Samuel Rutherford Part 6

The whole world, and all the worlds, are continually thrown into this market, both by the seller and by the purchaser. The seller holds nothing back from this market, and the purchaser comes to this market for everything. Even what he already possesses; even what he bought and paid for but yesterday; even what everybody else would call absolutely the poor man's own, he throws it all back again upon G.o.d every day, and thus holds all he has as his instant purchase of the great Merchantman. The poor man's market is as far as possible from being a Vanity Fair, but the catalogues and the sale-lists of that fair may be taken as a specimen of the things that change hands continually in the poor man's market also.

For here also are sold such merchandise as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, pleasures and delights of all sorts; wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, gold, silver, and what not. All these things G.o.d sells to poor men every day; and for all these things, as often as they need any of them, His poor men come to His market for them. And, as has been said, even after they have got possession of any or all of these things, as if the market had an absolute fascination for them, like gamblers who cannot stay away from the wheel, they are back again, buying and selling what, but yesterday, they took home with them as the best bargain they had ever made. Yes, the things that, once possessed, either by inheritance or by purchase or by gift, you would think they would die rather than part with--a patrimony in ancient lands and houses, a possession they had toiled and prayed and waited for all their days, Christ on His cross, their own child in his cradle--absolutely everything they possess, or would die to possess, they part with again, just that they may have the excitement, the debate, the delight, the security, and the liberty of purchasing it all over again every day in the poor man's market.

Over all this merchandise G.o.d Himself is the Master Merchant. It all belongs to Him, and He has put it all into the poor man's purchase. He owns all the merchandise, and He has opened the market: He invites and advertises the purchasers, fixes the prices, and settles the conditions of sale. And the first condition of sale is that all intending purchasers shall come to Himself immediately for whatever they need. All negotiation here must be held immediately with G.o.d. There are no middlemen here. They have their own place in the markets of earth; but there is no room and no need for them here. The producer and the purchaser meet immediately here. He employs whole armies of servants to distribute and deliver His goods, but the bargain itself must be struck with G.o.d alone. The price must be paid directly to Him; and then, with His own hand, He will write out your right and t.i.tle to your purchase.

Let every poor man, then, be sure to draw near to G.o.d, and to G.o.d alone.

Draw near to G.o.d, and He will draw near to you. Ho, ye that have no money: incline your ear, and come to Me: hear, and your soul shall live!

Now, surely, one of the most remarkable things about the purchasers in this market is just their fewness. We find Isaiah in his day canva.s.sing the whole of Jerusalem, high and low, and glad to get even one purchaser here and another there. And Rutherford, looking back to Anwoth from Aberdeen, was not sure that he had got even so much as one really earnest purchaser brought near to G.o.d. And thus it was that, while at Anwoth, he was so much in that market himself. Partly on the principle that preachers are bidden to take to themselves for their trouble what their proud people refuse, and partly because Rutherford was out of all sight the poorest man in all Anwoth.

Now, what made Isaiah and Rutherford and Fergushill such poor men themselves, was just this, that they came out of every money-making enterprise in the divine life far poorer men than they entered it. There are some unlucky men in life who never prosper in anything. Everything goes against them. Everything makes shipwreck into which they adventure their time and their money and their hope. They go into one promising concern after another with flying colours and a light heart. Other men have made great fortunes here, and so will they; but before long their old evil luck has overtaken them, and they are glad that they are not all their life in prison for the uttermost farthing. And so on, till at last they have to go to the poor man's market for the last decencies of their death and burial; for their winding-sheet, and their coffin, and their grave. And so was it with the ministers of Anwoth and Ochiltree; and so it is with all that poverty-stricken cla.s.s of ministers to which they belonged. For, whatever their attainments and performances in preaching or in pastoral work may do to enrich others, one thing is certain: all they do only impoverishes to pennilessness the men who put their whole life and their whole heart into the performance of such work. Their whole service of G.o.d, both in the public ministry of the word, and in their more personal submission to His law, has this fatal and hopeless principle ruling it, that the better it is done, and the more completely any man gives himself up to the doing of it, the poorer and the weaker it leaves him who does it. So much so, that while he leads other men into the way of the greatest riches, he himself sinks deeper and deeper into poverty of spirit every day. Till, out of sheer pity, and almost remorse, that His service should entail such poverty on all His servants, Christ sends them out continually less with an invitation to their people than to themselves, saying always to them, 'Take the invitation to yourselves; and he of My servants who hath no money let him buy without money and bear away what he will.' 'My dear Fergushill, our Lord is not so cruel as to let a poor man see salvation and never let him touch it for want of money; indeed, the only thing that commendeth sinners to Christ is their extreme necessity and want. Ho, he that hath no money, that is the poor man's market.' When James Guthrie was lying ill and like to die, he called in his man, James Cowie, to read in the Epistle to the Romans to him, and when Cowie came to these words, 'I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,' his master burst into tears, and said, 'James, I have nothing but that to lippen to.'

