(Rutherford, Selected letters. part 7)
afternoon is nearer even-tide now than it was. As a flood carried back
to the sea, so does the Lord's swift post, Time, carry you and your
life with wings to the grave. Ye eat and drink, but time standeth not
still; ye laugh, but your day fleeth away; ye sleep, but your hours
are reckoned and put by hand. Oh how soon will time shut you out of
the poor, and cold, and hungry inn of this life! And then what will
yesterday's short-born pleasures do to you, but be as a snow-ball
melted away many years since? O blessed conquest, to lose all things,
and to gain Christ! I know not what ye have, if ye want Christ! Alas!
How poor is your gain, if the earth were all yours in free heritage,
holding it of no man of clay, if Christ be not yours!
I recommend Christ and His love to your seeking; and yourself to the
tender mercy and rich grace of our Lord. Remember my love in Christ to
your wife. I desire her to learn to make her soul's anchor fast upon
Christ Himself. Few are saved.
Your soul's eternal well-wisher.
ABERDEEN, 1637
XLIV. To CASSIN CARRIE
MUCH HONORED SIR, - Grace, mercy, and peace be to you. I have been too
long in writing to you. I am confident that ye have learned to prize
Christ, and His love and favor, more than ordinary professors who
scarce see Christ with half an eye, because their sight is taken up
with eyeing and liking the beauty of this over-gilded world, that
promiseth fair to all its lovers, but in the push of a trial, when
need is, can give nothing but a fair beguile.
I know that ye are not ignorant that men come not to this world, as
some do to a market, to see and to be seen; or as some come to behold
a May-game, and only to behold, and to go home again. Ye come hither
to treat with God, and to tryst with Him in His Christ for salvation
to your soul, and to seek reconciliation with an angry, wrathful God,
in a covenant of peace made to you in Christ; and this is more than
ordinary sport, or the play that the greatest part of the world give
their heart unto. And, therefore, worthy Sir, I pray you, by the
salvation of your soul, and by the mercy of God, and your compearance
before Christ, do this in sad earnest, and let not salvation be your
by-work or your holy-day's talk only, or a work by the way. For men
think that this may be done on three days' space on a feather bed,
when death and they are fallen in hands together, and that with a word
or two they shall make their soul-matters right. Alas! This is to sit
loose and unsure in the matters of our salvation. Know and try in time
your holding of Him, and the rights and charters of heaven, and upon
what terms ye have Christ and the Gospel, and what Christ is worth in
your estimation, and how lightly ye esteem of other things, and how
dearly of Christ. I am sure, if you see Him in his beauty and glory,
you will see Him to be that incomparable jewel which you should seek,
howbeit you should sell, wadset and forfeit your few years' portion of
this life's joys. Oh happy soul for evermore, who can rightly compare
this life with that long-lasting life to come, and can balance the
weighty glory of the one, with the light golden vanity of the other!
The day of the Lord is at hand, and all men shall come out in their
blacks and whites as they are; there shall be no borrowed colors in
that day. Men now borrow the lustre of Christianity, but how many
counterfeit masks will be burnt in the day of God, in the fire that
shall consume the earth and the works that are on it! And howbeit
Christ have the hardest part of it now, yet, in the presence of my
Lord, whom I serve in the Spirit, I would not differ or exchange
Christ's prison, bonds, and chains, with the golden chains and lordly
rents of the men of this world. Worthy, worthy for evermore is Christ,
for whom the saints of God suffer the short pains of this life!
Sir, I wish your soul may be more acquainted with the sweetness of
Christ. Grace, grace be with you.
