often has that been repeated in the preaching of the Gospel since the days of Peter and John! How often have our best preachers preached their best sermons to themselves! 'I preached the following Lord's Day,' says Boston in his diary, 'on "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" and my sermon was mostly on my own account.' And it was just because Boston preached so often in that egoistical way that the people of Ettrick were able to give such a good account of what they heard. Weep yourselves, if you would have your readers weep, said the shrewd old Roman poet to the shallow poetasters of his Augustan day. And the reproof and the instruction come up from every pew to every pulpit still. 'Feel what you say, if you would have us feel it. Believe what you say, if you would have us believe it. Flee to the refuge yourselves, if you would have us flee. And let us see you selling all in the poor man's market, if you would see us also selling all and coming after you.' The people of Anwoth and Ochiltree were very well off in this respect also that their ministers did not bid them do anything that they did not first do themselves. The truest and best apostolical succession had come to those two parishes in that their two pastors were able, with a good conscience before God and before their people, to say with Paul to the Philippians: 'Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me do; and the God of peace shall be with you.'

As to the merchandise of the poor man's market,—that embraces everything that any man can possibly need or find any use for either in this world or in the next. Absolutely everything is found in the poor man's market—everything, from God Himself, the most precious of all things, down to the sinner himself, the most vile and worthless of all things. The whole world, and all the worlds, are continually thrown into this market, both by the seller and by the purchaser. The seller holds nothing back from this market, and the purchaser comes to this market for everything. Even what he already possesses; even what he bought and paid for but yesterday; even what everybody else would call absolutely the poor man's own, he throws it all back again upon God every day, and thus holds all he has as his instant purchase of the great Merchantman. The poor man's market is as far as possible from being a Vanity Fair, but the catalogues and the sale-lists of that fair may be taken as a specimen of the things that change hands continually in the poor man's market also. For here also are sold such merchandise as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, pleasures and delights of all sorts; wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, gold, silver, and what not. All these things God sells to poor men every day; and for all these things, as often as they need any of them, His poor men come to His market for them. And, as has been said, even after they have got possession of any or all of these things, as if the market had an absolute fascination for them, like gamblers who cannot stay away from the wheel, they are back again, buying and selling what, but yesterday, they took home with them as the best bargain they had ever made. Yes, the things that, once possessed, either by inheritance or by purchase or by gift, you would think they would die rather than part with—a patrimony in ancient lands and houses, a possession they had toiled and prayed and waited for all their days, Christ on His cross, their own child in his cradle—absolutely everything they possess, or would die to possess, they part with again, just that they may have the excitement, the debate, the delight, the security, and the liberty of purchasing it all over again every day in the poor man's market.

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

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

Now, what made Isaiah and Rutherford and Fergushill such poor men themselves, was just this, that they came out of every money-making enterprise in the divine life far poorer men than they entered it. There are some unlucky men in life who never prosper in anything. Everything goes against them. Everything makes shipwreck into which they adventure their time and their money and their hope. They go into one promising concern after another with flying colours and a light heart. Other men have made great fortunes here, and so will they; but before long their old evil luck has overtaken them, and they are glad that they are not all their life in prison for the uttermost farthing. And so on, till at last they have to go to the poor man's market for the last decencies of their death and burial; for their winding-sheet, and their coffin, and their grave. And so was it with the ministers of Anwoth and Ochiltree; and so it is with all that poverty-stricken class of ministers to which they belonged. For, whatever their attainments and performances in preaching or in pastoral work may do to enrich others, one thing is certain: all they do only impoverishes to pennilessness the men who put their whole life and their whole heart into the performance of such work. Their whole service of God, both in the public ministry of the word, and in their more personal submission to His law, has this fatal and hopeless principle ruling it, that the better it is done, and the more completely any man gives himself up to the doing of it, the poorer and the weaker it leaves him who does it. So much so, that while he leads other men into the way of the greatest riches, he himself sinks deeper and deeper into poverty of spirit every day. Till, out of sheer pity, and almost remorse, that His service should entail such poverty on all His servants, Christ sends them out continually less with an invitation to their people than to themselves, saying always to them, 'Take the invitation to yourselves; and he of My servants who hath no money let him buy without money and bear away what he will.' 'My dear Fergushill, our Lord is not so cruel as to let a poor man see salvation and never let him touch it for want of money; indeed, the only thing that commendeth sinners to Christ is their extreme necessity and want. Ho, he that hath no money, that is the poor man's market.' When James Guthrie was lying ill and like to die, he called in his man, James Cowie, to read in the Epistle to the Romans to him, and when Cowie came to these words, 'I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,' his master burst into tears, and said, 'James, I have nothing but that to lippen to.'