Look now at the prices that are demanded and paid in the poor man's market. And, paradoxical and past all understanding as are so many of the things connected with this matter, the most paradoxical and past all understanding of them all is the price that is always asked, and that is sometimes paid, in that market. When any man comes here to buy, it is not the value of the article on sale that is asked of him; but the first question that is asked of him is, How much money have you got? And if it turns out that he is rich and increased with goods, then, to him, the price, even of admittance to this market, is all that he has. The very entrance-money, before he comes in sight of the stalls and tables at all, has already stripped him bare of every penny he possesses. And that is why so few purchasers are found in this market; they do not feel able or willing to pay down the impoverishing entrance-price. As a matter of fact, it is a very unusual thing to find a young man who has been so well taught about this market by his parents, his schoolmasters, or even by his ministers, that he is fit to enter early on its great transactions.

And increasing years do not tend of themselves to reconcile him to the terms on which G.o.d sells His salvation. The price in the poor man's market is absolutely everything that a rich man possesses; and then, when he has nothing left, when he has laid down all that he has, or has lost all, or has been robbed of all, only then the full paradox of the case comes into his view; for then he begins to discover that the price he could not meet or face so long as he was a rich and a well-to-do man is such a price that, in his absolute penury, he can now pay it down till all the market is his own. Mult.i.tudes of poor men up and down the land remember well, and will never forget, this poor man Rutherford's so Isaiah-like words, 'Our wants best qualify us for Christ'; and again, 'All my own stock of Christ is some hunger for Him.' 'Say Amen to the promises, and Christ is yours,' he wrote to Lady Kenmure. 'This is surely an easy market. You need but to look to Him in faith; for Christ suffered for all sin, and paid the price of all the promises.'

'Faith cannot be so difficult, surely,' says William Guthrie in his _Saving Interest_, 'when it consists of so much in _desire_.' Now, both its exceeding difficulty and its exceeding ease also just consist in that. Nothing is so easy to a healthy man as the desire for food; but, then, nothing is so impossible to a dead man, or even to a sick man, as just desire. Desire sounds easy, but how few among us have that capacity and that preparation for Christ and His salvation that stands in desire.

Have you that desire? Really and truly, in your heart of hearts, have you that desire? Then how well it is with you! For that is all that G.o.d looks for in him who comes to the poor man's market; indeed, it is the only currency accepted there. Isaiah's famous invitation is drawn out just to meet the case of a man who has desire, and nothing but desire, in his heart. All the encouragements and a.s.surances that his evangelical genius can devise are set forth by the prophet to attract and to win the desiring heart. The desiring heart says to itself, I would give the whole world if I had it just to see Christ, just to be near Christ, and just, if it were but possible, that I should ever be the least thing like Christ. Now, that carries G.o.d. G.o.d, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, cannot resist that. No true father could, and least of all a father who loves his son, and who has such a son to love as G.o.d has in Christ. Well, He says; if you love and desire, honour and estimate My Son like that, I cannot deny Him the reward and the pleasure of possessing you and your love. And thus, without any desert in you--any desert but sheer desire--you have made the greatest, the easiest, the speediest, the most splendid purchase that all the poor man's market affords. No, William Guthrie; faith is not so very difficult to the sinner who has desire. For where desire of the right quality is, and the right quant.i.ty, there is everything. And all the merchandise of G.o.d is at that sinner's nod and bid.

Ho, then, he that hath no money, but only the _desire_ for money, and for what money can, and for what money cannot, buy, come and buy, without money and without price. Instead of money, instead of merit, even if you have nothing but Rutherford's only fitness for Christ, 'My loathsome wretchedness,' then come with that. Come boldly with that. Come as if you had in and on you the complete opposite of that. The opposite of loathsomeness is delightsomeness; and the opposite of wretchedness is happiness. Yes! but you will search all the Book of G.o.d and all its promises, and you will not find one single letter of them all addressed to the abounding and the gladsome and the self-satisfied. It is the poor man's market; and this market goes best when the poor man is not only poor, but poor beyond all ordinary poverty: poor, as Samuel Rutherford always was, to 'absolute and loathsome wretchedness.' Let him here, then, whose sad case is best described in Rutherford's dreadful words, let him come to Rutherford's market and make Rutherford's merchandise, and let him do it now. Ho, he that hath no money, he that hath only misery, let him come, and let him come now.

XX. JAMES BAUTIE, STUDENT OF DIVINITY

'You crave my mind.'--_Rutherford_.