ABERDEEN, 1637
XLV. To JOHN LENNOX, Laird of Catty
MUCH HONORED SIR, - Grace, mercy, and peace be to you. - I long to
hear how your soul prospereth. I have that confidence that your soul
mindeth Christ and salvation. I beseech you, in the Lord, to give more
pains and diligence to fetch heaven than the country-sort of lazy
professors, who think their own faith and their own godliness, because
it is their own, best; and content themselves with a cold rife custom
and course, with a resolution to summer and winter in that sort of
profession which the multitude and the times favor most; and are still
shaping and clipping and carving their faith, according as it may best
stand with their summer sun and a whole skin; and so breathe out hot
and cold in God's matters, according to the course of the times. This
is their compass which they sail towards heaven by, instead of a
better. Worthy and dear Sir, separate yourself from such, and bend
yourself to the utmost of your strength and breath, in running fast
for salvation; and, in taking Christ's kingdom, use violence. It cost
Christ and all His followers sharp showers and hot sweats, see they
won to the top of the mountain; but still our soft nature would have
heaven coming to our bedside when we are sleeping, and lying down with
us that we might go to heaven in warm clothes. But all that came there
found wet feet by the way, and sharp storms that did take the hide off
their face, and found tos and fros and ups and downs, and many enemies
by the way.
It is impossible that a man can take his lusts to heaven with him;
such wares as these will not be welcome there. Oh, how loath are we to
forego our packalds and burdens, that hinder us to run our race with
patience! It is no small work to displease and anger nature, that we
may please God. Oh, if it be hard to win one foot, or half an inch,
out of our own will, out of our own wit, out of our own ease and
worldly lusts (and so to deny ourself, and to say, 'It is not I but
Christ, not I but grace, not I but God's glory, not I but God's love
constraining me, not I but the Lord's word, not I but Christ's
commanding power as King in me!'), oh, what pains, and what a death it
is to nature, to turn me, myself, my lust, my ease, my credit, over
into, 'My Lord, my Savior, my King, and my God, my Lord's will, my
Lord's grace!' But, alas! that idol, myself, is the master idol we all
bow to. What made Eve miscarry? And what hurried her headlong upon the
forbidden fruit, but that wretched thing herself? What drew that
brother-murderer to kill Abel? That wild himself. What drove the old
world on to corrupt their ways? Who, but themselves, and their own
pleasure? What was the cause of Solomon's falling into idolatry and
multiplying of strange wives? What, but himself, whom he would rather
pleasure than God? What was the hook that took David and snared him
first in adultery, but his self-lust? and then in murder, but his
self-credit and self-honour? What led Peter on to deny his Lord? Was
it not a piece of himself, and self-love to a whole skin? What made
Judas sell his Master for thirty pieces of money, but a piece of
self-love, idolizing of avaricious self? What made Demas to go off the
way of the Gospel, to embrace this present world? Even self-love and
love of gain for himself. Every man blameth the devil for his sins;
but the great devil, the house-devil of every man, that lieth and
eateth in every man's bosom, is that idol that killeth all, himself.
Blessed are they who can deny themselves, and put Christ in the room
of themselves. 0 sweet word! (Gal. 2.1O) 'I live no more, but Christ
liveth in me!' Worthy Sir, pardon this my freedom of love. God is my
witness, that it is out of an earnest desire after your soul's eternal
welfare, that I use this freedom of speech. Your sun, I know, is
lower, and your sun-setting and evening sky nearer, than when I saw
you last: strive to end your task before night, and to make Christ
yourself, and to acquaint your heart and your love with the Lord. Sir,
I remember you in my prayers to the Lord, according to my promise:
help me with your prayers, that our Lord would be pleased to bring me
amongst you again, with the Gospel of Christ. Grace, grace, be with
you.
ABERDEEN, 1637
XLVI. To JOHN GORDON OF CARDONESS, the younger
DEARLY-BELOVED IN THE LORD, - I long exceedingly to hear of the case
of your soul, which has a large share both of my prayers and careful
thoughts. Sir, remember that a precious treasure and prize is upon
this short play that ye are now upon. Even the eternity of well or wo
to your soul standeth upon the little point of your well or
ill-employed short and swift-posting sand glass. Seek the Lord while
He may be found; the Lord waiteth upon you.
