To MR. JAMES WILSON.
[There was a contemporary of that name, the minister of Inch, in the Presbytery of Stranraer. There was also a JAMES WILSON who was a friend of Blair and minister of Dysart in 1653. (See Row’s Life of Blair.) This letter indicates that the correspondent was a man of thought and education.]
Dear Brother,—Grace, mercy and peace be multiplied upon you. I bless our rich and only wise Lord, who careth so for His new creation that He is going over it again and trying every piece in you, and blowing away the motes of His new work in you. Alas! I am not so fit a physician as your disease requireth. Sweet, sweet, lovely Jesus be your physician, where His under-chirurgeons1 cannot do anything for putting in order the wheels, paces, and goings of a marred soul. I have little time but yet the Lord hath made me so to concern myself in your condition that I dow not, I dare not, be altogether silent.
1 Chirurgeons: Surgeons.
First: ye doubt (from II Cor. xiii. 5) whether ye be in Christ or not? and so, whether you are a reprobate or not? I answer three things to the doubt: (1) Ye owe charity to all men but most of all to lovely and loving Jesus, and some also to yourself, especially to your renewed self, because your new self is not yours but another Lord’s, even the work of His own Spirit. Therefore, to slander His work is to wrong himself. Love thinketh no evil: if ye love grace, think not ill of grace in yourself. And ye think ill of grace in yourself when ye make it but a bastard and a work of nature; for a holy fear that ye be not Christ’s, and withal a care and desire to be His, and not your own, is not, nay cannot be, bastard nature. The great Advocate pleadeth hard for you; be upon the Advocate’s side, O poor feared client of Christ! Stay, and side with such a Lover, who pleadeth for no other man’s goods than His own; for He (if I may say so) scorneth to be enriched with unjust conquest. And yet He pleadeth for you, whereof your letter (though too, too full of jealousy) is a proof. For if ye were not His, your thoughts (which, I hope, are but the suggestions of His Spirit, that only bringeth the matter into debate to make it sure to you) would not be such, nor so serious as these, “Am I His?” or “Whose am I?”
(2) Dare ye forswear your Owner and say in cold blood, “I am not His?” What nature or corruption saith at starts in you, I regard not. Your thoughts of yourself, when sin and guiltiness round you in the ear, and when you have a sight of your deservings, are Apocrypha, and not Scripture, I hope. Hear what the Lord saith of you: “He will speak peace.” If your Master say, “I quit you,” I shall then bid you eat ashes for bread and drink waters of gall and wormwood. But, however Christ out of His own mouth should seem to say, “I came not for thee, as He did (Matt. xv. 24), yet let me say that the words of the tempting2 Jesus are not to be stretched as Scripture, beyond His intention, seeing His intention in speaking them is to strengthen, not to deceive. And, therefore, here faith may contradict what Christ seemeth at first to say, and so may ye. I charge you by the mercies of God, be not that cruel to grace and the new birth as to cast water on your own coal by misbelief. If ye must die (as I know ye shall not) it were a folly to slay yourself.
2 Jesus when he puts us to trial (Gen. xxii).
(3) I hope that ye love the new birth and a claim to Christ, howbeit ye do not make it good; and if ye were in hell, and saw the heavenly face of lovely, ten thousand times lovely Jesus, that hath God’s hue, and God’s fair, fair and comely red and white, wherewith it is beautified beyond comparison and imagination, ye could not forbear to say, “Oh, if I could but blow a kiss from my sinful mouth from hell up to heaven, upon His cheeks that are a bed of spices as sweet flowers” (Cant. v. 13). I hope ye dare say, “O fairest sight of heaven! O boundless mass of crucified and slain love for me, give me leave to wish to love Thee! O Flower and Bloom of heaven and earth’s love! O angel’s Wonder! O Thou, the Father’s eternal, sealed Love! And O Thou, God’s old Delight! Give me leave to stand beside Thy love, and look in and wonder; and give me leave to wish to love Thee, if I can do no more.”
