Montrose, 3 July, 1880
My Dear Friend — How are you? “Faint,” perhaps, “yet pursuing,” the Lord doing you good. I mean doing you good to your obvious perception thereof, for He cannot do you other than good, world without end.
I wish to tell you that you may help me to praise the Lord for it, that during the past few weeks He has been graciously pleased to be revisiting and reviving my poor and needy soul. Humbly let me say it, yet to the honour of His grace, He has been leading me to the green pastures and beside the still waters, and restoring me in the paths of righteousness for His own name’s sake. Therefore, “extol the Lord with me, let us exalt His name together.”
In considering what were the means which the Lord was pleased to employ, and through which He drew near, I may say it was in connection with that too much neglected and despised invitation of His Word. “Turn you at my reproof, behold I will pour out my Spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you.” O! do we realise the exhaustless supply there set before us, and to which we are bidden welcome? Do we realise the wondrous privilege of being warranted yea encouraged “to turn?” Do we realise the greatness of the blessing promised by Him who cannot lie, “I will pour out my Spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you?” It is in substance the same blessing as was held out to the woman of Samaria. “If thou hadst asked of Him He would have given thee living water.” Are we, therefore, dry and parched as we may be, but on the warrant of God’s own invitation “turning” and “asking” these blessings which He has been pleased to declare He is willing to bestow? In speaking thus, it is with myself I am reasoning, though it may not be inapplicable to you too.
I have also been thinking lately of that glorious foundation of all our blessings — the death of Christ. How ashamed we should be of our low and superficial views of that blessed mystery into which even angels desire to look! Christ in and by His death defeated and destroyed death — the death that was the penalty of His people’s sins. He was even in death a powerful triumphant conqueror, a slain Lamb yet a living Priest. His death, although it was the separation of His soul from His body, was the separation of neither from His Godhead or from Himself, for His personality is in His Godhead. He was the Living One while vanquishing the death due to His people in and by His own death. He also went to the grave; not His dead body merely, “Come see the place where the Lord lay.” He likewise rose from the dead; not merely “was raised”, but reuniting His paradisaically-blessed soul and His lifeless body, He arose. “The Lord is risen indeed.” And all this He did as His people’s surety, and this triumph they will share with Him, He the first fruits and afterwards they that are His. Pity poor Unitarians and praise God for a Divine Saviour! I have expanded these thoughts in an article I have written for next issue of the British and Foreign Evangelical Review, and shall send you a copy when it is out.
I have also an article in this month’s issue on “Justification by Faith”. It may not be relished by those who hold erroneous views of the atonement, but if any seekers after scriptural views of it are benefitted or helped, I don’t care should a thousand whipper-snappers call me “an old wife”. I have an impression that my writing days are nearly over, that the time is not very far off when Christ shall be, not to my fitful faith, but to my endless enjoyment, the “Pearl of great price.” Indeed, with my broken health, it will be but a fight to the end, but in the hope that the end will end the fighting, all is well. Write soon.
Yours affectionately,
Hugh Martin
Montrose, 20th July, 1880
My Dear Friend — I have been “learning my questions” according to your authoritative directions, but to be fair to me, was it not on the supposition of continued broken health that I spoke as I did? I am also ill of a disease without something of which I could hardly keep up any sense of self-respect, viz, a grumbling and grudging over my uselessness in the Church, and in the world. That sense of uselessness along with my broken health affords little reason why I should wish to live alway. But the Lord’s will be done. If He is pleased to give me health wherewith to serve Him and His Church a little longer, I am willing; although as regards our own Church, alas! the more abundantly I love her the less I am loved!
Did it strike you that I have been too rash and ready of late, to say things that indicate an assurance of my own personal salvation? It may have been so, but you know I have been, as a rule, so sorely kept down, that if the Lord has been pleased to give a faith’s glimpse of what He has provided for His children, surely a little bit of joyous scamper towards the confines of that everlasting inheritance may be allowed? especially when all is seen to be the provision of Grace, when Christ himself is seen as the gift of that Grace, ready, fit, yea, waiting to be received by the poor sinner that has nothing, not the least coin wherewith to purchase the least blessing. We may think we ought to give, if not a price, at least some return for blessing received, but I have come to feel myself so strengthless, so helpless, so empty and dependent, that even if I had something to give (which I have not), I have not strength to give it. Giving therefore, can no longer be my investment, it must be taking. And in the measure in which the freeness, the fulness and the all-sufficiency that is in Christ is apprehended by faith, in that measure will I become content to take at God’s hand what He is pleased to give, and to say “Even so, Lord, be it unto me as Thou wilt.”
But I am writing too much about myself. It is, however, almost my settled persuasion — although I am not saying anything about it to any one — (what good would that do?) — that I shall not long be able to hold intercourse with you. For one thing, I see truths with which I have been familiar from my childhood in a new light, the light of eternity. When reading this morning the first chapter of Genesis, where it is written “the evening and the morning were the first day, the evening and the morning were the second day,” &c, &c; it occurred to me that men do not reckon time as God reckons it. He says, “The evening and the morning are a day,” we say “from the morning till the evening is a day.” But soon we shall reckon as God reckons. We shall begin our reckoning in the “evening” of this mortal life, looking back on all its darkening clouds and deepening shadows, on all its precarious paths, and sorrowful stumblings, and we shall end our reckoning in the “morning” of the bright rising of the “Sun of Righteousness,” whose glorious beams shall usher in the full noon-day light of glory. Of that glorious noon-day we may reverently say that it shall be “infinite, eternal and unchangeable.”
Yours, dear friend, until its dawning,
Hugh Martin.