LASSWADE, 30th April, 1875
My Dear Friend,
Many thanks for the volume you have so kindly sent me. I read part of it last year at Lodgehill with great pleasure, and please accept my cordial thanks for it, and for this proof of your friendship. Let me also say what a pleasant savour I retain of our last conversation at ________. If we are enabled by grace to help each other in any degree in our efforts after a truly Christian life, O! what help should we expect from that “Mighty One” on whom God hath laid help, a help that must go for nothing, except for being expended on the helpless; a help, that with all its spending, can yet never be spent.
I was meditating this morning on Zechariah, 3rd chapter. How precious what is there unfolded! A sinner clothed in filthy garments, and the “seven eyes” reading him right through, gets laid before him a stone with this wondrous engraving, “I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day.” How precious to a guilty one, whose sin has been read to him under the light of the seven eyes, to read now on this stone set straight before him, the writing, “I will remove thine iniquity in one day.” O to roll ourselves over on this stone and rest! O to praise God for this most gracious announcement! “I will remove thine iniquity.” O to build on this stone, and to be built upon it! The psalmist got a sight of this stone with its wondrous engraving when he said, “Thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.” He was now in the hiding place, and like Peter on the Mount of Transfiguration, said, “It is good to be here.” Ah! David would like to abide there always, to have always a sense of pardoned sin, and to sing a song of deliverance, but he remembers that he has still sin within him and around him to meet and to face; and the Lord, as it were, understands the thought, the unspoken thought, for while David says, “Thou wilt compass me with songs of deliverance,” the Lord replies, “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go; I will guide thee with mine eye.” As if he said, “Be not dismayed although thy present state is not always realised by thee. Be not afraid to go down from the mount of communion to the tear and war of everyday life. Do not repine at having to go outside from thy hiding-place within the veil. I will preserve thee, I will guide thee, yea, I will set mine eye upon thee, and with my eye upon thee, lift thou thine eye to me; set thine eye toward me, the Lord, as I set mine eye on thee, and thou shalt have light and direction.” What a deep, tender affectionateness of intercourse between the psalmist and his God do these verses imply. Is it not sad, and sore, and very sinful to see even a little into this, to get a taste of this sweet reconciliation, and yet to wander and backslide, and fret and be impatient, and have many mournful relapses? What have you to say as to that?
But I must now away to write a lecture I am to deliver on Wednesday evening in Glasgow on “The Relation between the Headship of Christ over the State and over the Church.” Too glorious a topic to be treated by me, but Philippians 2, verses 5-11 would help me could I get into them. I think we should have nothing to do with Christ at all, or else make him our all and never stint.
Yours, hurriedly, etc.,
HUGH MARTIN