Alexander Whyte

“ Knockbrex is now a fine modern mansion that is sometimes let for the summer to city people seeking solitude and rest. Among these thick woods and along these silent sands Samuel Rutherford and Robert Gordon were wont to walk and talk together. And here still a man who wishes it may be free from the noise and the hurrying of this life. Here a man shall not be let and hindered in his contemplations as in other places he is apt to be. There are woods here that he who loves a pilgrim’s life may safely walk in. ”

“ But we are not all body; we are soul as well, and much more soul than body. Bodily exercise profiteth little, says the Apostle,—compared, that is, with the exercise of the soul, of the mind, and of the heart. Now, Alexander Gordon was such an athlete of the heart that all who knew him saw well what exercise he must have gone through before he was subdued in his high mind and proud spirit to be so humble, so meek, so silent, so unselfish, and so full of godliness and brotherly kindness—what a world of inward exercise all that bespoke! ”

“ Let us all try Samuel Rutherford’s piecemeal way of reformation with our own anger; let us put a bridle on our mouths part of every day. Let us do this if we can as yet go no further; let us bridle our mouths on certain subjects, and about certain people, and in certain companies. If you have some one you dislike, some one who has injured or offended you, some rival or some enemy, whom to meet, to see, to read or to hear the name of, always brings hell’s dunnest gloom into your heart—well, put off this piece of your sin concerning him ”

“ Alexander Gordon’s patience under wrong, his low esteem of himself and of all he did, his miraculous power over himself in the forgiveness of enemies and in the forgetfulness of injuries, his contentment amid losses and disappointments, his silence when other men were bursting to speak, and his openness to be told that when he did speak he had spoken rashly, unadvisedly, and offensively—in all that Earlston was a conspicuous example of what inward exercise carried on with sufficient depth and through a sufficiently long life will do even for a man of a hot temper and a proud heart. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Rutherford’s very thinnest books are almost too thick, both with theology and with thought.
How ever a woman like Jane Campbell came to marry a man like John Gordon will remain a mystery. It was not that he was a man of no mind; he was a man of no worth or interest of any kind. He was a rake and a lick-spittle, the very last man in Scotland for Jane Campbell to throw herself away upon. And she was too clever and too good a woman not to make a speedy and a heart-breaking discovery of the fatal mistake she had committed. ”

“ 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 God’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 ”

“ But as we stand and look at Cardoness Castle, with its hard tasks for eternal life, a divine voice says to ourselves, Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; and at that voice the old keep fades from our eyes, and our own house in modern Edinburgh rises up before us. Here, too, are old men with hard tasks between them and their salvation—a past life to read, to repent of, to redress, to reform, to weep deliberate and bitter tears over. ”

“ 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 passing misunderstanding about some matter that will soon be as dead to us both as the Resolutions and Protestations of Rutherford’s day now are to all men; an accidental oversight; our simple indolence in letting an absent friendship go too much out of repair for want of a call, or a written message, or a timeous gift: a thing that only a too-scrupulous mind would go the length of calling sin, will yet poison an old friendship and embitter it beyond all our power again to sweeten it. And, then, how party spirit poisons our best enjoyments as it did Rutherford’s. ”

“ An outgate is just a gate out, a way of redemption, deliverance and escape. And her rare outgates does not imply that Lady Robertland’s outgates were few, but that they were extraordinary, seldom matched, and above all expectation and praise. Lady Robertland’s outgates were not rare in the sense of coming seldom and being few; for, the fact is, they filled her remarkable life full; but they were rare in the sense that she, like the Psalmist in Mr. James Guthrie’s psalm, was a wonder unto many, and most of all unto herself. ”

“ We still read in his Last Speeches how God made Lord Gordon’s sins to find him out, and with what firmness and with what tenderness Rutherford handled the soul of the dying man till all his cowardice, title-hunting, and truth-betraying life came back to his death-bed with a sharper sting in them than even his grossest sins. Whoredom and wine after all are but the lusts of a man, whereas time-serving and truth-selling are the lusts of a devil. ”

“ 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 grasshoppers, 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 God out of the wild oats of his past sin and his present sinfulness. ”