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

'Faith cannot be so difficult, surely,' says William Guthrie in his Saving Interest, 'when it consists of so much in desire.' Now, both its exceeding difficulty and its exceeding ease also just consist in that. Nothing is so easy to a healthy man as the desire for food; but, then, nothing is so impossible to a dead man, or even to a sick man, as just desire. Desire sounds easy, but how few among us have that capacity and that preparation for Christ and His salvation that stands in desire. Have you that desire? Really and truly, in your heart of hearts, have you that desire? Then how well it is with you! For that is all that God looks for in him who comes to the poor man's market; indeed, it is the only currency accepted there. Isaiah's famous invitation is drawn out just to meet the case of a man who has desire, and nothing but desire, in his heart. All the encouragements and assurances that his evangelical genius can devise are set forth by the prophet to attract and to win the desiring heart. The desiring heart says to itself, I would give the whole world if I had it just to see Christ, just to be near Christ, and just, if it were but possible, that I should ever be the least thing like Christ. Now, that carries God. God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, cannot resist that. No true father could, and least of all a father who loves his son, and who has such a son to love as God has in Christ. Well, He says; if you love and desire, honour and estimate My Son like that, I cannot deny Him the reward and the pleasure of possessing you and your love. And thus, without any desert in you—any desert but sheer desire—you have made the greatest, the easiest, the speediest, the most splendid purchase that all the poor man's market affords. No, William Guthrie; faith is not so very difficult to the sinner who has desire. For where desire of the right quality is, and the right quantity, there is everything. And all the merchandise of God is at that sinner's nod and bid.

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



XX. JAMES BAUTIE, STUDENT OF DIVINITY

'You crave my mind.'—Rutherford.

