Alexander Whyte - Samuel Rutherford
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Alexander Whyte >> Samuel Rutherford
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'Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write;
and, like Sir Philip Sydney, Samuel Rutherford looked into his own heart,
and drew a Directory out of it for the better Christian conduct of his
friend John Fleming.
1. Now--would you believe it?--the first thing Samuel Rutherford found
his own heart accusing him in before God was, of all things, the way he
had wasted his time. Would you believe it that the student who was
summer and winter in his study at three o'clock in the morning, and the
minister who, as his people boasted, was always preparing his sermons,
always visiting his people, always writing books, and always entertaining
strangers,--would you believe it that one of his worst consciences was
for the bad improvement of his time? What an insatiable thirst for
absolute and unearthly perfection God has awakened in the truly gracious
heart! Give the truly gracious heart a little godliness and it cries out
night and day for more. Give it more, and it straightway demands all.
Give it all and it still accuses you that it has literally got none at
all. Samuel Rutherford gave all his time and all his strength to his
pastoral and his professorial duties, and yet when he looked into his own
heart to write a letter to Bailie Fleming out of it, his whole heart
condemned him to his face because he had so mismanaged his time, and had
not aright redeemed it. 'You complain that your time is fast speeding
away, and that you have not even begun to employ it well. So is mine. I
give a good part of my time to my business, as you say you do to yours;
but, just like you, that leaves me no time to give to God. God forgive
me for the way I forget Him and neglect Him all the time that I am
bustling about in the things of His house! Let us both begin, and me
especially, to give some of God's best earthly gift back to Him again.
Let us spare a little of His time that He allows us and bestow it back
again upon Himself. He values nothing so much as a little of our
allotted time. Let us meditate on Him more, and pray more to Him. Let
us throw up ejaculations of prayer to Him more and more while we are at
our daily employments; you in the timber-yard, down among the ships, at
the desk, and at the Council-table; and I among my books, and among my
people, and in my pulpit. These are always golden moments to me, and why
they do not multiply themselves into hours and days and years is to me
but another proof of my deep depravity. And, John Fleming, sanctify you
the Sabbath. As you love and value your immortal soul, sanctify and do
not waste and desecrate the Sabbath. Let no man steal from you a single
hour of the Sabbath-day. Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work,
but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.'
2. And again and again in his letters to Fleming Rutherford returns to
the sins of the tongue. Rutherford himself was a great sinner by his
tongue, and he seems to have taken it for granted that the bailies of
Leith were all in the same condemnation. 'Observe your words well,' he
writes out of the bitterness of his own heart. 'Make conscience of all
your conversations.' Cut off a right hand, pluck out a right eye, says
Christ. And I wonder that half of His disciples have not bitten out
their offending tongues. What a world of injury and of all kinds of
iniquity has the tongue always and everywhere been! In Jerusalem in
David's day; and still in Jerusalem in James's day; in Anwoth and
Aberdeen and St. Andrews in Rutherford's day; and in Leith in John
Fleming's day; and still in all these places in our own day. The tongue
can no man tame, and no wonder, for it is set on fire of hell. 'I shall
show you,' says Rutherford, 'what I would fain be at myself, howbeit I
always come short of my purpose.' Rutherford made many enemies both as a
preacher and as a doctrinal and an ecclesiastical controversialist. He
was a hot, if not a bad-blooded man himself, and he raised both hot and
bad blood in other men. He was a passionate-hearted man, was Rutherford;
he would not have been our sainted Samuel Rutherford if he had not had a
fast and a high-beating heart. And his passionate heart was not all
spent in holy love to Jesus Christ, though much of it was. For the dregs
of it, the unholy scum and froth of it, came out too much in his books of
debate and in his differences with his own brethren. His high-mettled
and almost reckless sense of duty brought him many enemies, and it was
his lifelong sanctification to try to treat his enemies aright, and to
keep his own heart and tongue and pen clean and sweet towards them. And
he divined that among the merchants and magistrates of Leith, anger and
malice, rivalry and revenge were not unknown any more than they were
among their betters in the Presbytery and the General Assembly. He knew,
for Fleming had told him, that his very prosperity and his father's
prosperity had procured for Fleming many enemies. The Norway timber
trade was not all in the Fleming hands for nothing. The late Council
election also had left Fleming many enemies, and his simple duty at the
Council-table daily multiplied them. It was quite unaccountable to him
how enemies sprang up all around him, and it was well that he had such an
open-eyed and much-experienced correspondent as Rutherford was, to whom
he could confide such ghastly discoveries, and such terrible shocks to
faith and trust and love. 'Watch well this one thing, Bailie Fleming,
even your deep desire for revenge. Be sure that it is in your heart in
Leith to seek revenge as well as it is in my heart here in Aberdeen.
