Alexander Whyte - Samuel Rutherford

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SAMUEL RUTHERFORD
AND SOME OF
HIS CORRESPONDENTS

LECTURES DELIVERED IN
ST. GEORGE'S FREE CHURCH
EDINBURGH: BY
ALEXANDER WHYTE, D.D.

AUTHOR OF 'BUNYAN CHARACTERS'
ETC.

PUBLISHED BY
OLIPHANT ANDERSON AND FERRIER

30 ST. MARY STREET, EDINBURGH, AND
24 OLD BAILEY, LONDON
1894

I. JOSHUA REDIVIVUS

'He sent me as a spy to see the land and to try the ford.'
_Rutherford_.

Samuel Rutherford, the author of the seraphic _Letters_, was born in the
south of Scotland in the year of our Lord 1600. Thomas Goodwin was born
in England in the same year, Robert Leighton in 1611, Richard Baxter in
1615, John Owen in 1616, John Bunyan in 1628, and John Howe in 1630. A
little vellum-covered volume now lies open before me, the title-page of
which runs thus:--'Joshua Redivivus, or Mr. Rutherford's Letters, now
published for the use of the people of God: but more particularly for
those who now are, or may afterwards be, put to suffering for Christ and
His cause. By a well-wisher to the work and to the people of God.
Printed in the year 1664.' That is all. It would not have been safe in
1664 to say more. There is no editor's name on the title-page, no
publisher's name, and no place of printing or of publication. Only two
texts of forewarning and reassuring Scripture, and then the year of grace
1664.

Joshua Redivivus: That is to say, Moses' spy and pioneer, Moses'
successor and the captain of the Lord's covenanted host come back again.
A second Joshua sent to Scotland to go before God's people in that land
and in that day; a spy who would both by his experience and by his
testimony cheer and encourage the suffering people of God. For all this
Samuel Rutherford truly was. As he said of himself in one of his letters
to Hugh Mackail, he was indeed a spy sent out to make experiment upon the
life of silence and separation, banishment and martyrdom, and to bring
back a report of that life for the vindication of Christ and for the
support and encouragement of His people. It was a happy thought of
Rutherford's first editor, Robert M'Ward, his old Westminster Assembly
secretary, to put at the top of his title-page, Joshua risen again from
the dead, or, Mr. Rutherford's Letters written from his place of
banishment in Aberdeen.

In selecting his twelve spies, Moses went on the principle of choosing
the best and the ablest men he could lay hold of in all Israel. And in
selecting Samuel Rutherford to be the first sufferer for His covenanted
people in Scotland, our Lord took a man who was already famous for his
character and his services. For no man of his age in broad Scotland
stood higher as a scholar, a theologian, a controversialist, a preacher
and a very saint than Samuel Rutherford. He had been settled at Anwoth
on the Solway in 1627, and for the next nine years he had lived such a
noble life among his people as to make Anwoth famous as long as Jesus
Christ has a Church in Scotland. As we say Bunyan and Bedford, Baxter
and Kidderminster, Newton and Olney, Edwards and Northampton, Boston and
Ettrick, M'Cheyne and St. Peter's, so we say Rutherford and Anwoth.

His talents, his industry, his scholarship, his preaching power, his
pastoral solicitude and his saintly character all combined to make
Rutherford a marked man both to the friends and to the enemies of the
truth. His talents and his industry while he was yet a student in
Edinburgh had carried him to the top of his classes, and all his days he
could write in Latin better than either in Scotch or English. His habits
of work at Anwoth soon became a very proverb. His people boasted that
their minister was always at his books, always among his parishioners,
always at their sick-beds and their death-beds, always catechising their
children and always alone with his God. And then the matchless preaching
of the parish church of Anwoth. We can gather what made the Sabbaths of
Anwoth so memorable both to Rutherford and to his people from the books
we still have from those great Sabbaths: _The Trial and the Triumph of
Faith_; _Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself_; and such like.
Rutherford was the 'most moving and the most affectionate of preachers,'
a preacher determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified,
but not so much crucified, as crucified and risen again--crucified
indeed, but now glorified. Rutherford's life for his people at Anwoth
has something altogether superhuman and unearthly about it. His
correspondents in his own day and his critics in our day stumble at his
too intense devotion to his charge; he lived for his congregation, they
tell us, almost to the neglect of his wife and children. But by the time
of his banishment his home was desolate, his wife and children were in
the grave. And all the time and thought and love they had got from him
while they were alive had, now that they were dead, returned with new and
intensified devotion to his people and his parish.

