Samuel Rutherford

Samuel Rutherford.

by Alexander Whyte.

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 t.i.tle-page of which runs thus:--"Joshua Redivivus, or Mr. Rutherford"s Letters, now published for the use of the people of G.o.d: 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 G.o.d.

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 t.i.tle-page, no publisher"s name, and no place of printing or of publication. Only two texts of forewarning and rea.s.suring 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 G.o.d"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 G.o.d. 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 a.s.sembly secretary, to put at the top of his t.i.tle-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 n.o.ble 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 cla.s.ses, 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d"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 G.o.d"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 G.o.d"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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sured 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 G.o.d was in this valley as well as himself.

Secondly, for that he perceived that G.o.d 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 gra.s.shoppers, 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 G.o.d 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 gra.s.shoppers 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 d.i.c.kson, 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 cl.u.s.ters 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 cl.u.s.ters 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 G.o.d. 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 d.i.c.kson. Dr. M"Crie says of David d.i.c.kson that he was singularly successful in dissecting the human heart and in winning souls to the Redeemer, and all that we know of d.i.c.kson 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sage 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, n.o.ble, heroic, faithful, religious, gracious, learned." Rutherford"s whole pa.s.sage is worthy to stand beside Shakespeare"s great pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sage 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 d.i.c.kson 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 n.o.blest 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 t.i.tle, "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 G.o.d"s grace, become a saint ever so great." And then he goes on to ill.u.s.trate 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 t.i.tles over again. And this mere t.i.tle, 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sage taken from the _Thoughts_: "The Christian religion teaches the righteous man that it lifts him even to a partic.i.p.ation 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, l.u.s.t, 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 G.o.d"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 sh.o.r.e 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 G.o.d. . . . 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 sh.o.r.e is full, as all left sh.o.r.es 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.

But why do we disinter such texts as this out of such an author as Samuel Rutherford? Why do we tell to all the world that such an eminent saint was full of such sad extremes? Well, we surely do so out of obedience to the divine command to comfort G.o.d"s people; for, next to their having no such extremes in themselves, their next best comfort is to be told that great and eminent saints of G.o.d have had the very same besetting sins and staggering extremes as they still have. If the like of Samuel Rutherford was vexed and weakened with such intellectual contradictions and spiritual extremes in his mind, in his heart and in his history, then may we not hope that some such saintliness, if not some such service as his, may be permitted to us also?

III. MARION M"NAUGHT

"O woman beloved of G.o.d."--_Rutherford_.

"The world knows nothing of its greatest men," says Sir Henry Taylor in his _Philip Van Artevelde_; and it knows much less of its greatest women.

I have not found Marion M"Naught"s name once mentioned outside of Samuel Rutherford"s Letters. But she holds a great place--indeed, the foremost place--in that n.o.ble book, to be written in which is almost as good as to be written in heaven.

Rutherford"s first letter to Marion M"Naught was written from the manse of Anwoth on the 6th of June 1627, and out of a close and lifelong correspondence we are happy in having had preserved to us some forty-five of Rutherford"s letters to his first correspondent. But, most unfortunately, we have none of her letters back again to Anwoth or Aberdeen or London or St. Andrews. It is much to be wished we had, for Marion M"Naught was a woman greatly gifted in mind, as well as of quite exceptional experience even for that day of exceptional experiences in the divine life. But we can almost construct her letters to Rutherford for ourselves, so pointedly and so elaborately and so affectionately does Rutherford reply to them.

Marion M"Naught is already a married woman, and the mother of three well- grown children, when we make her acquaintance in Rutherford"s Letters.

She had sprung of an ancient and honourable house in the south of Scotland, and she was now the wife of a well-known man in that day, William Fullarton, the Provost of Kirkcudbright. It is interesting to know that Marion M"Naught was closely connected with Lady Kenmure, another of Rutherford"s chief correspondents. Lord Kenmure was her mother"s brother. Kenmure had lived a profligate and popularity-hunting life till he was laid down on his death-bed, when he underwent one of the most remarkable conversions anywhere to be read of--a conversion that, as it would appear, his niece Marion M"Naught had no little to do with. As long as Kenmure was young and well, as long as he was haunting the purlieus of the Court, and selling his church and his soul for a smile from the King, the Provost of Kirkcudbright and his saintly wife were despised and forgotten; but when he was suddenly brought face to face with death and judgment, when his ribbons and his t.i.tles were now like the coals of h.e.l.l in his conscience, nothing would satisfy him but that his niece must leave her husband and her children and take up her abode in Kenmure Castle. _The Last and Heavenly Speeches of Lord Kenmure_ was a cla.s.sic memoir of those days, and in that little book we read of his niece"s constant attendance at his bedside, as good a nurse for his soul as she was for his body.

Samuel Rutherford"s favourite correspondent was, to begin with, a woman of quite remarkable powers of mind. We gather that impression powerfully as we read deeper and deeper into the remarkable series of letters that Rutherford addressed to her. To no one does he go into deeper matters both of Church and State, both of doctrinal and personal religion than to her, and the impression of mental power as well as of personal worth she made on Rutherford, she must have made on many of the ablest and best men of that day. Robert Blair, for instance, tells us that when he was on his way home from London to Ireland he visited Scotland chiefly that he might see Rutherford at Anwoth and Marion M"Naught at Kirkcudbright, and when he came to Kirkcudbright he found Rutherford also there. And when Rutherford was in exile in Aberdeen, and in deep anxiety about his people at Anwoth, he wrote beseeching Marion M"Naught to go to Anwoth and give his people her counsel about their congregational and personal affairs.

But, above all, it is from the depth and the power of Rutherford"s letters to herself on the inward life that we best gather the depth and the power of this remarkable woman"s mind.

There is no other subject of thought that gives such scope for the greatest gifts of the human mind as does the life of G.o.d in the soul.

There is no book in all the world that demands such a combination of mental gifts and spiritual graces to understand it aright as the Bible.