Watch, as you would the workings of a serpent, the workings of your sore-
hurt heart in the matter of its revenges. Watch how the calamities that
come on your enemies refresh and revive you. Watch how their prosperity
and their happiness depress and darken you. Disentangle the desire for
revenge and the delight in it out of the rank thickets of your wicked
heart; drag that desire and delight out of its native darkness; know it,
name it, and it will be impossible but that you will hate it like death
and hell, and yourself on account of it. Do you honestly wish, as you
say you do, for direction as to your duty to your many enemies in Leith,
and to God and your own soul among them? Then begin with this: watch and
find yourself out in your deep desire for revenge, and in your secret
satisfaction and delight to hear it and to speak it. Begin with that;
and, then, long after that, and as the divine reward of that, you will be
enabled to begin to try to love your enemies, to bless them that curse
you, to do good to them that hate you, and to pray for them that
despitefully use you and persecute you. You need no Directory for these
things from me when you have the Sermon on the Mount in your own New
Testament.'
3. And, still looking into his own heart and writing straight out of it,
Rutherford says to Fleming, 'I have been much challenged in my
conscience, and still am, for not referring all I do to God as my last
and chiefest end.' Which is just Samuel Rutherford's vivid way of taking
home to himself the first question of the Shorter Catechism which he had
afterwards such a deep hand in drawing up. I do not know any other
author who deals so searchingly with this great subject as that prince
among experimental divines, Thomas Shepard, the founder of Yale in New
England. His insight is as good as his style is bad. His English is
execrable, but his insight is nothing short of divine. 'The pollution of
the whole man, and of all his actions,' he says in his _Parable of the
Ten Virgins_, 'consists chiefly in his self-seeking, in making ourselves
our utmost end. This makes our most glorious actions vile; this stains
them all. And so the sanctification of a sinner consists chiefly in
making the Lord our utmost end in all that we do. Every man living seeks
himself as his last end and chiefest good, and out of this captivity no
human power can redeem us. . . . Make this your last and best end--to
live to Christ and to do His will. This is your last end; this is the
end of your being born again--nay, of your being redeemed by His
blood--that you may live unto Christ.' And in the same author's
_Meditations and Spiritual Experiences_, he says, 'On Sabbath morning I
saw that I had a secret eye to my own name in all that I did, and I
judged myself to be worthy of death because I was not weaned from all
created glory, from all honour and praise, and from the esteem of men. .
. . On Sabbath, again, when I came home, I saw into the deep hypocrisy
of my own heart, because in my ministry I sought to comfort and quicken
the people that the glory might reflect on me as well as on God. . . . On
the evening before the sacrament I saw it to be my duty to sequester
myself from all other things and to prepare me for the next day. And I
saw that I must pitch first on the right end. I saw that mine own ends
were to procure honour to myself and not to the Lord. There was some
poor little eye in seeking the name and glory of Christ, yet I sought not
it only, but my own glory, too. After my Wednesday sermon I saw the
pride of my heart acting thus, that when I had done public work my heart
would presently look out and inquire whether I had done it well or ill.
Hereupon I saw my vileness to be to make men's opinions my rule, and that
made me vile in mine own eyes, and that more and more daily.' 'I have
been much challenged,' writes Rutherford to Fleming, 'because I do not
refer all I do to God as my last end: that I do not eat and drink and
sleep and journey and speak and think for God.' And, the fanatic that he
is, he seems to think that that is the calling and chief end not only of
ministers like himself and Shepard, but of the bailies and
timber-merchants of Edinburgh and Leith also.
