Samuel Rutherford | Page 5

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