CCXCV.--_To his very dear Friend_, JOHN FENWICK.
[MR. JOHN FENWICK was an Englishman, who suffered considerably
for nonconformity. He is mentioned in Row's "Life of R. Blair,"
where it is said that "John Fenwick was one of the best of the
Commissioners sent by Cromwell to visit the Universities." He was
a Puritan and Nonconformist.]
(_CHRIST THE FOUNTAIN--FREENESS OF GOD'S LOVE--FAITH TO BE EXERCISED
UNDER FROWNS--GRACE FOR TRIALS--CHRIST YET TO BE EXALTED ON THE
EARTH._)
MUCH HONOURED AND DEAR FRIEND,--Grace, mercy, and peace be to
you.--The necessary impediments of my calling have hitherto kept me
from making a return to your letter, the heads whereof I shall now
briefly answer.
I approve of your going to the Fountain, when your own cistern is
dry. A difference there must be betwixt Christ's well and your
borrowed water; and why but ye have need of emptiness and drying up,
as well as ye have need of the well? Want and a hole there must be in
our vessel, to leave room to Christ's art. His well hath its own need
of thirsty drinkers, to commend infinite love which, from eternity,
did brew such a cellar of living waters for us.
Ye commend His free love; and it is well done. Oh, if I could help
you! and if I could be master-convener to gather an earth-full and an
heaven-full of tongues, dipped and steeped in my Lord's well of love,
or His wine of love, even tongues drunken with His love, to raise a
song of praises to Him, betwixt the east and west end, and furthest
points of the broad heavens! If I were in your case (as, alas! my dry
and dead heart is not now in that garden), I would borrow leave to
come and stand upon the banks and coasts of that sea of love, and be a
feasted soul to see love's fair tide, free love's high and lofty
waves, each of them higher than ten earths, flowing in upon pieces of
lost clay. Oh, welcome, welcome, great sea! Oh, if I had as much love,
for wideness and breadth, as twenty outmost shells and spheres of the
heaven of heavens, that I might receive in a little flood of His free
love! Come, come, dear friend, and be pained that the King's
wine-cellar of free love, and His banqueting-house (oh so wide, so
stately! oh so God-like, so glory-like!) should be so abundant, so
overflowing, and your shallow vessel so little to take in some part of
that love. But since it cannot come into you for want of room, enter
yourself into this sea of love, and breathe under these waters, and
die of love; and live as one dead and drowned of this love.
But why do ye complain of waters going over your soul, and that the
smoke of the terrors of a wrathful Lord do almost suffocate you, and
bring you to death's brink? I know that the fault is in your eyes, not
in Him. It is not the rock that fleeth and moveth, but the green
sailor. If your sense and apprehension be made judge of His love,
there is a graven image made presently, even a changed god, and a
foe-god, who was once ("When ye washed your steps with butter, and the
rock poured you out rivers of oil," Job xxix. 6) a Friend-God. Either
now or never, let God work. Ye had never, since ye were a man, such a
fair field for faith; for a painted hell, and an apprehension of wrath
in your Father, is faith's opportunity to try what strength is in it.
Now, give God as large a measure of charity as ye have of sorrow.
Now, see faith to be faith indeed, if ye can make your grave betwixt
Christ's feet, and say, "Though He should slay me, I will trust in
Him. His believed love shall be my winding-sheet, and all my
grave-clothes; I shall roll and sew in my soul, my slain soul, in that
web, His sweet and free love; and let Him write upon my grave, 'Here
lieth a believing dead man, breathing out and making a hole in death's
broadside, and the breath of faith cometh forth through the hole.'"
See now if ye can overcome and prevail with God, and wrestle God's
tempting to death, quite out of breath, as that renowned wrestler did:
"And by his strength he had power with God; yea, he had power over the
angel and prevailed" (Hosea xii. 3, 4). He is a strong man indeed who
overmatcheth heaven's Strength, and the Holy One of Israel, the strong
Lord: which is done by a secret supply of divine strength within,
wherewith the weakest, being strengthened, overcome and conquer. It
shall be great victory, to blow out the flame of that furnace ye are
now in, with the breath of faith. And when hell, men, malice, cruelty,
falsehood, devils, the seeming glooms of a sweet Lord, meet you in the
teeth, if ye then, as a captive of hope, as one fettered in hope's
prison, run to your stronghold, even from God glooming to God
glooming, and believe the salvation of the Lord in the dark, which is
your only victory, your enemies (that are but pieces of malicious
clay) shall die as men, and be confounded. But, that your troubles are
many at once, and arrows come in from all airths, from country,
friends, wife, children, foes, estate, and right down from God who is
the hope and stay of your soul, I confess is more, and very heavy to
be borne. Yet all these are not more than grace; all these bits of
coals casten into your sea of mercy cannot dry it up. Your troubles
are many and great; yet not an ounce-weight beyond the measure of
infinite wisdom, I hope, nor beyond the measure of grace that He is to
bestow. For our Lord never yet brake the back of His child, nor
spilled His own work. Nature's plastering and counterfeit work He doth
often break in shreds, and putteth out a candle not lighted at the Sun
of righteousness; but He must cherish His own reeds (Isa. xlii. 3),
and handle them softly (never a reed getteth a thrust with the
Mediator's hand!), to lay together the two ends of the reed. Oh, what
bands and ligaments hath our Chirurgeon of broken spirits, to bind up
all His lame and bruised ones with! Cast your disjointed spirit into
His lap; and lay your burden upon One who is so willing to take your
cares and your fears off you, and to exchange and niffer your
crosses, and to give you new for old, and gold for iron; even to give
you garments of praise for the spirit of heaviness.