Fair Anwoth by the Solway,
To me thou still art dear,
E'en from the verge of heaven
I drop for thee a tear.

Oh! if one soul from Anwoth
Meet me at God's right hand,
My heaven will be two heavens
In Immanuel's Land.

This then was the spy chosen by Jesus Christ to go out first of all the
ministers of Scotland into the life of banishment in that day, so as to
try its fords and taste its vineyards, and to report to God's straitened
and persecuted people at home.

To begin with, it must always be remembered that Rutherford was not laid
in irons in Aberdeen, or cast into a dungeon. He was simply deprived of
his pulpit and of his liberty to preach, and was sentenced to live in
silence in the town of Aberdeen. Like Dante, another great spy of God's
providence and grace, Rutherford was less a prisoner than an exile. But
if any man thinks that simply to be an exile is a small punishment, or a
light cross, let him read the psalms and prophecies of Babylon, the
_Divine Comedy_, and Rutherford's _Letters_. Yes, banishment was
banishment; exile was exile; silent Sabbaths were silent Sabbaths; and a
borrowed fireside with all its willing heat was still a borrowed
fireside; and, spite of all that the best people of Aberdeen could do for
Samuel Rutherford, he felt the friendliest stairs of that city to be very
steep to his feet, and its best bread to be very salt in his mouth.

But, with all that, Samuel Rutherford would have been but a blind and
unprofitable spy for the best people of God in Scotland, for Marion
M'Naught, and Lady Kenmure, and Lady Culross, for the Cardonesses,
father, and mother, and son, and for Hugh Mackail, and such like, if he
had tasted nothing more bitter than borrowed bread in Aberdeen, and
climbed nothing steeper than a granite stair. 'Paul had need,'
Rutherford writes to Lady Kenmure, 'of the devil's service to buffet him,
and far more, you and me.' I am downright afraid to go on to tell you
how Satan was sent to buffet Samuel Rutherford in his banishment, and how
he was sifted as wheat is sifted in his exile. I would not expose such a
saint of God to every eye, but I look for fellow-worshippers here on
these Rutherford Sabbath evenings, who know something of the plague of
their own hearts, and who are comforted in their banishment and battle by
nothing more than when they are assured that they are not alone in the
deep darkness. 'When Christian had travelled in this disconsolate
condition for some time he thought he heard the voice of a man as going
before him and saying, "_Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow
of Death I will fear no ill, for Thou art with me_." Then he was glad,
and that for these reasons:--Firstly, because he gathered from thence
that some one who feared God was in this valley as well as himself.
Secondly, for that he perceived that God was with them though in that
dark and dismal state; and why not, thought he, with me? Thirdly, for
that he hoped, could he overtake them, to have company by and by.' And,
in like manner, I am certain that it will encourage and save from despair
some who now hear me if I just report to them some of the discoveries and
experiences of himself that Samuel Rutherford made among the siftings and
buffetings of his Aberdeen exile. Writing to Lady Culross, he says:--'O
my guiltiness, the follies of my youth and the neglects of my calling,
they all do stare me in the face here; . . . the world hath sadly
mistaken me: no man knoweth what guiltiness is in me.' And to Lady Boyd,
speaking of some great lessons he had learnt in the school of adversity,
he says, 'In the third place, I have seen here my abominable vileness,
and it is such that if I were well known no one in all the kingdom would
ask me how I do. . . . I am a deeper hypocrite and a shallower professor
than any one could believe. Madam, pity me, the chief of sinners.' And,
again, to the Laird of Carlton: 'Woe, woe is me, that men should think
there is anything in me. The house-devils that keep me company and this
sink of corruption make me to carry low sails. . . . But, howbeit I am a
wretched captive of sin, yet my Lord can hew heaven out of worse timber
than I am, if worse there be.' And to Lady Kenmure: 'I am somebody in
the books of my friends, . . . but there are armies of thoughts within
me, saying the contrary, and laughing at the mistakes of my many friends.
Oh! if my inner side were only seen!' Ah no, my brethren, no land is so
fearful to them that are sent to search it out as their own heart. 'The
land,' said the ten spies, 'is a land that eateth up the inhabitants
thereof; the cities are walled up to heaven, and very great, and the
children of Anak dwell in them. We were in their sight as grasshoppers,
and so we were in our own sight.' Ah, no! no stair is so steep as the
stair of sanctification, no bread is so salt as that which is baked for a
man of God out of the wild oats of his past sin and his present
sinfulness. Even Joshua and Caleb, who brought back a good report of the
land, did not deny that the children of Anak were there, or that their
walls went up to heaven, or that they, the spies, were as grasshoppers
before their foes: Caleb and Joshua only said that, in spite of all that,
if the Lord delighted in His people, He both could and would give them a
land flowing with milk and honey. And be it recorded and remembered to
his credit and his praise that, with all his self-discoveries and self-
accusings, Rutherford did not utter one single word of doubt or despair;
so far from that was he, that in one of his letters to Hugh M'Kail he
tells us that some of his correspondents have written to him that he is
possibly too joyful under the cross. Blunt old Knockbrex, for one, wrote
to his old minister to restrain somewhat his ecstasy. So true was it,
what Rutherford said of himself to David Dickson, that he was 'made up of
extremes.' So he was, for I know no man among all my masters in personal
religion who unites greater extremes in himself than Samuel Rutherford.
Who weeps like Rutherford over his banishment from Anwoth, while all the
time who is so feasted in Christ's palace in Aberdeen? Who loathes
himself like Rutherford? Not Bunyan, not Brea, not Boston; and, at the
same time, who is so transported and lost to himself in the beauty and
sweetness of Christ? As we read his raptures we almost say with cautious
old Knockbrex, that possibly Rutherford is somewhat too full of ecstasy
for this fallen, still unsanctified, and still so slippery world.

