3. The Day of Salvation
Roy Middleton
During the summer break in the early years of his divinity course, John Love was employed as a tutor to the children of the Dow family. The family lived on the Kerelaw Estate situated, on the coast of Ayrshire near the town of Stevenston. They must have had reasonable means in order to employ a resident tutor for their children.
How Love obtained the position is not clear, but it may have been through the influence of John Warner.^5 If the position was through the influence of Warner and Wodrow, the outcome, in the providence of God, was hardly what they would have wished. Love’s tutorship with the Dows led to his salvation. Mrs Dow, according to the editor of the Memorials, was “a truly pious lady” (1:45). Realising that the young tutor was unconverted, she gave him copies of Thomas Boston’s Human Nature in Its Fourfold State and William Guthrie’s The Christian’s Great Interest.
Love was with the Dows in the summer of 1774 whilst he still held Socinian views. In a confession of his past sins he writes, “My sin on the Sabbath Day, when going to Kilbride with Mr Dow; also in Mr Oughtertan’s house, in the church, going up the hill, on the seaside, etc. My behaviour concerning Boston’s Fourfold State of Man, which was given me by Mrs Dow” (1:30). Clearly, he was not pleased to have received the book in the summer of 1774. He was again tutoring with the Dows in the following summer and in Mrs Dow, though he did not appreciate it, he had the privilege of the company of a genuine Christian whose life exemplified the “power of godliness”. Living in close quarters to such a lady must have had a beneficial influence upon him. Yet the principal means of his conversion was the Word of God, applied by the Holy Spirit, and there appears to have been little to no human instrumentality.
The conversion of John Love is a notable instance of the sheer sovereignty of God in the salvation of a sinner. The editor of the Memorials reflects on the fact that the Lord’s usual procedure in bringing sinners to Christ is to cause them to see the magnitude of their sin, which then leads to a shorter or longer period of conviction of sin before their minds are enlightened to the knowledge of Christ and they are enabled by grace to rest on the Saviour alone for salvation. However, in some the gospel is brought home with such assurance of Divine authority and with such demonstration of the Holy Spirit that the sinner sees the remedy before he sees his sin. This was the case with John Love.^6 He had a profound conviction of his sin, but this conviction followed his conversion rather than preceded it. He began a diary in early July 1775; the first entry, written just days after his conversion, is as follows:
“In that evening, from which I shall date my spirit’s comfort, the Lord appeared to me in prayer. In an instant He enlarged my heart, and made it to overflow with a lively view of God’s free and sovereign grace in the covenant of redemption, and of the stability of this covenant to me, because offered to him that believes. He enabled me to say from the heart, ‘Lord, I believe: help my unbelief! Lord, I believe; let me be saved according to Thy Word.’ When Thy holy law shone upon my filthy heart, how odious was it! To what part of Thy universe could I assign myself, where I would not be a blot, a polluting object, but hell!”
“I was enabled to love the Lord, and to pray vehemently for sanctification, that I might glorify His name. All this I attained: which my hard heart would never have attained for itself. I am now humbled, with a deep sense of vile hardened ingratitude. Saul wept for gratitude. When did I weep for Thy love, O Lord? When wilt Thou make me to weep? Blessed would be those tears. Blessed be that infinite fountain of grace which is with Thee, which is able to effect this also!”
“I was brought by a way which I knew not. The Lord visited me, when I sought not after Him” (1:41-42).
The amazing grace of God which appeared in the instantaneousness, and yet the thoroughness, of the change in Love’s life made a lifelong impression on him of the absolute sovereignty of Divine grace. His conversion, after being embroiled in Socinianism, led him never to despair of anyone’s salvation. No sinner was, in his eyes, as far beyond the reach of grace as he was, yet grace triumphed. His conversion led him in later life to pursue, with perseverance and hopefulness, to their dying hour, the most notoriously wicked that had never made a profession of religion, and those who had grievously backslidden after professing themselves to be the Lord’s. He would tell them of the “unsearchable riches of Christ and the free offer of His grace whilst he earnestly entreated from God on their behalf an efficacious visitation of His omnipotent grace”.^7
Although Love seems to have rejected Socinianism seven or eight months prior to his conversion, he did not finally break with Warner of Kilbarchan until he was the subject of a saving change. In a commonplace book of John Love’s there is a paper on Regeneration in which he makes a general acknowledgement of the Lord’s kindness in removing every object that stands in the way of a sinner’s conversion even whilst he is embracing a deadly error. He writes, “It is excellently ordered for us – when the Lord withdraws from us, when we are willing to be deceived – the fascinating allurements of errors. And this is to be regarded as proceeding from His special grace – when false prophets are either silent or their silliness is by some means detected”. He then adds his own testimony, “This was the case with me at my conversion, Mr Warner being struck dumb, and I being taken away from home out of my father’s way, and Mr Warner being detected” (1:45-46).^8
John Love’s repentance over his former life and his lapse into error were profound. He writes in July 1778: “But O what a terrible view of my corruption do I get in this fact – that my thinking upon poor, vile, wretched creatures (such as Mr Warner and others) daring to contradict a Divine truth – a truth which is attested by God in His Word, causes my faith in it to stagger! . . . I am troubled with perplexing thoughts when I think about Mr Warner and that set of poor unbelievers that follow him. Yet, I cannot rid myself of those thoughts: and this is the just punishment of my former bold wickedness while I associated with them. O that the Lord may pity me in this respect. . . . I know not but that the Lord may require a public acknowledgement from me in my preaching, if ever I be put into the ministry. . . . It may be that the Lord will call me to warn others, who may have been injured by my example, that that way is the way of death” (1:26-27).