As a rule the difficulties of a divinity student are not at all the difficulties of the best of his future people. A divinity student's difficulties are usually academic and speculative, whereas the difficulties of the best people in his coming congregation will be difficulties of the most intensely real and practical kind. And thus it is that we so often hear lately-ordained ministers confessing that they have come to the end of their resources and experiences, and have nothing either fresh or certain left to preach to the people about. Just as, on the other hand, so many congregations complain that they look up to the pulpit from Sabbath to Sabbath and are not fed. It is not much to be wondered at that a raw college youth cannot all at once feed and guide and extricate an old saint; or that a minister, whose deepest difficulties. .h.i.therto have been mostly of the debating society kind, should not be able to afford much help to those of his people who are wading through the deep and drowning waters of the spiritual life. And whether something could not be done by the inst.i.tution of chairs of genuine pastoral and experimental theology for the help of our students and the good of our people is surely a question that well deserves the earnest attention of all the evangelical churches. Meantime we are to be introduced to a divinity student of the middle of the seventeenth century who was early and deeply exercised in those intensely real problems of the soul which occupied such a large place both in the best religious literature and in the best pulpit work of that intensely earnest day.

James Bautie, or Beattie, as we shall here call him on Dr. Bonar's suggestion, was a candidate for the ministry such that the ripest and most deeply exercised saints in Scotland might well have rejoiced to have had such an able and saintly youth for their preacher on the Sabbath-day as well as for their pastor all the week. As James Beattie's college days drew on to an end he became more and more exercised about his mental deficiencies, and still more about his spiritual unfitness to be anybody's minister. Beattie had, to begin with, this always infallible mark of an able man--an increasing sense of his own inability: and he had, along with that, this equally infallible mark of a spiritually-minded man--an overwhelming sense of his utter lack of anything like a spiritual mind. No man but a very able man could have written the letter that Beattie wrote about himself to Samuel Rutherford; and Rutherford's letter back to Beattie will not be a bad test of a divinity student whether he has enough of the true divinity student mind in him to read that letter, to understand it, and to translate it.

Beattie had an excellent intellect, and his excellent intellect had not been laid out at college on those windy fields that so puff up a beginner in knowledge and in life; his whole mind had been given up already to those terrible problems of the soul that both humble and exalt the man who spends his life among them. Beattie's future congregation will not vaunt themselves about their minister's ability or scholarship or eloquence; his sermons will soon push his people back behind all such superficial matters. Beattie's preaching and his whole pastorate will soon become another ill.u.s.tration of the truth that it is not gifts but graces in a minister that will in the long-run truly edify the body of Christ. You have James Beattie's portrait as a divinity student in Rutherford's 249th letter, and you will find a complementary portrait of Beattie as a grey-haired pastor in Dr. Stalker's _Preacher and his Models_. 'He was a man of competent scholarship, and had the reputation of having been in early life a powerful and popular preacher. But it was not to those gifts that he owed his unique influence. He moved through the town, with his white hair and somewhat staid and dignified demeanour, as a hallowing presence. His very pa.s.sing in the street was a kind of benediction; the people, as they looked after him, spoke of him to each other with affectionate reverence. Children were proud when he laid his hand on their heads, and they treasured the kindly words which he spoke to them. They who laboured along with him in the ministry felt that his mere existence in the community was an irresistible demonstration of Christianity and a tower of strength to every good cause. Yet he had not gained this position of influence by brilliant talents or great achievements or the pushing of ambition; for he was singularly modest, and would have been the last to credit himself with half the good he did.

The whole mystery lay in this, that he had lived in the town for forty years a blameless life, and was known by everybody to be a G.o.dly and a prayerful man. The prime qualification for the ministry is goodness.'

Beattie as a student challenged himself severely on this account also, that some truths found a more easy and unshaken credit with him than other truths. This is a common difficulty with many of our modern students also, and how best to advise with them under this real difficulty constantly puts their professors and their pastors to the test. Whatever Beattie may have got, I confess I do not get much help in this difficulty out of Rutherford's letter back to Beattie. Rutherford, with all his splendid gifts of mind and heart, had sometimes a certain dogmatic and dictatorial way with him, and this is just the temper that our students still meet with too often in their old and settled censors.

The 'torpor of a.s.surance' has not yet settled on the young divine as it has done on too many of the old. There was a modest, a genuine, and an every way reasonable difficulty in this part of Beattie's letter to Rutherford, and I wish much that Rutherford had felt himself put upon his quite capable mettle to deal with the difficulty. Or, if he had not time to go to the bottom of all Beattie's deep letter, as he says he has not, he might have referred his correspondent--for his correspondent was a well-read student--to a great sermon by the greatest of English Churchmen--a sermon that a reader like Rutherford must surely have had by heart, ent.i.tled, 'A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect.' But, unfortunately for England and Scotland both, England was thrusting that sermon and all the other writings of its author on the Church of Christ in Scotland at the point of the bayonet, and that is the very worst instrument that can be employed in the interests of truth and of ecclesiastical comprehension and conformity. And among the many things we have to be thankful for in our more emanc.i.p.ated and more catholic day, it is not the least that Rutherford and Hooker lie in peace and in complemental fulness beside one another on the tables of all our students of divinity.