It took two men to carry back the cluster of grapes the spies cut down at
Eshcol, and there is sweetness and strength and ecstasy enough for ten
men in any one of Rutherford's inebriated Letters. 'See what the land
is, and whether it be fat or lean, and bring back of the fruits of the
land.' This was the order given by Moses to the twelve spies. And,
whether the land was fat or lean, Moses and all Israel could judge for
themselves when the spies laid down their load of grapes at Moses' feet.
'I can report nothing but good of the land,' said Joshua Redivivus, as he
sent back such clusters of its vineyards and such pots of its honey to
Hugh Mackail, to Marion M'Naught, and to Lady Kenmure. And then, when
all his letters were collected and published, never surely, since the
Epistles of Paul and the Gospel of John, had such clusters of
encouragement and such intoxicating cordials been laid to the lips of the
Church of Christ.

Our old authors tell us that after the northern tribes had tasted the
warmth and the sweetness of the wines of Italy they could take no rest
till they had conquered and taken possession of that land of sunshine
where such grapes so plentifully grew. And how many hearts have been
carried captive with the beauty and the grace of Christ, and with the
land of Immanuel, where He drinks wine with the saints in His Father's
house, by the reading of Samuel Rutherford's Letters, the day of the Lord
will alone declare.

Oh! Christ He is the Fountain,
The deep sweet Well of love!
The streams on earth I've tasted,
More deep I'll drink above.
There to an ocean fulness
His mercy doth expand,
And glory, glory dwelleth
In Immanuel's Land.

II. SAMUEL RUTHERFORD AND SOME OF HIS EXTREMES

'I am made of extremes.'--_Rutherford_.

A story is told in Wodrow of an English merchant who had occasion to
visit Scotland on business about the year 1650. On his return home his
friends asked him what news he had brought with him from the north. 'Good
news,' he said; 'for when I went to St. Andrews I heard a sweet, majestic-
looking man, and he showed me the majesty of God. After him I heard a
little fair man, and he showed me the loveliness of Christ. I then went
to Irvine, where I heard a well-favoured, proper old man with a long
beard, and that man showed me all my own heart.' The little fair man who
showed this English merchant the loveliness of Christ was Samuel
Rutherford, and the proper old man who showed him all his own heart was
David Dickson. Dr. M'Crie says of David Dickson that he was singularly
successful in dissecting the human heart and in winning souls to the
Redeemer, and all that we know of Dickson bears out that high estimate.
When he was presiding on one occasion at the ordination of a young
minister, whom he had had some hand in bringing up, among the advices the
old minister gave the new beginner were these:--That he should remain
unmarried for four years, in order to give himself up wholly to his great
work; and that both in preaching and in prayer he should be as succinct
as possible so as not to weary his hearers; and, lastly, 'Oh, study God
well and your own heart.' We have five letters of Rutherford's to this
master of the human heart, and it is in the third of these that
Rutherford opens his heart to his father in the Gospel, and tells him
that he is made up of extremes.

