Samuel Rutherford | Page 6

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.
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 God'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 God 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