Coming still closer home to himself, our divinity student puts this acute difficulty to his spiritual casuist: Whether a man of G.o.d, and especially a minister of Christ, can be right who does not love G.o.d for Himself, for His nature and for His character solely and purely, and apart altogether from all His benefactions both in nature and in grace. James Beattie had been brought up with such a love for the Kirk of Scotland, and for her ministers and her people; he had of late grown into such a love for his books also, and for the work of the ministry, that in examining himself in prospect of his approaching licence he had felt afraid that he loved the thought of a study, and a pulpit, and a manse, and its inhabitants, and, indeed, the whole prospective life of a minister, with more keenness of affection than he loved the souls of men, or even his Master Himself.

And he put that most distressing difficulty also before Rutherford. Now there was an expression on that matter that was common in the pulpits of Rutherford's school in that day that Rutherford would be sure to quote in his second letter to Beattie, if not in his first. It was a Latin proverb, but all the common people of that day quite well understood it, not to speak of a student like Beattie. _Aliquid in Christo formosius Salvatore_, wrote Rutherford to distressed Beattie; that is to say, There is that in Christ which is far more fair and sweet than merely His being a Saviour. Never be content, that is, till you can rise up above manses and pulpits and books and sermons, and even above your own salvation, to see the pure and infinite loveliness of Christ Himself. Dost thou, O my soul, love Jesus Christ for Himself alone, and not only as thy Redeemer?

though to love Him as such He doth allow thee, yet there is that in Christ that is far more amiable than merely in His being thy Saviour. And yet the two kinds of love may quite well stand together, writes Rutherford, just as a child loves his mother because she is his mother, and yet his love leaps the more out when she gives him an apple. At the same time, to love Christ for Himself alone is the last end of a true believer's love.

It was one of the great experimental problems much agitated among the greater evangelical divines of that deep, clear-eyed, and honest day, Why the truly regenerate are all left so full of all manner of indwelling sin. We never hear that question raised nowadays, nor any question at all like that. The only difficulty in our day is why any man should have any difficulty about his own indwelling sin at all. But neither Beattie, nor Rutherford, nor any of the masters who remain to us had got so far as we. And as for the Antinomian, perfectionist, and higher-life preachers of that day, they are all so dead and forgotten that you would not know their names even if I repeated them. Beattie, as a beginner in the spiritual life, had made this still not uncommon mistake. He had taken those New Testament pa.s.sages in which the apostles portray an ideal Christian man as he stands in the election and calling of G.o.d, and as he will be found at last and for ever in heaven, and he had prematurely and inconsequently applied all that to himself as a young man under sanctification and under the painful and humiliating beginnings of it; and no wonder that, so confusing the very first principles of the Gospel, he confused and terrified himself out of all peace and all comfort and all hope. Now, that was just the kind of difficulty with which Rutherford could deal with all his evangelical freedom and fulness, depth and insight. No preacher or writer of that day held up the absolute necessity of holiness better than Rutherford did; but then, that only the more compelled him to hold up also such comfort as he conveys in his consoling and rea.s.suring letter to despairing Beattie: 'Comparing the state of one truly regenerate, whose heart is a temple of the Holy Ghost, with your own, which is full of uncleanness and corruption, you stand dumb and dare not call Christ heartsomely your own. But, I answer, the best regenerate have their defilements, and, wash as they will, there will be the filth of sin in their hearts to the end. Glory alone will make our hearts pure and perfect, never till then will they be absolutely sinless.' And if we, Rutherford's so weak-kneed successors, preached the law of G.o.d and true holiness as he preached those n.o.ble doctrines, the sheer agony of our despairing people would compel us to preach also the true nature, the narrow limits, and the whole profound laws of evangelical sanctification as we never preach, and scarce dare to preach, those things now. They who preach true holiness best are just thereby the more compelled to preach its partial, tentative, elementary, and superficial character in this life. And the hearer who knows in the word of G.o.d and in his own heart what indeed true holiness is, will insist on having its complementary truths frequently preached to him to keep him from despair; or else he will turn continually to those great divines who, though dead, yet preach such things in their n.o.ble books. And that those books are not still read and preached among us, and that the need for them and their doctrines is so little felt, is only another ill.u.s.tration of the true proverb that where no oxen are the crib is clean.

James Beattie was in very good company when he said that he must have more a.s.surance, both of his gifts and his graces, before he could enter on his ministry. For Moses, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and many another minister who could be named, have all felt and said the same thing. Now that he is near the door of the pulpit, Beattie feels that he cannot enter it till he has more certainty that it is all right with himself.