In every way that was so. It is a common remark with all Rutherford's
biographers and editors and commentators what extremes met in that little
fair man. The finest thing that has ever been written on Rutherford is
Mr. Taylor Innes's lecture in the Evangelical Succession series. And the
intellectual extremes that met in Rutherford are there set forth by
Rutherford's acute and sympathetic critic at some length. For one thing,
the greatest speculative freedom and theological breadth met in
Rutherford with the greatest ecclesiastical hardness and narrowness. I
do not know any author of that day, either in England or in Scotland,
either Prelatist or Puritan, who shows more imaginative freedom and
speculative power than Rutherford does in his _Christ Dying_, unless it
is his still greater contemporary, Thomas Goodwin. And it is with
corresponding distress that we read some of Rutherford's polemical works,
and even the polemical parts of his heavenly Letters. There is a
remarkable passage in one of his controversial books that reminds us of
some of Shakespeare's own tributes to England: 'I judge that in England
the Lord hath many names and a fair company that shall stand at the side
of Christ when He shall render up the kingdom to the Father; and that in
that renowned land there be men of all ranks, wise, valorous, generous,
noble, heroic, faithful, religious, gracious, learned.' Rutherford's
whole passage is worthy to stand beside Shakespeare's great passage on
'this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.' But
persecution from England and controversy at home so embittered
Rutherford's sweet and gracious spirit that passages like that are but
few and far between. But let him away out into pure theology, and,
especially, let him get his wings on the person, and the work, and the
glory of Christ, and few theologians of any age or any school rise to a
larger air, or command a wider scope, or discover a clearer eye of
speculation than Rutherford, till we feel exactly like the laird of
Glanderston, who, when Rutherford left a controversial passage in a
sermon and went on to speak of Christ, cried out in the church--'Ay, hold
you there, minister; you are all right there!' A domestic controversy
that arose in the Church of Scotland towards the end of Rutherford's life
so separated Rutherford from Dickson and Blair that Rutherford would not
take part with Blair, the 'sweet, majestic-looking man,' in the Lord's
Supper. 'Oh, to be above,' Blair exclaimed, 'where there are no
misunderstandings!' It was this same controversy that made John
Livingstone say in a letter to Blair that his wife and he had had more
bitterness over that dispute than ever they had tasted since they knew
what bitterness meant. Well might Rutherford say, on another such
occasion, 'It is hard when saints rejoice in the sufferings of saints,
and when the redeemed hurt, and go nigh to hate the redeemed.' Watch and
pray, my brethren, lest in controversy--ephemeral and immaterial
controversy--you also go near to hate and hurt one another, as Rutherford
did.

And then, what strength, combined with what tenderness, there is in
Rutherford! In all my acquaintance with literature I do not know any
author who has two books under his name so unlike one another, two books
that are such a contrast to one another, as _Lex Rex_ and the _Letters_.
A more firmly built argument than _Lex Rex_, an argument so clamped
together with the iron bands of scholastic and legal lore, is not to be
met with in any English book; a more lawyer-looking production is not in
all the Advocates' Library than just _Lex Rex_. There is as much emotion
in the multiplication table as there is in _Lex Rex_; and then, on the
other hand, the _Letters_ have no other fault but this, that they are
overcharged with emotion. The _Letters_ would be absolutely perfect if
they were only a little more restrained and chastened in this one
respect. The pundit and the poet are the opposites and the extremes of
one another; and the pundit and the poet meet, as nowhere else that I
know of, in the author of _Lex Rex_ and the _Letters_.

Then, again, what extremes of beauty and sweetness there are in
Rutherford's style, too often intermingled with what carelessness and
disorder. What flashes of noblest thought, clothed in the most apt and
well-fitting words, on the same page with the most slatternly and down-at-
the-heel English. Both Dr. Andrew Bonar and Dr. Andrew Thomson have
given us selections from Rutherford's _Letters_ that would quite justify
us in claiming Rutherford as one of the best writers of English in his
day; but then we know out of what thickets of careless composition these
flowers have been collected. Both Gillespie and Rutherford ran a tilt at
Hooker; but alas for the equipment and the manners of our champions when
compared with the shining panoply and the knightly grace of the author of
the incomparable _Polity_.