And sinning against light will put out your candle, and stupefy your
conscience, and bring upon it more coverings and skin, and less
feeling and sense of guiltiness; and when that is done, the devil is
like a mad horse that has broken his bridle and runneth away with his
rider whither he listeth. Learn to know that which the apostle knew,
the deceitfulness of sin. Strive to make prayer and reading and holy
company and holy conference your delight; and when delight comets in,
ye shall by little and little smell the sweetness of Christ, till at
length your soul be over head and ears in Christ's sweetness. Then
shall ye be taken up to the top of the mountain with the Lord, to know
the ravishments of spiritual love, and the glory and excellency of a
seen, revealed, felt, and embraced Christ: and then ye shall not be
able to loose yourself off Christ, and to bind your soul to old
lovers. Then, and never till then, are all the paces, motions,
balkings, and wheels of your soul in a right tune, and in a spiritual
temper.
But if this world and its lusts be your delight, I know not what
Christ can make of you; ye cannot be metal to be a vessel of glory and
mercy. As the Lord liveth, thousand thousands are beguiled with
security, because God and wrath and judgment are not terrible to them.
Stand in awe of God and of the warnings of a checking and rebuking
conscience. Make others to see Christ in you, moving, doing, speaking
and thinking. Your actions will smell of Him if He be in you. There is
an instinct in the new-born babes of Christ, like the instinct of
nature that leads birds to build their nests, and bring forth their
young, and love such and such places, as woods, forests, and
wildernesses, better than other places. The instinct of nature maketh
a man love his mother-country above all countries; the instinct of
renewed nature, and supernatural grace, will lead you to such and such
works, as to love your country above, to sigh to be clothed with your
house not made with hands, and to call your borrowed prison here below
a borrowed prison, and to look upon it servant-like and pilgrim-like.
And the pilgrim's eye and look is a disdainfullike, discontented cast
of his eye, his heart crying after his eye, 'Fy, fy, this is not like
my country.'
I recommend to you the mending of a hole, and reforming of a failing,
one or other, every week; and put off a sin, or a piece of it, as
anger, wrath, lust, intemperance, every day, that ye may more easily
master the remnant of your corruption. God has given you a wife; love
her, and let her breasts satisfy you; and, for the Lord's sake, drink
no waters but out of your own cistern. Strange wells are poison.
Strive to learn some new way against your corruption from the man of
God, Mr W. D. [William Dalgleish], or other servants of God. Sleep not
sound, till ye find yourself in that case that ye dare look death in
the face, and durst hazard your soul upon eternity. I am sure that
many ells and inches of the short thread of your life are by-hand
since I saw you; and that thread has an end; and ye have no hands to
cast a knot, and add one day, or a finger-breadth, to the end of it.
When hearing, and seeing, and the outer walls of the clay house shall
fall down, and life shall render the besieged castle of clay to death
and judgment, and ye find your time worn ebb, and run out, what
thoughts will you then have of idol-pleasures, that possibly are now
sweet? What bud or hide would you then give for the Lord's favor? And
what a price would you then give for pardon? It were not amiss to
think, 'What if I were to receive a doom, and to enter into a furnace
of fire and brimstone? What if it come to this, that I shall have no
portion but utter darkness? And what if I be brought to this, to be
banished from the presence of God, and to be given over to God's
sergeants, the devil and the power of the second death?' Put your
soul, by supposition, in such a case, and consider what horror would
take hold of you, and what ye would then esteem of pleasing yourself
in the course of sin. Oh, dear Sir, for the Lord's sake awake to live
righteously, and love your poor soul! And after ye have seen this my
letter, say with yourself, 'The Lord will seek an account of this
warning which I have received.'
Lodge Christ in your family. Receive no stranger hireling as your
pastor. I bless your children. Grace be with you.
ABERDEEN, 1637
XLVII. To WILLIAM GORDON
DEAR BROTHER, - Ye complain that ye want a mark of the sound work of
grace and love in your soul. For answer, consider for your
satisfaction (till God send more) I John 3.14. And as for your
complaint of deadnes.~ and doubting. Christ will, I hope, take your
deadness and you together. They are bodies full of holes, running
boils, and broken bones which need mending, that Christ the Physician
taketh up: whole vessels are not for the Mediator Christ's art.
