BY THE REV. D. BEATON, WICK.
(Concluded from page 440.)
ANOTHER of Rutherford’s noted correspondents was Lady Boyd. Her maiden name was Christian Hamilton. She was the eldest daughter of Thomas, first Earl of Haddington, and was first married to Lord Lindsay, who died in 1616. Her second husband was Lord Boyd, who died in 1628. John Livingstone speaks of her as a “rare pattern of Christianity, grave, diligent, and prudent.” “She used every night,” he says, “to write what had been the case of her soul all the day, and what she had observed of the Lord’s dealing.” To her he writes:—”I rejoice exceedingly that the Father of lights hath made you see that there is a nick (mark) in Christianity which ye contend to be at; and that is, to quit the right eye and the right hand, and to keep the Son of God. I hope your desire is to make Him your garland, and that your eye looketh up the Mount; which is certainly nothing but the new creature. . . . I hope your ladyship will keep the King’s highway. Go on (in the strength of the Lord) in haste, as if ye had not leisure to speak to the innkeepers by the way. He is over beyond time, on the other side of the water, who thinketh long for you.”
Among his clerical correspondents are to be found such famous men as Alexander Henderson, George Gillespie, John Livingstone, David Dickson, James Durham, and James Guthrie, the martyr. To these eminent ministers of Christ Rutherford was bound by the closest ties of spiritual communion, and though questions afterwards arose which put a great strain on the chain which bound some of them to him, it was never broken.
But if Rutherford’s spirituality is eminently reflected in these Letters—if his ability to speak a word in season to the bereaved and heavy-laden proves an attraction to many a heart which has felt that there are sunless depths in human sorrow when Christ is not present—yet in a pre-eminent degree Rutherford reveals himself as the true pastor, deeply concerned for the well-being of the souls of all committed to his charge. From Aberdeen he writes to his parishioners at Anwoth:—”I long exceedingly to know if the oft-spoken-of match betwixt you and Christ holdeth, and if ye follow on to know the Lord. My day-thoughts and my night-thoughts are of you. While ye sleep I am afraid of your souls, that they may be off the Rock. Next to my Lord Jesus and this fallen Kirk, ye have the greatest share of my sorrow and also of my joy: ye are the matter of the tears, care, fear, and daily prayers of an oppressed prisoner of Christ. As I am in bonds for my high and lofty One, my royal and princely Master, my Lord Jesus, so I am in bonds for you. For I should have slept in my warm nest, and kept the fat world in my arms, and the cords of my tabernacle should have been fastened more strongly; I might have sung an evangel of ease to my soul and you for a time, with my brethren, the sons of my mother, that were angry at me and that have thrust me out of the vineyard; if I would have been broken, and drawn on to mire you, the Lord’s flock, and to cause you to eat pastures trodden upon with men’s feet, and to drink foul and muddy waters. But truly the Almighty was a terror to me, and His fear made me afraid. O my Lord, judge if my ministry be not dear to me, but not so dear by many degrees as Christ, my Lord. God knoweth the sad and heavy Sabbaths I have had since I laid down at my Master’s feet my two shepherd’s staves.”1 And in another letter, written in September, 1638, he thus writes to them:—”I long exceedingly to hear of your ongoing and advancement in your journey to the kingdom of God. My only joy out of heaven is to hear that the seed of God sown among you is growing and coming to a harvest. For I ceased not, while I was among you, in season and out of season (according to the measure of grace given unto me), to warn and stir up your minds; and I am free from the blood of all men, for I have communicated to you the whole counsel of God. And I now again charge and warn you, in the great and dreadful name and in the sovereign authority of the King of kings and Lord of lords, and I beseech you also by the mercies of God and by the bowels of Christ—by your appearance before Christ Jesus, our Lord—by all the plagues that are written in God’s Book—by your part of the holy city, the New Jerusalem—that ye keep the truth of God as I delivered it to you before many witnesses, in the sight of God and His holy angels. For now the last days are come and coming, when many forsake Christ Jesus; and He saith to you, ‘Will ye also leave me?'”2
And the same earnest solicitude for his people finds expression in a letter to Marion MacNaught, in which he writes:—”Pray for my poor flock; I would take a penance on my soul for their salvation. I fear that the entering of a hireling upon my labours there will cut off my life with sorrow. There I wrestled with the angel and prevailed. Wood, trees, meadows, and hills are my witnesses that I drew on a fair meeting betwixt Christ and Anwoth.”3 It was the great ambition, if we may so put it, of his ministry that he might present Anwoth a chaste virgin to Christ, and even the hope of one soul from Anwoth meeting him in heaven would make it two heavens to him.