And then, morally, as great extremes met in Rutherford as intellectually.
Newman has a fine sermon under a fine title, 'Saintliness not forfeited
by the Penitent.' 'No degree of sin,' he says, 'precludes the
acquisition of any degree of holiness, however high. No sinner so great,
but he may, through God's grace, become a saint ever so great.' And then
he goes on to illustrate that, and balance that, and almost to retract
and deny all that, in a way that all his admirers only too well know. But
still it stands true. A friend of mine once told me that it was to him
often the most delightful and profitable of Sabbath evening exercises
just to take down Newman's sermons and read their titles over again. And
this mere title, I feel sure, has encouraged and comforted many:
'Saintliness not forfeited by the Penitent.' And Samuel Rutherford's is
just another great name to be added to the noble roll of saintly
penitents we all have in our minds taken out of Scripture and Church
History. Neither great Saintliness nor great service was forfeited by
this penitent; and he is constantly telling us how the extreme of demerit
and the extreme of gracious treatment met in him; how he had at one time
destroyed himself, and how God had helped him; how, where sin had
abounded, grace had abounded much more. In one of the very last letters
he ever wrote--his letter to James Guthrie in 166l--he is still amazed
that God has not brought his sin to the Market Cross, to use his own
word. But all through his letters this same note of admiration and
wonder runs--that he has been taken from among the pots and his wings
covered with silver and gold. Truly, in his case the most seraphic
Saintliness was not forfeited, and we who read his books may well bless
God it was so.

And then, experimentally also, what extremes met in our author! Pascal
in Paris and Rutherford in Anwoth and St. Andrews were at the very
opposite poles ecclesiastically from one another. I do not like to think
what Rutherford would have said of Pascal, but I cannot embody what I
have to say of Rutherford's experimental extremes better than just by
this passage taken from the _Thoughts_: 'The Christian religion teaches
the righteous man that it lifts him even to a participation in the divine
nature; but that, in this exalted state, he still bears within him the
fountain of all corruption, which renders him during his whole life
subject to error and misery, to sin and death, while at the same time it
proclaims to the most wicked that they can still receive the grace of
their Redeemer.' And again, 'Did we not know ourselves full of pride,
ambition, lust, weakness, misery and injustice, we were indeed blind. . .
. What then can we feel but a great esteem for a religion that is so
well acquainted with the defects of man, and a great desire for the truth
of a religion that promises remedies so precious.' And yet again, what
others thought of him, and how they treated him, compared with what he
knew himself to be, caused Rutherford many a bitter reflection. Every
letter he got consulting him and appealing to him as if he had been God's
living oracle made him lie down in the very dust with shame and
self-abhorrence. Writing on one occasion to Robert Blair he told him
that his letter consulting him about some matter of Christian experience
had been like a blow in the face to him; it affects me much, said
Rutherford, that a man like you should have any such opinion of me. And,
apologising for his delay in replying to a letter of Lady Boyd's, he says
that he is put out of all love of writing letters because his
correspondents think things about him that he himself knows are not true.
'My white side comes out on paper--but at home there is much black work.
All the challenges that come to me are true.' There was no man then
alive on the earth so much looked up to and consulted in the deepest
matters of the soul, in the secrets of the Lord with the soul, as
Rutherford was, and his letters bear evidence on every page that there
was no man who had a more loathsome and a more hateful experience of his
own heart, not even Taylor, not even Owen, not even Bunyan, not even
Baxter. What a day of extremest men that was, and what an inheritance we
extreme men have had left us, in their inward, extreme, and heavenly
books!

Once more, hear him on the tides of feeling that continually rose and
fell within his heart. Writing from Aberdeen to Lady Boyd, he says: 'I
have not now, of a long time, found such high springtides as formerly.
The sea is out, and I cannot buy a wind and cause it to flow again; only
I wait on the shore till the Lord sends a full sea. . . . But even to
dream of Him is sweet.' And then, just over the leaf, to Marion
M'Naught: 'I am well: honour to God. . . . He hath broken in upon a poor
prisoner's soul like the swelling of Jordan. I am bank and brim full: a
great high springtide of the consolations of Christ hath overwhelmed me.'
. . . But sweet as it is to read his rapturous expressions when the tide
is full, I feel it far more helpful to hear how he still looks and waits
for the return of the tide when the tide is low, and when the shore is
full, as all left shores are apt to be, of weeds and mire, and all
corrupt and unclean things. Rutherford is never more helpful to his
correspondents than when they consult him about their ebb tides, and find
that he himself either has been, or still is, in the same experience.

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