4. Lastly, in the closing sentences of this inexhaustible letter,
Rutherford says to his waiting and attentive correspondent: 'Growth in
grace, sir, should be cared for by you above all other things.' And so
it should. Literally and absolutely above all other things. Above good
health, above good name, above wealth, and station, and honour. These
things, take them all together, if need be, are to be counted loss in
order to gain growth in grace. But what is growth in grace? It is
growth in everything that is truly good; but Fleming, as he read his
Directory daily, would always think of growth in grace as the right
improvement of his remaining time, and, especially, its religious use and
dedication to God; as also of the government of his own untamed tongue;
the extinction of the desire for revenge, and of all delight in the
injury of his enemies; and, above all, and including all, in making God
his chief end in all that he did. How all-important, then, is a sound
and Scriptural Directory to instruct us how we are to grow in grace. And
how precious must that directory-letter have been to a man in dead
earnest like John Fleming. It was precious to his heart, you may be
sure, above all his ships, and all his woodyards, and all his fine
houses, and all his seats of honour. And if his growth in grace in Leith
has now become full-grown glory in Heaven, how does he there bless God to-
day that ever he met with Samuel Rutherford in old John Maine's shop in
his youth, and had him for a friend and a director all his after-days.
And when John Fleming at the table above forgets not all His benefits,
high up, you may be very sure, among them all he never forgets to put
Samuel Rutherford's letters; and, more especially, this very directory-
letter we have read here for our own direction and growth in grace this
Communion-Sabbath night.
XXIV. THE PARISHIONERS OF KILMACOLM
'For want of time I have put you all in one letter.'--_Rutherford_.
There is a well-known passage in _Lycidas_ that exactly describes the
religious condition of the parish of Kilmacolm in the year 1639. For the
shepherd of that unhappy sheepfold also had climbed up some other way
before he knew how to hold a sheephook, till, week after week, the hungry
sheep looked up and were not fed. The parishioners of Kilmacolm must
have been fed to some purpose at one time, for the two letters they write
to Rutherford in their present starvation bear abundant witness on every
page to the splendid preaching and the skilful pastorate that this parish
must at one time have enjoyed. There must have been men of no common
ability, as well as of no common profundity of spiritual life in
Kilmacolm during those trying years, for the letters they wrote to
Rutherford would have done credit to any of Rutherford's ablest and best
correspondents--to William Guthrie, or David Dickson, or Robert Blair, or
John Livingstone. Indeed, the expert author of the _Therapeutica_
himself would have been put to it to answer fully and satisfactorily
those two so acute and so searching letters. The Kilmacolm people had
heard about the famous answers that Samuel Rutherford, now home again in
Anwoth, had written both from Anwoth and from Aberdeen to all classes of
people and on all kinds of subjects; copies, indeed, of some of those now
already widespread letters had come to Kilmacolm itself, till, at one of
their private meetings for conference and prayer, it was resolved that a
small committee of their elders should gather up their painful
experiences in the spiritual life that got no help from the parish
pulpit, and should set them by way of submission and consultation before
the great spiritual casuist. Everybody else was getting what counsel and
comfort they needed from the famous adviser of Anwoth, and why not they,
the neglected parishioners of Kilmacolm? And thus it was that two or
three of the oldest and ablest men in the kirk-session so wrote to
Rutherford, as, after some delay, to get back the elaborate letter from
Anwoth numbered 286 in Dr. Bonar's edition.
I am tempted to think it possible that the old, long-experienced, and
much-exercised saints of Kilmacolm may have demanded a little too much of
their minister: at any rate, I am quite as anxious to hear what
Rutherford shall say to them as they can be to hear from him themselves.
And all that leads me to believe that not only must there have been some
quite remarkable people in the parish church at that date, but that they
must also have had some very special pulpit and pastoral work expended on
them in former years. Or, if not that, then their case is just another
illustration of what Rutherford says in his reassuring answer, namely,
that the life of grace among a people is not at all tied up to the lips
of their minister. Which, again, is just another way of putting what the
Psalmist says of himself in his humble and happy boast: 'I have more
understanding than all my teachers, for Thy testimonies are my
meditation. I understand more than the ancients, because I keep Thy
precepts.'
1. The first complaint that came to Anwoth from Kilmacolm was expressed
in the quaint and graphic language natural to that day. 'Security,
strong and sib to nature, is stealing in upon us.' The holy law of God,
they mean, was never preached in their parish; at any rate, it was never
carried home to any man's conscience. Nobody was ever disturbed.