Three years later, in August 1778, he reflects on his conversion: “I was led to plead that the Lord would, by His Spirit, so cure the rottenness of my soul, and establish me in the faith and love of His precious truths and in abhorrence of error, particularly of Socinian and Arminian errors, that I might condemn myself and repent bitterly, because of my having touched that accursed thing concerning which the Apostle declares: ‘Though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed'” (1:27).
Six months later, in February 1779, he is still burdened by his lapse into error: “I was led this evening to dwell in my thoughts upon that awful spirit of error and delusion with which I was fully possessed when following Mr Warner and his party, and with which he and they are still possessed, and upon the full rejection which I thereby gave the truths, people and ways of God. . . . I have at present some apprehensions intuitively (though in a small degree) of the horror of that state of possession by Satan which Mr Warner is under when I compare his way, as I then knew it, with the sweet way of Mr Brainerd” (1:23).^9
Yet, those days in the Dow’s home were a joyful time, and we can be sure they were a joyful time to Mrs Dow as she saw a sinner brought from darkness to light. The editor of the Memorials notes, “During those summer months which Mr Love spent at Kerelaw, the bright sunshine of the countenance of God, as His heavenly Father, seems continually to have rested on him, without an obscuring cloud to darken it” (1:55). Two years after his conversion he wrote, “How sweetly do I recollect the saviour which Mr Guthrie’s book (The Christian’s Great Interest) had to me at my conversion, at Kerelaw!” (1:45).
An early biographical sketch of Love notes, “From being an Arminian of the lowest school, he was brought from the study of his own acceptance with God, to renounce the entire system of theology which had engaged his early speculations, and to rank himself with that section of the Church of Scotland, then a small one, in which the doctrines of the Westminster Confession were not only subscribed, but cordially believed and faithfully proclaimed. His conversion to God, and his adoption of the Calvinistic tenets, were in his case simultaneous events; his creed and his conscience were brought to rest at one and the same time; and under the influence of new views of human nature, and of the person and work of the Lord Jesus, he was filled with divine peace.”^10
A few years later John Love would be convinced of the goodness of God in bringing him to salvation with a real measure of assurance in such a gentle way. Commenting on his conversion in February 1779 he writes, “Indeed I may wonder at the Lord’s gentleness in dealing with such a sinner as I have been, in converting me in so mild a way. And dealing so kindly with me; in His, as it were, forgetting all my former iniquities” (1:53). Yet, his conversion was with such assurance that in little more than a week afterwards he sat at the Lord’s Table. His diary for 16 July 1775 reads: “The Lord providentially ordered things so, without my having any hand in it, that He brought me to His own table in Paisley, and made me sit under His shadow, and prepared my heart to make a covenant with Him. O how merciful is the Lord! He breaks and bruises, and then He heals. How tenderly did He deal with me after awakening me!” (1:54).
When Love returned to his home in Paisley after his conversion he no longer attended the Abbey Kirk, where the minister was a Moderate, but became a member in the Evangelical Laigh Kirk where James Morrison, the successor to John Witherspoon, was the minister. Regarding his church membership, the editor of the Memorials observes, “The communion with the church into which Mr Love was now received was much more than that general recognition of him as a full member of the church by other members, which too frequently is all that is thought of as included in it. It was, on the part at least of some living members of the church, a warm and cordial embracing and welcoming into the communion of saints of a lost one found, of a dead one restored to life spiritual and eternal, a communion which he and they were to enjoy together, in happy fellowship with Christ their Redeemer, in time and eternity” (1:54).
After his conversion, Love seems to have gone with Morrison to communions at which his minister was assisting. He was with Morrison at a communion at Carmunnock in the winter of 1775-76. After the action sermon and during the serving of the first table, with shame and difficulty Love left the church and returned to where he was staying without going forward. Whilst away from the church he greatly regretted his action and returned to the church and applied to his grandfather^11 for a token. He then went to the table, which was being served by Morrison. In his diary he describes his feelings, “I felt my soul go out in sweet, willing consent, giving myself to the Lord, soul and body; and taking Him, and triumphing and rejoicing in Him. Every word almost that the minister spoke came to me with power. . . . I came away with like boldness and serenity, in some degree willing to take up my Lord’s cross” (1:65).