But our young ministers will attain to a.s.surance not so much by consulting Rutherford, skilled casuist in such matters as he is, as by themselves going forward in a holy life and a holy ministry. 'It is not G.o.d's design,' says Jonathan Edwards, 'that men should obtain a.s.surance in any other way than by mortifying corruption, increasing in grace, and obtaining the lively exercises of it. a.s.surance is not to be obtained so much by self-examination as by action. Paul obtained a.s.surance of winning the prize more by running than by reflecting. The swiftness of his pace did more toward his a.s.surance of the goal than the strictness of his self-examination.' 'I wish you a share of my feast,' replies Rutherford. 'But, for you, hang on our Lord, and He will fill you with a sense of His love, as He has so often filled me. Your feast is not far off. Hunger on; for there is food already in your hunger for Christ.

Never go away from Him, but continue to fash Him; and if He delays, yet come not away, albeit you should fall aswoon at His feet.' Pray, says Rutherford, and you will not long lack a.s.surance. Work, says Edwards, and a.s.surance of G.o.d's love will be an immediate earnest of your full wages.

XXI. JOHN MEINE, JUNR., STUDENT OF DIVINITY

'If you would be a deep divine I recommend you to sanctification.'--_Rutherford_.

Old John Meine's shop was a great howf of Samuel Rutherford's all the time of his student life in Edinburgh. Young Rutherford had got an introduction to the Canongate shopkeeper from one of the elders of Jedburgh, and the old shopkeeper and the young student at once took to one another, and remained fast friends all their days. John Meine's shop was so situated at a corner of the Canongate that Rutherford could see the Tolbooth and John Knox's house as he looked up the street, and Holyrood Palace as he looked down, and the young divine could never hear enough of what the old shopkeeper had to tell him of Holyrood and its doings on the one hand, and of the Reformer's house on the other. The very paving-stones of the Canongate were full of sermons on the one hand, and of satires on the other, in that day. 'He was an old man when he came to live near my father's shop,' John Meine would say to the eager student. 'But, even as an errand boy, taking parcels up his stair, I felt what a good man's house I was in, and I used to wish I was already a man, that I might either be a soldier or a minister.' The divinity student often sat in the shopkeeper's pew on Sabbath-days, and after sermon they never went home till they had again visited John Knox's grave. And as they turned homeward, old Meine would lay his hand on young Rutherford's shoulder and say: 'Knoxes will be needed in Edinburgh again, before all is over, and who knows but you may be elect, my lad, to be one of them?'

Barbara Hamilton, who lived above her husband's shop, was almost more young Rutherford's intimate friend than even her intimate husband.

Barbara Hamilton was both a woman of eminent piety and of a high and bold public spirit. And stories are still told in the Wodrow Books of her interest and influence in the affairs of the Kirk and its silenced ministers. The G.o.dly old couple had two children: John, called after his father, and Barbara, called after her mother, and Barbara a.s.sisted her mother in the house, while John ran errands and a.s.sisted his father.

Rutherford and the little boy had made a great friendship while the latter was still a boy; and one of Rutherford's fellow-students had made a still deeper friendship upstairs than any but the two friends themselves suspected. Twenty years after this Barbara Hume will receive a letter from Samuel Rutherford, written in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster, consoling and sanctifying her for the death of his old friend William Hume, lately chaplain in the Covenanters' army at Newcastle.

By the time that Rutherford was minister at Anwoth, and then prisoner in Aberdeen, John Meine, junior, had grown up to be almost a minister himself. He is not yet a minister, but he is now a divinity student, hard at work at his books, and putting on the shopkeeper's ap.r.o.n an hour every afternoon to let his father have a rest. The old merchant used to rise at all hours in the morning, and spend the early summer mornings on Arthur's Seat with his Psalm-book in his hand, and the winter mornings at his shop fire, reading translations from the Continental Reformers, comparing them with his Bible, singing Psalms by himself and offering prayer. Till his student son felt, as he stood behind the counter for an hour in the afternoon, that he was like Aaron and Hur holding up his father's praying and prevailing hands.

There have always been speculative difficulties and animated debates in our Edinburgh Theological Societies, and, from the nature of the study, from the nature of the human mind, and from the nature of the Scottish mind, there will always be. John Meine's difficulties were not the same difficulties that exercise the minds of the young divines in our day, but they were anxious and troublesome enough to him, and he naturally turned to his old friend at Anwoth for counsel and advice. When Rutherford came in to Edinburgh, there was always a prophet's chamber in Barbara Hamilton's house ready for him; and when the winter session came to a close her young son would set off to Anwoth with a thousand questions in his head. But Aberdeen was too far away, and, though the posts of that day were expensive and uncertain, the old merchant did not grudge to see his son's letters sent off to Samuel Rutherford. Samuel Rutherford knew that John Meine, junior, was not shallow in his divinity, young as he was, nor an entire stranger to sanctification, else he would not have written that still extant letter back to him:--'I have little of Christ in this prison, little but desires. All my present stock of Christ is some hunger for Him; I cannot say but that I am rich in that. But, blessed be my Lord, who taketh me as I am. Christ had only one summer in His year, and shall we insist on two? My love to your father. And, for yourself, if you would be a deep divine, I recommend you to sanctification.' What with his father and his mother, his books, his acquaintance with Rutherford and Hume, and, best of all, his acquaintance with his own evil heart, young John Meine must have been a somewhat deep divine already, else Rutherford would not have cast such pearls of experience down before him.