“ It is not given to any man to fill a whole library with first-rate work. Our greatest authors have all written little books. Job is a small book, so is the Psalms, so is Isaiah, so is the Gospel of John, so is the Epistle to the Romans, so is the Confessions, so is the Comedy, so is the Imitation, so are the Pilgrim and the Grace Abounding, and though William Guthrie’s small book is not for a moment to be ranked with such master-pieces as these, yet it is a small book on a great subject, and a book to which I cannot find a second among the big religious books of our day. ”

“ The first thing that strikes me in reading Rutherford’s letters to young Earlston and to several other young men of that day is the extraordinary frankness and self-forgetfulness of the writer. He takes his young correspondents into his confidence in a remarkable way. He opens up his whole heart to them. He goes back with a startling boldness and unreserve and plainness of speech on his own youth, and he lays himself alongside of his youthful correspondents in a way that only a strong man and a humble could afford to do. ”

“ Once let a poor wretch awake to the unbroken winter of his own sinfulness, a sinfulness that is with him when he lies down and when he rises up, when he is abroad among men and when he is at home with himself alone: an incessant, increasing, agonising, overwhelming sense of sin,—and how that most miserable of men will grow in grace, and how he will drink in all the means of grace! How he will hear the word of grace preached, mixing it no longer with fault-finding, as he used to do, but with repentance and faith under any and every ministry. How he will examine himself every day ”

“ 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. ”

“ As Bishop Martensen also says, ‘Many a time we cannot avoid feeling a deep sorrow for ourselves because of the bottomless depth of corruption which lies hidden in our heart—which sorrow, rightly felt and rightly exercised, is a weighty basis of sanctification.’
To an able woman building on such a weighty basis as that on which Lady Boyd had for long been building, Rutherford was quite safe to lay weighty and unusual comforts on her mind and on her heart. ‘Christ has a use for all your corruptions,’ he says to her, to her surprise and to her comfort. ”

“ 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 God in the soul. ”

“ We apprehend the coming evil, and feel it long before it comes. We die, like the coward, many times before our death.
Now, Rutherford just takes that well-known word and applies it to his fears and his sinkings of heart about his past sins, and about the unsettled wages of his sins. His conscience makes him a coward, till he thinks every bush an officer. But then he reasons and remonstrates with himself in his deep and intimate letter to Gillespie, and says that these his doubts, and terrors, and apprehensions are not canonical. ”

“ William Guthrie was a great humorist, a great sportsman, a great preacher, and a great writer. The true Guthrie blood has always had a drop of humour in it, and the first minister of Fenwick was a genuine Guthrie in this respect. The finest humour springs up out of a wide and a deep heart, and it always has its roots watered at a wellhead of tears. ‘William Guthrie was a great melancholian,’ says Wodrow, and as we read that we are reminded of some other great melancholians, such as Blaise Pascal and John Foster and William Cowper. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Old Hugh Kennedy’s death-bed was for long a glorious tradition among the godly in the West of Scotland. The old saint was visited in his last hours on earth with a joy that was unspeakable and full of glory: the mere report of it made an immense impression both on the Church and the world. And his son John, who stood entranced beside his father’s chariot of fire, never forgot the transporting sight. He did not need Rutherford’s warning never to forget his father’s example and his father’s end. For John Kennedy was a ‘choice Christian,’ as a well-known writer of that day calls him. ”

“ Men go to heaven in ones and twos. And that you may go there, even if it has to be alone, love your enemies and stand to the truth I taught you. Fear no man, fear God only. Seek Christ every day. You will find Him alone in the fields of Rusco. Seek a broken heart for sin, for, otherwise, you may seek Him all your days, but you will never find Him. And it is not in our New Testament only, and in such books as Rutherford’s Letters only, that we are reminded of the loneliness of our road to heaven ”

“ Some disingenuity, some simulation or dissimulation of affection, some downright or constructive dishonesty, some lack towards some one of open and entire integrity, some breach of good faith in spirit if not in letter, some still stinging tresspass of the golden rule, some horn or hoof of the golden calf, the bitter dust of which they taste to this day in their sweetest cup and at their most grace-spread table. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There had been some sin in Samuel Rutherford’s student days, or some stumble sufficiently of the nature of sin, to secretly poison the whole of his subsequent life. Sin is such a poisonous thing that even a mustard-seed of it planted in a man’s youth will sometimes spring up into a thicket of terrible trouble both to himself and to many other people all his and all their days. ”