Publicans, sinners, whores, harlots, are ready market-wares for
Christ. The only thing that will bring sinners within a cast of
Christ's drawing arm is that which ye write of, some feeling of death
and sin. That bringeth forth complaints; and, therefore, out of sense
complain more, and be more acquaint with all the cramps, stitches, and
soulswoonings that trouble you. The more pain, and the more
night-watching, and the more fevers, the better. A soul bleeding to
death, till Christ were sent for, and cried for in all haste, to come
and stem the blood, and close up the hole in the wound with His own
heart and balm, were a very good disease, when many are dying of a
whole heart. We have all too little of hell-pain and terrors that way;
nay, God send me such a hell as Christ has promised to make a heaven
of. Alas! I am not come that far on the way, as to say in sad earnest,
'Lord Jesus, great and sovereign Physician, here is a pained patient
for Thee.' But the thing that we mistake is the want of victory. We
hold that to be the mark of one that has no grace. Nay, say I, the
want of fighting were a mark of no grace; but I shall not say the want
of victory is such a mark. If my fire and the devil's water make
crackling like thunder in the air, I am the less feared; for where
there is fire, it is Christ's part, which I lay and bind upon Him, to
keep in the coal, and to pray the Father that my faith fail not, if I
in the meantime be wrestling, and doing, and fighting, and mourning.
Pray for me, that the Lord would give me house-room again, to hold a
candle to this dark world. - Grace, grace be with you.
ABERDEEN, 1637
XLVIII. To LADY KENMURE
MY VERY NOBLE AND DEAR LADY,- Grace, mercy, and peace be to you. - The
Lord has brought me safely to Aberdeen: I have gotten lodging in the
hearts of all I meet with. No face that has not smiled upon me; only
the indwellers of this town are dry, cold, and general. They consist
of Papists, and men of Gallio's metal, firm in no religion; and it is
counted no wisdom here to countenance a confined and silenced
prisoner. But the shame of Christ's cross shall not be my shame.
Madam, your Ladyship knoweth what Christ has done to have all your
love; and that He alloweth not His level upon your dear child. Keep
good quarters with Christ in your love. I verily think that Christ has
said, 'I must needs-force have Jean Campbell for Myself'; and He has
laid many oars in the water, to fish and hunt home-over your heart to
heaven. Let Him have His prey, He will think you well won, when He has
gotten you. It is good to have recourse often, and to have the door
open, to our stronghold. For the sword of the Lord, the sword of the
Lord is for Scotland! And yet two or three berries shall be left in
the top of the olive-tree.
If a word can do my brother good in his distress, I know your Ladyship
will be willing and ready to speak it, and more also. Now the only
wise God, and your only, only One, He who dwelt in the Bush, be with
you. I write many kisses and many blessings in Christ to your dear
child: the blessings of his father's God, the blessings due to the
fatherless and the widow, be yours and his.
ABERDEEN
XLIX. To MRS STUART, wife of the Provost of Aye
(See Letter XXIX)
MISTRESS, - Grace, mercy, and peace be to you. - I am sorry that ye
take it so hardly that I have not written to you.
I am judged to be that which I am not. I fear that if I were put into
the fire, I should melt away, and fall down in shreds of painted
nature; for truly I have little stuff at home that is worth the eye of
God's servants. If there 'be anything of Christ's in me (as I dare not
deny some of His work), it is but a spunk of borrowed fire, that can
scarce warm myself, and has little heat for standers-by. I would fain
have that which ye and others believe I have; but ye are only
witnesses to my outer side, and to some words on paper. Oh that He
would give me more than paper-grace or tongue-grace! But if I have any
love to Him, Christ has both love to me, and wit to guide His love.
And I see that the best thing I have has as much dross beside it as
might curse me and it both; and, if it were for no more, we have need
of a Savior to pardon the very faults, and diseases, and weakness of
the new man, and to take away (to say so) our godly sins, or the sins
of our sanctification, and the dross and scum of spiritual love.
I would have you and myself helping Christ mystical to weep for His
wife. And oh that we could mourn for Christ buried in Scotland, and
for His two slain witnesses, killed because they prophesied! If we
could so importune and solicit God, our buried Lord and His two buried
witnesses should rise again. Earth and clay and stone will not bear
down Christ and the Gospel in Scotland. I know not if I shall see the
second temple and the glory of it; but the Lord has deceived me if it
be not to be reared up again. I would wish to give Christ His welcome
Home again. My blessing, my joy, my glory and love be on the
Home-comer.