As a rule the difficulties of a divinity student are not at all the difficulties of the best of his future people. A divinity student's difficulties are usually academic and speculative, whereas the difficulties of the best people in his coming congregation will be difficulties of the most intensely real and practical kind. And thus it is that we so often hear lately-ordained ministers confessing that they have come to the end of their resources and experiences, and have nothing either fresh or certain left to preach to the people about. Just as, on the other hand, so many congregations complain that they look up to the pulpit from Sabbath to Sabbath and are not fed. It is not much to be wondered at that a raw college youth cannot all at once feed and guide and extricate an old saint; or that a minister, whose deepest difficulties hitherto have been mostly of the debating society kind, should not be able to afford much help to those of his people who are wading through the deep and drowning waters of the spiritual life. And whether something could not be done by the institution of chairs of genuine pastoral and experimental theology for the help of our students and the good of our people is surely a question that well deserves the earnest attention of all the evangelical churches. Meantime we are to be introduced to a divinity student of the middle of the seventeenth century who was early and deeply exercised in those intensely real problems of the soul which occupied such a large place both in the best religious literature and in the best pulpit work of that intensely earnest day. James Bautie, or Beattie, as we shall here call him on Dr. Bonar's suggestion, was a candidate for the ministry such that the ripest and most deeply exercised saints in Scotland might well have rejoiced to have had such an able and saintly youth for their preacher on the Sabbath-day as well as for their pastor all the week. As James Beattie's college days drew on to an end he became more and more exercised about his mental deficiencies, and still more about his spiritual unfitness to be anybody's minister. Beattie had, to begin with, this always infallible mark of an able man—an increasing sense of his own inability: and he had, along with that, this equally infallible mark of a spiritually-minded man—an overwhelming sense of his utter lack of anything like a spiritual mind. No man but a very able man could have written the letter that Beattie wrote about himself to Samuel Rutherford; and Rutherford's letter back to Beattie will not be a bad test of a divinity student whether he has enough of the true divinity student mind in him to read that letter, to understand it, and to translate it. Beattie had an excellent intellect, and his excellent intellect had not been laid out at college on those windy fields that so puff up a beginner in knowledge and in life; his whole mind had been given up already to those terrible problems of the soul that both humble and exalt the man who spends his life among them. Beattie's future congregation will not vaunt themselves about their minister's ability or scholarship or eloquence; his sermons will soon push his people back behind all such superficial matters. Beattie's preaching and his whole pastorate will soon become another illustration of the truth that it is not gifts but graces in a minister that will in the long-run truly edify the body of Christ. You have James Beattie's portrait as a divinity student in Rutherford's 249th letter, and you will find a complementary portrait of Beattie as a grey-haired pastor in Dr. Stalker's Preacher and his Models. 'He was a man of competent scholarship, and had the reputation of having been in early life a powerful and popular preacher. But it was not to those gifts that he owed his unique influence. He moved through the town, with his white hair and somewhat staid and dignified demeanour, as a hallowing presence. His very passing in the street was a kind of benediction; the people, as they looked after him, spoke of him to each other with affectionate reverence. Children were proud when he laid his hand on their heads, and they treasured the kindly words which he spoke to them. They who laboured along with him in the ministry felt that his mere existence in the community was an irresistible demonstration of Christianity and a tower of strength to every good cause. Yet he had not gained this position of influence by brilliant talents or great achievements or the pushing of ambition; for he was singularly modest, and would have been the last to credit himself with half the good he did. The whole mystery lay in this, that he had lived in the town for forty years a blameless life, and was known by everybody to be a godly and a prayerful man. The prime qualification for the ministry is goodness.'

Beattie as a student challenged himself severely on this account also, that some truths found a more easy and unshaken credit with him than other truths. This is a common difficulty with many of our modern students also, and how best to advise with them under this real difficulty constantly puts their professors and their pastors to the test. Whatever Beattie may have got, I confess I do not get much help in this difficulty out of Rutherford's letter back to Beattie. Rutherford, with all his splendid gifts of mind and heart, had sometimes a certain dogmatic and dictatorial way with him, and this is just the temper that our students still meet with too often in their old and settled censors. The 'torpor of assurance' has not yet settled on the young divine as it has done on too many of the old. There was a modest, a genuine, and an every way reasonable difficulty in this part of Beattie's letter to Rutherford, and I wish much that Rutherford had felt himself put upon his quite capable mettle to deal with the difficulty. Or, if he had not time to go to the bottom of all Beattie's deep letter, as he says he has not, he might have referred his correspondent—for his correspondent was a well-read student—to a great sermon by the greatest of English Churchmen—a sermon that a reader like Rutherford must surely have had by heart, entitled, 'A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect.' But, unfortunately for England and Scotland both, England was thrusting that sermon and all the other writings of its author on the Church of Christ in Scotland at the point of the bayonet, and that is the very worst instrument that can be employed in the interests of truth and of ecclesiastical comprehension and conformity. And among the many things we have to be thankful for in our more emancipated and more catholic day, it is not the least that Rutherford and Hooker lie in peace and in complemental fulness beside one another on the tables of all our students of divinity.