A divine, according to our division of labour, is a man who has chosen as his life-work to study the things of G.o.d; the things, that is, of G.o.d in Christ, in Scripture, in the Church, and in the heart and life of man.

John and James and Peter and Andrew ceased to be fishermen, and became divines when Christ said to them 'Follow me.' And after seventy years of sanctification the second son of Zebedee had at last attained to divinity enough to receive the Revelation, to write it out, and to be called by the early Church John the Divine.

But what is this process of sanctification that makes a young man already a deep divine? What is sanctification? Rutherford had a deep hand in drawing up the well-known definition, and, therefore, we may take it as not far from the truth: 'Sanctification is the work of G.o.d's free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of G.o.d, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness.' That, or something like that, was the recipe that Samuel Rutherford sent south to John Meine, student of divinity, with the a.s.surance that, if he followed it close enough and long enough, it would result in making him a deep divine. I wonder if he took the recipe; I wonder if he kept to it; I wonder how he pictured to himself the image of G.o.d; I wonder, nay, I know, how he felt as he submitted his whole man--body, soul, and spirit--to the renewing of the Holy Ghost. And did he begin and continue to die more and more unto sin, till he died altogether to this sinful world, and live more and more unto righteousness, till he went to live with Knox, and Rutherford, and Hume, and his father and mother in the Land of Life?

'Did he begin with regeneration?' Dr. John Duncan, of the New College, asked his daughter, one Sabbath when she had come home from church full of praise of a sermon she had just heard on sanctification. Dr. Duncan was perhaps the deepest divine this century has seen in Edinburgh; and his divinity took its depth from the same study and the same exercise that Rutherford recommended to John Meine. Dr. Duncan was a great scholar, but it was not his scholarship that made him such a singularly deep divine. He was a profound philosopher also; but neither was it his philosophy. He was an immense reader also; but neither was it the piles of books; it was, he tells us, first the new heart that he got as a student in Aberdeen, and then it was the lifelong conflict that went on within him between the old heart and the new. And it is this that makes sanctification rank and stand out as the first and the oldest of all the experimental sciences. Long before either of the Bacons were born, the humblest and most obscure of G.o.d's saints were working out their own salvation on the most approved scientific principles and methods. Long before science and philosophy had discovered and set their seal to that method, the Church of Christ had taught it to all her true children, and all her best divines had taken a deep degree by means of it. What experimentalists were David and Asaph and Isaiah and Paul; and that, as the subtlest and deepest sciences must be pursued, not upon foreign substances but upon themselves, upon their own heart, and mind, and will, and disposition, and conversation, and character. Aristotle says that 'Young men cannot possess practical judgment, because practical judgment is employed upon individual facts, and these are learned only by experience, and a youth has not experience, for experience is gained only by a course of years.'

'A truly great divine,' was Jonathan Edwards' splendid certificate to our own Thomas Boston. Now, when we read his _Memoirs_, written by himself, we soon see what it was that made Boston such a truly great and deep divine. It was not the number of his books, for he tells us how he was pained when a brother minister opened his book-press and smiled at its few shelves. 'I may be a great bookman,' writes Rutherford to Lady Kenmure, 'and yet be a stark idiot in the things of Christ.' It was not his knowledge of Hebrew, though he almost discovered that hidden language in Ettrick. No, but it was his discovery of himself, and his experimental study of his own heart. 'My duties, the best of them, would d.a.m.n me; they must all be washed with myself in that precious blood.

Though I cannot be free of sin, G.o.d Himself knows that He would be welcome to make havoc of all my l.u.s.ts to-night, and to make me holy. I know no l.u.s.t I would not be content to part with to-night. The first impression on my spirit this morning was my utter inability to put away sin. I saw that it was as possible for a rock to raise itself as it was for me to raise my heart from sin to holiness.'

