Samuel Rutherford | Page 4

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