Coming still closer home to himself, our divinity student puts this acute difficulty to his spiritual casuist: Whether a man of God, and especially a minister of Christ, can be right who does not love God for Himself, for His nature and for His character solely and purely, and apart altogether from all His benefactions both in nature and in grace. James Beattie had been brought up with such a love for the Kirk of Scotland, and for her ministers and her people; he had of late grown into such a love for his books also, and for the work of the ministry, that in examining himself in prospect of his approaching licence he had felt afraid that he loved the thought of a study, and a pulpit, and a manse, and its inhabitants, and, indeed, the whole prospective life of a minister, with more keenness of affection than he loved the souls of men, or even his Master Himself. And he put that most distressing difficulty also before Rutherford. Now there was an expression on that matter that was common in the pulpits of Rutherford's school in that day that Rutherford would be sure to quote in his second letter to Beattie, if not in his first. It was a Latin proverb, but all the common people of that day quite well understood it, not to speak of a student like Beattie. Aliquid in Christo formosius Salvatore, wrote Rutherford to distressed Beattie; that is to say, There is that in Christ which is far more fair and sweet than merely His being a Saviour. Never be content, that is, till you can rise up above manses and pulpits and books and sermons, and even above your own salvation, to see the pure and infinite loveliness of Christ Himself. Dost thou, O my soul, love Jesus Christ for Himself alone, and not only as thy Redeemer? though to love Him as such He doth allow thee, yet there is that in Christ that is far more amiable than merely in His being thy Saviour. And yet the two kinds of love may quite well stand together, writes Rutherford, just as a child loves his mother because she is his mother, and yet his love leaps the more out when she gives him an apple. At the same time, to love Christ for Himself alone is the last end of a true believer's love.

It was one of the great experimental problems much agitated among the greater evangelical divines of that deep, clear-eyed, and honest day, Why the truly regenerate are all left so full of all manner of indwelling sin. We never hear that question raised nowadays, nor any question at all like that. The only difficulty in our day is why any man should have any difficulty about his own indwelling sin at all. But neither Beattie, nor Rutherford, nor any of the masters who remain to us had got so far as we. And as for the Antinomian, perfectionist, and higher-life preachers of that day, they are all so dead and forgotten that you would not know their names even if I repeated them. Beattie, as a beginner in the spiritual life, had made this still not uncommon mistake. He had taken those New Testament passages in which the apostles portray an ideal Christian man as he stands in the election and calling of God, and as he will be found at last and for ever in heaven, and he had prematurely and inconsequently applied all that to himself as a young man under sanctification and under the painful and humiliating beginnings of it; and no wonder that, so confusing the very first principles of the Gospel, he confused and terrified himself out of all peace and all comfort and all hope. Now, that was just the kind of difficulty with which Rutherford could deal with all his evangelical freedom and fulness, depth and insight. No preacher or writer of that day held up the absolute necessity of holiness better than Rutherford did; but then, that only the more compelled him to hold up also such comfort as he conveys in his consoling and reassuring letter to despairing Beattie: 'Comparing the state of one truly regenerate, whose heart is a temple of the Holy Ghost, with your own, which is full of uncleanness and corruption, you stand dumb and dare not call Christ heartsomely your own. But, I answer, the best regenerate have their defilements, and, wash as they will, there will be the filth of sin in their hearts to the end. Glory alone will make our hearts pure and perfect, never till then will they be absolutely sinless.' And if we, Rutherford's so weak-kneed successors, preached the law of God and true holiness as he preached those noble doctrines, the sheer agony of our despairing people would compel us to preach also the true nature, the narrow limits, and the whole profound laws of evangelical sanctification as we never preach, and scarce dare to preach, those things now. They who preach true holiness best are just thereby the more compelled to preach its partial, tentative, elementary, and superficial character in this life. And the hearer who knows in the word of God and in his own heart what indeed true holiness is, will insist on having its complementary truths frequently preached to him to keep him from despair; or else he will turn continually to those great divines who, though dead, yet preach such things in their noble books. And that those books are not still read and preached among us, and that the need for them and their doctrines is so little felt, is only another illustration of the true proverb that where no oxen are the crib is clean.