But the study of divinity is not a close profession: a profession for men only, and from which women are shut out; nor is the method of it shut off from any woman or any man. 'I counsel you to study sanctification,'

wrote Rutherford, the same year to the Lady Cardoness. And if you think that Rutherford was a closet mystic and an unpractical and head-carried enthusiast, too good for this rough world, read his letter to Lady Cardoness, and confess your ignorance of this great and good man. 'Deal kindly with your tenants,' he writes, 'and let your conscience be your factor'; and again, 'When your husband's pa.s.sion overcomes him, my counsel to your ladyship is, that a soft answer putteth away wrath.' And lastly, 'Let it not be said that the Lord hath forsaken your house because of your neglect of the Sabbath-day and its exercises. I counsel you to study sanctification among your tenants, and beside your husband, and among your children and your guests. Your lawful and loving pastor, in his only, only Lord,--SAMUEL RUTHERFORD.

XXII. ALEXANDER BRODIE OF BRODIE

'Mr. Rutherford's letter desiring me to deny myself.'--Brodie's _Diary_.

Alexander Brodie was born at Brodie in the north country in the year 1617. That was the same year that saw Samuel Rutherford matriculate in the College of Edinburgh. Of young Brodie's early days we know nothing; for, though he has left behind him a full and faithful diary both of his personal and family life, yet, unfortunately, Brodie did not begin to keep that diary till he was well advanced in middle age. Young Brodie's father died when his son and heir was but fourteen years old, and after taking part of the curriculum of study in King's College, Aberdeen, the young laird married a year before he had come to his majority. His excellent wife was only spared to be with him for two years when she was taken away from him, leaving him the widowed father of one son and one daughter.

As time goes on we find the laird of Brodie a member of Parliament, a member of General a.s.sembly, and a Lord of Session. He was one of the commissioners also, who were sent out to the Hague to carry on negotiations with Charles, and during the many troubled years that followed that mission, we find Brodie corresponding from time to time with Cromwell and his officers, and with Charles and his courtiers, both about public and private affairs. Brodie was one of the ablest men of his day in Scotland, and he should have stood in the very front rank of her statesmen and her saints; but, as it is, he falls very far short of that. We search the signatures of the National Covenant in vain for the name of Alexander Brodie, and the absence of his name from that n.o.ble roll is already an ill-omen for his future life. David Laing, in his excellent preface to Brodie's _Diary_, is good enough to set down the absence of Brodie's name from the Covenant to his youth and retired habits. I wish I could take his editor's lenient view of Brodie's absence from Greyfriars church on the testing day of the Covenant. It would be an immense relief to me if I could persuade myself to look at Brodie in that matter with Mr. Laing's eyes. I have tried hard to do so, but I cannot. Far younger men than the laird of Brodie were in the Greyfriars churchyard that day, and far more modest men than he was. And I cannot shut my eyes to what appears to me, after carefully studying his life and his character, a far likelier if a far less creditable reason.

After the Restoration Brodie's life, if life it could be called, was spent in a constant terror lest he should lose his estates, his liberty, and his life in the prelatic persecution; but, with his sleepless management of men, if not with the blessing of G.o.d and the peace of a good conscience, Alexander Brodie died in his own bed, in Brodie Castle, on the 17th of April, 1680.

There were some things in which Alexander Brodie ran well, to employ the apostle's expression; in some things, indeed, no man of his day ran better. To begin with, Brodie had an excellent intellect. If he did not always run well it was not for want of a sound head or a sharp eye. In reading Brodie's diary you all along feel that you are under the hand of a very able man, and a man who all his days does excellent justice to his excellent mind, at least on its intellectual side. The books he enters as having read on such and such a date, the catalogues of books he buys on his visits to Edinburgh and London, and the high planes of thought on which his mind dwells when he is at his best, all bespeak a very able man doing full justice to his great ability. The very examinations he puts himself under as to his motives and mainsprings in this and that action of his life; the defences and exculpations he puts forward for this and that part of his indefensible conduct; the debate he holds now with the presbyterian party and now with the prelatist; the very way he puts his finger down on the weak and unsound places in both of the opposing parties; and, not least, his power of aphoristic thought and expression in the running diary of his spiritual life, all combine to leave the conviction on his reader's mind that Lord Brodie was one of the very ablest men of a very able day in Scotland. I open his voluminous diary at random, and I at once come on such pa.s.sages as these: 'If substantial duties are neglected or slighted it is a shrewd suspicion, be the repentance what it will, that all is not right. Lord, discover Thyself in the duties of the time, and in every substantial duty. At the same time, hang not the weight of our wellbeing on our duties, but on Christ by faith. I am a reeling, unstable, staggering, unsettled, lukewarm creature. For Thy compa.s.sion's sake forgive and heal, warm, establish, enlighten, draw me and I will follow. I am full of self-love, darkness in my judgment, fear to confess Thee, or hazard myself, or my estate, or my peace. . . . We poor creatures are commanded by our affections and our pa.s.sions; they are not at our command; but the Holy One doth exercise all His attributes at His own will; they are all at His command; they are not pa.s.sions or perturbations in His mind, though they transport us. When I would hate, I cannot. When I would love, I cannot. When I would grieve, I cannot. When I would desire, I cannot. But it is the better for us that all is as He wills. . . . Another of the deep deceits of my heart is this, that I have more affection in prayer than I have corresponding holiness in my walk or conversation. I wondered not to see the men of the world so taken up with covetous, ambitious, vain projects, for no man's head and heart can be so full of them as my head and heart are. Oh keep me from these unsober, distempered, mad, unruly thoughts!