Nobody's feelings were ever hurt. Nobody in all the parish had ever
heard a voice of thunder saying, Thou art the man. Toothless and timid
generalities made up all the preaching they ever heard either on the
ethical or on the evangelical side: and generalities disturb no man's
peace of mind. The pulpit of Kilmacolm was but too sib to the pew, and
both pulpit and pew slept on together in undisturbed security. And that
supplied Samuel Rutherford with an excellent text for a sermon he was
continually preaching in every utterance of his--the constant danger we
all lie under as long as we are in this life. Danger from sin, and, in
its own still subtler way, as much danger from grace; danger from want,
and danger from fulness; danger from our weakness, and danger from our
strength. So much danger is there that if any man in this life is in a
state of security about himself he is surely the foolishest of all
foolish men. For,
Thy close pursuers' busy hands do plant
Snares in thy substance, snares attend thy want;
Snares in thy credit, snares in thy disgrace;
Snares in thy high estate, snares in thy base;
Snares tuck thy bed, and snares attend thy board;
Snares watch thy thoughts, and snares attack thy word;
Snares in thy quiet, snares in thy commotion;
Snares in thy diet, snares in thy devotion;
Snares lurk in thy resolves, snares in thy doubt;
Snares lurk within thy heart, and snares without;
Snares are above thy head, and snares beneath;
Snares in thy sickness, snares are in thy death.
What a fool and what a sluggard nature must be, as Rutherford here says
she is, if she can lull us into security about ourselves in such a life
as this! And what a noble field does this snare-filled life supply for
all a preacher's boldest and best powers!
2. They have some new beginners in Kilmacolm in spite of all its
spiritual stagnation, and the older people are full of anxiety lest those
new beginners should not be rightly directed. 'Tell them for one thing,'
says Rutherford in reply, 'to dig deep while they are yet among their
foundations. Tell them that a sick night for sin is not so common either
among young or old as I would like to see it. Make them to understand
what I mean by digging deep. I mean deep into their own heart in order
to discover and lay bare to themselves the corrupt motives from which
they act every day even in the very best things they do. And that of
itself will give them many sufficiently sick days and nights too, both as
new beginners and as old believers. And tell them, also, from me, that
once they have seen themselves in their own hearts, and Jesus Christ in
His heart, it will be impossible for them ever to go back from Him.
Absolutely impossible. So much so that it is perfectly certain that he
who goes back from Christ has never really seen himself or Christ either.
He may have seen something somewhat more or less like Christ, but, all
the time, it was not Christ. Let your soul once come up to close
quarters with Christ, and I defy you ever to forget Him again. Tell all
your new beginners that from me, Samuel Rutherford, who, after all, am
not yet well begun myself.'
3. 'You complain bitterly of a dead ministry in your bounds. I have
heard as much. But I will reply that a living ministry is not
indispensable to a parish. All our parishes ought to have it, and we
ought to see to it that they all get it; but neither the conversion of
sinners, nor the sanctification and comfort of God's saints, is tied up
to any man's lips. You will read your unread Bibles more: you will buy
more good books: you will meet more in private converse and prayer: and
it will not be bad for you for a season to look above the pulpit, and to
look Jesus Christ Himself more immediately in the face.' As Fraser of
Brea also said in a striking passage in his diary, so Rutherford says in
his reply letter: 'in your sore famine of the water of life, run your
pipe right up to the fountain.'
4. If the parishioners of Kilmacolm were severe on their minister it was
not that they let themselves escape. And there was something in their
present letters that led Rutherford to warn them against a mistake that
only people of the Kilmacolm type will ever fall into. 'Some of the
people of God,' says their sharp-eyed censor, 'slander the grace of God
in their own soul.' And that is true of some of God's best people still.
We meet with such people now and then in our own parishes to-day. They
are so possessed with penitence and humility; they have such high and
inflexible and spiritual standards for measuring themselves by; the law
has so fatally entered their innermost souls that they will not even
admit or acknowledge what the grace of God has, to all other men's
knowledge, done in them. Seek out, says Rutherford, the signs of true
grace in yourselves as well as the signs of secret sin. And when you
have found such and such an indubitable sign of grace, say so. Say
_this_, and _this_, and _this_, pointing it out, is assuredly the work of
God in my soul. When you, after all defeat, really discover your soul
growing in grace; in patience under injuries; in meekness under reproofs
and corrections; in love for, or at least in peace of heart toward, those
you at one time did not like, but disliked almost to downright hatred; in
silent and assenting acceptance, if not yet in actual and positive
enjoyment, of another man's talents and success, gain and fame; in the
decay and disappearance of party spirit, and in openness to all the good
and the merit of other men; in prayerfulness; in liberality, and so on;
when you cannot deny these things in yourself, then speak good of Christ,
and do not traduce and backbite His work because it is in your own soul.