I know that your heart and Christ are married together; it were not
good to make a divorce. Rue not of that meeting and marriage with such
a Husband. Pray for me, His prisoner. Grace, grace be with you.
ABERDEEN, 1637
L. To MR JAMES FLEMING
Fleming was minister of a parish in East Lothian. He was strongly
opposed to the attempts of James and Charles I to impose prelacy and
the Prayer Book on Scotland. His first wife, Martha, was the eldest
daughter of John Knox.
REVEREND AND WELL-BELOVED IN OUR LORD, - Grace, mercy, and peace to
you. I received your letter which has refreshed me in my bonds. I
cannot but testify unto you, my dear brother, what sweetness I find in
our Master's cross; but alas, what can I either do or suffer for Him?
I am not able, by tongue, pen, or sufferings, to provoke many to fall
in love with Him: but He knoweth, whom I love to serve in the Spirit,
what I would do and suffer by His own strength, so being that I might
make my Lord Jesus lovely and sweet to many thousands in this land. I
think it amongst God's wonders, that He will take any praise or glory,
or any testimony to His honorable cause, from such a forlorn sinner as
I am. But when Christ worketh, He needeth not ask the question, by
whom He will be glorious. I know (seeing His glory at the beginning
did shine out of poor nothing, to set up such a fair house for men and
angels, and so many glorious creatures, to proclaim His goodness,
power, and wisdom) that, if I were burnt to ashes, out of the smoke
and powder of my dissolved body He could raise glory to Himself. But,
alas! Few know the guiltiness that is on my part: it is a wonder, that
this good cause has not been marred and spilled in my foul hands. But
I rejoice in this, that my sweet Lord Jesus has found something ado,
even a ready market for His free grace and incomparable and matchless
mercy, in my wants. Only my loathsome wretchedness and my wants have
qualified me for Christ, and the riches of His glorious grace. Few
know the unseen and private reckonings betwixt Christ and me; yet His
love, His boundless love would not bide away, nor stay at home with
Himself.
How joyful is my heart, that ye write that ye are desirous to join
with me in praising; for it is a charity to help a devour to pay his
debts. But when all have helped me, my name shall stand in His
account-book under ten thousand thousands of sums unpaid. But it
easeth my heart that His dear servants will but speak of my debts to
such a sweet Creditor. I desire that He may lay me in His own balance
and weigh me, if I would not fain have a feast of His boundless love
made to my own soul, and to many others. One thing I know, that we
shall not at all be able to come near His Excellency, with eye, heart,
or tongue; for He is above all created thoughts. All nations before
Him are as nothing, and less than nothing: He sitteth in the circuit
of heaven, and the inhabitants of the earth are as grasshoppers before
Him. Oh that men would praise Him!
Ye complain of your private case. Alas! I am not the man to speak to
such an one as ye are. Any sweet presence which I have had in this
town, is, I know, for this cause, that I might express and make it
known to others. But I never find myself nearer Christ, that royal and
princely One, than after a great weight and sense of deadness and
gracelessness. I think that the sense of our wants, when withal we
have a restlessness and a sort of spiritual impatience under them and
can make a din, because we want Him whom our soul loveth, is that
which maketh an open door to Christ. And when we think we are going
backward, because we feel deadness, we are going forward; for the more
sense, the more life; and no sense argueth no life.
And for your complaints of your ministry, I now think all I do too
little. Plainness, freedom, watchfulness, fidelity, shall swell upon
you, in exceeding large comforts, in your sufferings. The feeding of
Christ's lambs in private visits lions and catechizing, in painful
preaching, and fair, honest, and free warning of the flock, is a
sufferer's garland. Oh, ten thousand times blessed are they who are
honored of Christ to be faithful and painful in wooing a bride to
Christ! My dear brother, I know that ye think more on this than I can
write; and I rejoice that your purpose is, in the Lord's strength, to
back your wronged Master; and to come out and call yourself Christ's
man when so many are now denying Him.
Help me with your prayers; and desire, from me, other brethren to
take courage for their Master.
(continued in part 8...)
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