When I am away from Thee then I am quite out of my wit. But G.o.d can make use of poison to expel poison. Oh, if I were examined and brought to the light, what a monstrous creature I would be seen to be! For as I see myself I am no better than a devil, void of sincerity and of uprightness in what I do myself, and yet judge others, condemning in another man what I excuse and even approve in myself: plunged in deep snares of self-love, not loving others nor judging nor acting for others as I do for myself and for my relations.' And then a pa.s.sage which might have been taken from _The Confessions_ itself: 'Ere I come to glory and to my journey's end, I shall have spent so much of Thy free grace--what in pardoning, what in preventing, what in convincing, what in enlightening, what in strengthening, and confirming, and upholding; what in watering and making me to grow; what in growth of sanctification, knowledge, faith, experience, patience, mortification, uprightness, steadfastness, watchfulness, humiliation, resolution, and self-denial; what for public, what for private, and what for the family; what against snares on the right hand and on the left;--O Lord, the all-sufficiency of Thy grace!'

Surely the man must run well and must make a good goal at last who can write about sin and grace in himself in that fashion! And that is not all he wrote on that subject and in that style. You have no idea of the wealth of personal and experimental matter there lies buried in Alexander Brodie's diary. When I first read Brodie's big diary I said to myself, What a treasure is this I have stumbled upon! Here is yet another of Scotland's statesmen, scholars, and eminent saints. Here, I thought, is an author on the inward life to be set beside Brae and Halyburton, if not beside Shepard and Edwards themselves.

In the religious upbringing also, and lifelong care of his orphaned son and daughter, Brodie was all we could wish to see. In the sanctification and wise occupation of the Sabbath-day; in the family preparation for communion seasons; in the personal and private covenants he encouraged his children to make with G.o.d in their own religious life; in the company he brought to his house and to his table; in his own devotional habits at home--in all these all-important matters Brodie was all that a father of children too early bereft of their mother ought to be. Till we do not wonder to find his son commencing his diary on the day of his father's death in this way: 'My precious, worthy, and dear father! I can hardly apprehend the consequence of it to the land, and the Church, and his family. The Lord give instruction. I have seen the G.o.dly conversation, holy and Christian walk of a father, his watchfulness and fruitfulness, his secret communion with G.o.d, and yet I cannot say that my heart has been won to G.o.d by his example.' A complete directory, indeed, for a Highland gentleman's household religion might easily be collected out of Alexander Brodie's domestic diary.

Another thing that greatly drew me to Brodie when I first read his diary was his n.o.ble and truly Christian acknowledgment of G.o.d in all the manifold experiences and events of his daily life. '23_rd_ _July_, 1661.--Came through the fells in England to Alsbori and dined there, saw a country full of gra.s.s, plentiful in comparison of us, and acknowledged G.o.d in it. . . . Thus I saw a large beautiful country, not straitened with the poverty that my native soil labours under. I desired to consider and understand this. . . . I saw a mighty city, London, numerous, many souls in it, great plenty of things, and thought him a great king that had so many things at his command; yet how much greater is He who hath at His command all things created in heaven and on earth.

Who shall not fear Him? . . . _August_ 17.--Went this afternoon with Ca.s.silis to the Bridge for natural refreshment, and I saw this populous city, and plenty in it. I therein saw something of the Lord's providence, who hath divided the kingdoms of the earth and given them their habitations, not all alike, but as His wisdom hath seen fit. I saw the copper-works also, and acknowledged the Lord in the gifts and the faculties He hath given to the children of men. 27.--I did see the Lord Mayor, his solemnities, and desired to be instructed by what I saw. The variety of the Lord's creatures on other parts of the earth was represented. In this I did acknowledge Him. But all the glory of the city neither abides nor can make its owner any the happier. It cannot be laid hold upon. It is not solid; it is but in conceit. Oh learn me to be crucified to all this and the like, and make me wise unto salvation!

_Nov_. 9--Dined at Billingsgate; saw the prison of King's Bench at Southwark, and the workers of gla.s.s, in all which I saw the manifold wisdom of G.o.d in all the gifts and faculties He hath given to the sons of men. But alas! I am so barren of any thoughts of G.o.d, and so have I found myself this day and at all times.'

'Yet, all these fences, and their whole array, One cunning bosom sin blows quite away.'