'Some wretches murmur of want while all the time their money in the bank
and their fat harvests make them liars.' Rutherford thinks he has put
his finger upon some such saintly liars in the kirk-session of Kilmacolm.
5. 'Fear your light, my lord,' wrote Rutherford to Lord Craighall from
Aberdeen; 'stand in awe of your light.' But the poor Kilmacolm people
did not need that sharp rebuke, for they had written to Rutherford at
their own instance to consult him in their terror of conscience about
this very matter, till Rutherford had to exhaust his vocabulary of
comfort in trying to pacify his correspondents just in this sufficiently
disquieting matter of light in the mind with great darkness in the heart
and the life. Our light in this world, he tells them, is a broad and
shining field, whereas our life of obedience is at best but a short and
straggling furrow. Only in heaven shall the broad and basking fields of
light and truth be covered from end to end with the songs of the
rejoicing reapers. And Rutherford is very bold in this matter, because
he knows he has the truth about it. A perfect life, he says, up to our
ever-increasing light, is impossible to us here, if only because our
light always increases with every new progress in duty. The field of
light expands to a new length and breadth every time the plough passes
through it. And, knowing well to whom he writes on this subject,
Rutherford goes on to say that there is a sorrow for sin, and for
shortcoming in service, that is as acceptable with God in the evangelical
covenant as would be the very service itself. But, then, it must be what
Rutherford calls 'honest sorrow after a sincere aim.' And let no man
easily allow himself to take shelter under that, lest it turn out to him
like taking shelter in a thunderstorm under a lightning rod. For what an
aim must that be, and then, what a sorrow, that is as good in the sight
of God as a full obedience is itself. At the same time, 'A sincere aim,
and then an honest sorrow, both of the right quality and quantity, taken
together with Christ's intercession, must be our best life before God
till we be over in the other country where the law of God will get a
perfect soul in which to fulfil itself. Your complaint on this head is
already booked in the New Testament (Rom. vii. 18).'
6. 'The less sense of liberty and sweetness, the more true spirituality
in the service of God,' is Rutherford's reply to their next perplexity.
Ought we to go on with our work and with our worship when our hearts are
dry and when we have no delight in what we do? That is just the time to
persevere, replies their evangelical guide, for it is in the absence of
all sense of liberty and sweetness that our duties prove themselves to be
truly spiritual. A sweet service has often its sweetness from an
altogether other source than the spiritual world. Let a man be engaged
in divine service, or in any other religious work, and let him have
sensible support and success in it; let him have liberty and enjoyment in
the performance of it; and, especially, let him have the praise of men
after it, and he will easily be deceived into thinking that he has had
God's Spirit with him, and the light of God's countenance, whereas all
the time it has only been an outpouring on his deceived heart of his own
lying spirit of self-seeking, self-pleasing, and self-exalting. While,
again, a man's spirit may be all day as dry as the heath in the
wilderness, and all other men's spirits around him and toward him the
same, yet a very rich score may be set down beside that unindulged
servant's name against the day of the 'well-dones.' 'I believe that many
think that obedience is lifeless and formal unless the wind be in the
west, and all their sails are filled with the joys of sense. But I am
not of their mind who think so.'
7. The scrupulosity of the Kilmacolm people was surely singular and
remarkable even in that day of tests and marks and scruples in the
spiritual life. The ministry may not have been wholly dead in and around
Kilmacolm, though it could not keep pace and patience with those so eager
and so anxious souls who would have Rutherford's mind on all possible
points of their complicated case. Six of their complaints we have just
seen, but their troubles are not yet all told. 'Surely,' they wrote, 'a
Master like our Lord, who gave such service when He was still a servant
Himself,--surely He will have hearty and unfeigned service from us, or
none at all. Will He not spue the lukewarm servant out of His mouth?' I
grant you, wrote Rutherford, that our Master must have honesty. The one
thing He will unmask and will not endure is hypocrisy. But if you mean
to insinuate that our hearts must always be entirely given up to His
service in all that we do, else He will cast us away, for all I am worth
in the world I would not have that true of me. I would not have that
true, else where would my hope be? An English contemporary of
Rutherford's puts it memorably: 'Our Master tries His servants not with
the balances of the sanctuary, but with the touchstone.' Take that, says
Rutherford, for my reply to your opinion that Christ must always have a
perfect service at our hands, or none at all.
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