His faithfulness as a pastor is further revealed in those remarkable letters4 written to John Gordon of Cardones, the elder. “Dear sir,” he writes, “I always saw nature mighty, lofty, heady, and strong in you, and that it was more for you to be mortified and dead to the world than for another common man. Ye will take a low ebb, and a deep cut and a long lance to go to the bottom of your wounds in saving humiliation, to make you a won prey for Christ. Be humbled; walk softly. Down, down, for God’s sake, my dear and worthy brother, with your top-sail. Stoop, stoop! It is a low entry to go in at heaven’s gate. There is infinite justice in the party ye have to do with; it is His nature not to acquit the guilty and the sinner.” In another letter to him he says:—”Believe me, I find heaven a city hard to be won. ‘The righteous shall scarcely be saved.’ Oh, what violence of thronging will heaven take! Alas! I see many deceiving themselves; for we will all to heaven now! Every foul dog, with his foul feet, will in at the nearest to the new and clean Jerusalem. All say that they have faith, and the greatest part in the world know not and will not consider that a slip in the matter of their salvation is the most pitiable slip that can be, and that no loss is comparable to this loss. Oh, then, see that there be not a loose pin in the work of your salvation; for ye will not believe how quickly the Judge will come. And for yourself, I know that death is waiting and hovering and lingering at God’s command. That ye may be prepared, then, ye had need to stir your time, and to take eternity and death to your riper advisement. A wrong step or a wrong stot (rebound) in going out of this life, in one property is like the sin against the Holy Ghost, and can never be forgiven, because ye cannot come back again through the last water to mourn for it.”1
And if he was anxious to prepare the sojourners who had travelled far over life’s perilous way, and who were about to begin a longer journey, he was no less concerned for those who had not yet experienced the evil days or the years in which they could say they had no pleasure in them. His letters abound with admonitions and exhortations to the young. Perhaps the thought of his own negligence stirred his soul within him to warn the young. “Like a fool,” he writes of himself, “as I was, I suffered my sun to be high in the heaven and near afternoon before ever I took the gate by the end.” But his evident desire was that others might not be so long in taking “the gate by the end,” for in writing to Patrick Carsen, he exhorts him thus:—”I cannot but, upon the opportunity of a bearer, exhort you to resign the love of your youth to Christ; and in this day, while your sun is high and your youth serveth you, to seek the Lord and His face. For there is nothing out of heaven so necessary for you as Christ. And ye cannot be ignorant but your day will end, and the night of death shall call you from the pleasures of this life; and a doom given out in death standeth for ever—as long as God liveth! Youth, ordinarily, is a first and ready servant for Satan, to run errands; for it is a nest for lust, cursing, drunkenness, blaspheming of God, lying, pride, and vanity. Oh, that there were such an heart in you as to fear the Lord, and to dedicate your soul and body to His service! When the time cometh that your eye-strings shall break, and your face wax pale, and legs and arms tremble, and your breath shall grow cold, and your poor soul look out at your prison house of clay, to be set at liberty, then a good conscience and your Lord’s favour shall be worth all the world’s glory. Seek it as your garland and crown.”1
But the commanding figure that stands out with a glory that belongs to no created being is the Lord Jesus Christ. Under a thousand figures of speech he gives expression to the love he had to his adorable Lord. One quotation will suffice. “Oh! if ye knew Him and saw His beauty, your love, your liking, your heart, your desires would close with Him and cleave to Him. Love, by nature, when it seeth, cannot but cast out its spirit and strength upon amiable objects and good things and things love-worthy; and what fairer thing than Christ? O fair sun, and fair moon, and fair stars, and fair flowers, and fair roses, and fair lilies, and fair creatures; but O, ten thousand thousand times fairer Lord Jesus! Alas, I wronged Him in making the comparison this way. O black sun and moon, but O fair Lord Jesus! O black flowers and black lilies and roses, but O fair, fair, ever fair Lord Jesus! O all fair things, black and deformed, without beauty, when ye are beside that fairest Lord Jesus! O black heaven, but O fair Christ! O black angels, but surpassingly fair Lord Jesus! I would seek no more to make me happy for evermore but a thorough and clear sight of the beauty of Jesus, my Lord. Let my eyes enjoy His fairness and stare Him for ever in the face, and I have all that can be wished. Get Christ rather than gold or silver; seek Christ, howbeit ye should lose all things for Him.”2
If the reader wishes to get some idea of the spark of genius that lit up Rutherford’s soul he must read these Letters. His scholarship and dialectic skill are revealed in his polemical works, but to have any idea of Rutherford as a saint one must turn to the Letters, and there learn with what ecstatic devotion he adored Him whom he lovingly called his “sweet Lord Jesus.”
The late Mr. John Mackay, Swordly, Sutherland-shire.—We regret to notice briefly this month the decease, after a short illness, of this worthy elder and missionary. This removal causes a real blank in the more northern part of our Church, and his genial presence will be missed at those Communion gatherings he was accustomed to attend. Much sympathy is felt with his widow and family in their great bereavement. We hope to have a fuller notice in a future issue.
1 Letter ccxxv.2 Letter cclxix.3 Letter cclxxix.4 Letters lxxxiij. and clxxx.1 Letter clxxx.1 Letter clvi.2 Letter ccii.