(4) We being born in atheism, and bairns of the house that we are come of, it is no new thing, my dear brother, for us to be under jealousies and mistakes about the love of God. What think ye of this that the man, Christ, was tempted to believe there were but two persons in the blessed Godhead, and that the Son of God, the substantial and co-eternal Son, was not the lawful Son of God? Did not Satan say, “If Thou be the Son of God?”
Secondly: Ye say that ye know not what to do. Your Head said once the same word, or not far from it. “Now is My soul troubled, and what shall I say?” (John xii. 27). And faith answered Christ’s “What shall I say?” with these words: “O tempted Saviour, askest Thou, ‘What shall I say?’ Say, ‘Pray, Father, save Me from this hour.'” What course can take but pray and frist.3 Christ His own comforts? He is no dyvour4; take His word. “Oh,” say ye, “I cannot pray?” Answer—Honest sighing is faith breathing and whispering Him in the ear. The life is not out of faith where there is sighing, looking up with the eyes, and breathing toward God. Hide not Thine ear at my breathing (Lam. iii. 56). “But what shall I do in spiritual exercises?” ye say. Answer: (1) If ye knew particularly what to do, it were not a spiritual exercise; (2) In my weak judgment, ye should first say, “I would glorify God in believing David’s salvation, and the Bride’s marriage with the Lamb, and love the Church’s slain Husband, although I cannot for the present believe mine own salvation”; (3) Say, “I will not pass from my claim: suppose Christ should pass from His claim to me, it shall not go back upon my side. Howbeit my love to Him be not worth a drink of water, yet Christ shall have it. Such as it is”; (4) Say, “I shall rather rather spill twenty prayers than not pray at all. Let my broken words go up to heaven: when they come up into the Great Angel’s golden censer, that compassionate Advocate will put together my broken prayers, and perfume them.” Words are but the accidents5 of prayer.
3 Frist: to postpone possession or action. 4 Dyvour: a debtor.
5 The incidental accompaniments.
“Oh,” say ye, “I am slain with hardness of heart, and troubled with confused and melancholious thoughts.” Answer: My dear brother, what would ye conclude thence? That ye know not well who aughteth6 you? I grant: “Oh, my heart is hard! Oh, my thoughts of faithless sorrow! Ergo, I know not who aughteth me,” were good logic in heaven amongst angels and the glorified; but down in Christ’s hospital, where sick and distempered souls are under cure, it is not worth a straw. Give Christ time to end His work in your heart. Hold on, in feeling and bewailing your hardness; for that is softness to feel hardness. (2) I charge you to make psalms of Christ’s praises for His begun work of grace. Make Christ your music and your song; for complaining and feeling of want doth often swallow up your praises. What think ye of those who go to hell never troubled with such thoughts? If your exercises be the way to hell, God help me! I have a cold coal to blow at, and a blank paper for heaven. I give you Christ caution, and my heaven surety, for your salvation. Send Christ your melancholy, for Satan hath no right to make a chamber in your melancholy. Borrow joy and comfort from the Comforter. Bid the Spirit do his office in you; and remember that faith is one thing, and the feeling and notice of faith another. God forbid that feeling were proprium quarto modo7 to all the saints; and that this were good reasoning, “No feeling, no grace.” I am sure ye were not always, these twenty years by-past, actually knowing that ye live! yet all this time ye are living. So it is with the life of faith.
6 Aughteth: owneth.
7 This is a term of logic and refers to the fourth kind of categorical proposition in which some particular point is proved in the negative.
But, alas! dear brother, it is easy for me to speak words and syllables of peace, but Isaiah telleth you, “I create peace” (Isa. lvii. 19). There is but one Creator, ye know. Oh, that ye may get a letter of peace sent you from heaven!
Pray for me, and for grace to be faithful, and for gifts to be able, with tongue and pen, to glorify God. I forget you not.
Yours, in his sweet Lord Jesus.—S. R.
St. Andrews, Jan. 8, 1640.