It is true, in great part, what ye write of this kirk, that the letter
of religion only is reformed, and scarce that. I do not believe our
Lord will build His Zion in this land upon this skin of reformation.
So long as our scum remaineth, and our heart-idols are kept, this work
must be at a stand; and, therefore, our Lord must yet sift this land,
and search us with candles. And I know that He will give and not sell
us His kingdom. His grace and our remaining guiltiness must be
compared; and the one must be seen in the glory of it, and the other
in the sinfulness of it. But I desire to believe, and would gladly
hope to see, that the glancing and shining lustre of glory coming from
the diamonds and stones set in the crown of our Lord Jesus shall cast
rays and beams many thousand miles about. I hope that Christ is upon a
great marriage; and that His wooing and suiting of His excellent Bride
doth take its beginning from us, the ends of the earth. Oh, what joy
and what glory would I judge it, if my heaven should be suspended till
I might have leave to run on foot to be a witness of that
marriage-glory, and see Christ put on the glory of His last-married
bride, and His last marriage-love on earth; when He shall enlarge His
love-bed, and set it upon the top of the mountains, and take in the
Elder Sister, the Jews, and the fulness of the Gentiles! It were
heaven's honour and glory upon earth to be His lackey, to run at His
horse's foot, and hold up the train of His marriage-robe royal, in the
day of our high and royal Solomon's espousals. But oh, what glory to
have a seat, or bed, in the chariot of King Jesus, that is bottomed
with gold, and paved, and lined over, and floored within with love,
for the daughters of Jerusalem (Cant. iii. 10). To lie upon such a
King's love, were a bed next to the flower of heaven's glory.
I am sorry to hear you speak in your letter of a "God angry at you,"
and of "the sense of His indignation;" which only ariseth from
suffering for Jesus all that is now come upon you. Indeed,
"apprehended wrath" flameth out of such ashes as "apprehended sin,"
but not from "suffering for Christ." But, suppose ye were in hell for
bygones and for old debt, I hope ye owe Christ a great sum of charity,
to believe the sweetness of His love. I know what it is to sin in that
kind. It is to sin (if it were possible) the unchangeableness of a
Godhead out of Christ, and to sin away a lovely and unchangeable God.
Put more honest apprehensions upon Christ. Put on His own mask upon
His face, and not your vail made of unbelief, which speaketh as if He
borrowed love to you, from you and your demerits and sinful
deservings. Oh, no! Christ is man, but He is not like man. He hath
man's love in heaven, but it is lustred with God's love, and it is
very God's love ye have to do with. When your wheels go about, He
standeth still. Let God be God. And be ye a man, and have ye the
deserving of man, and the sin of one who hath suffered your
Well-beloved to slip away, nay, hath refused Him entrance when He was
knocking, till His head and locks were frozen: yet what is that to
Him? His book keepeth your name, and is not printed and reprinted, and
changed, and corrected. And why but He should go to His place, and
hide Himself? Howbeit His departure be His own good work, yet the
belief of it, in that manner, is your sin. But wait on till He return
with salvation, and cause you to rejoice in the latter end. It is not
much to complain; but rather believe than complain, and sit in the
dust, and close your mouth, till He make your sown light[424] grow
again. For your afflictions are not eternal; time will end them, and
so shall ye at length see the Lord's salvation. His love sleepeth not,
but is still working for you. His salvation will not tarry nor linger;
and suffering for Him is the noblest cross that is out of heaven. Your
Lord had the wale and choice of ten thousand other crosses beside
this, to exercise you withal; but His wisdom and His love waled and
choosed out this for you, beside them all. And take it as a choice
one, and make use of it so as ye look to this world as your
stepmother, in your borrowed prison. For it is a love-look to heaven
and the other side of the water that God seeketh; and this is the
fruit, the flower and bloom growing out of your cross, that ye be a
dead man to time, to clay, to gold, to country, to friends, wife,
children, and all pieces of created nothings; for in them there is not
a seat nor bottom for soul's love. Oh, what room is for your love (if
it were as broad as the sea) up in heaven, and in God! And what would
not Christ give for your love? God gave so much for your soul; and
blessed are ye if ye have a love for Him, and can call in your soul's
love from all idols, and can make a God of God, a God of Christ, and
draw a line betwixt your heart and Him. If your deliverance came not,
Christ's presence and His believed love must stand as caution and
surety for your deliverance, till your Lord send it in His blessed
time. For Christ hath many salvations, if we could see them; and I
would think it better-born comfort and joy that cometh from the faith
of deliverance, and the faith of His love, than that which cometh from
deliverance itself. It is not much matter, if ye find ease to your
afflicted soul, what be the means, either of your own wishing or of
God's choosing. The latter, I am sure, is best, and the comforts
strongest and sweetest. Let the Lord absolutely have the ordering of
your evils and troubles; and put them off you by recommending your
cross and your furnace to Him who hath skill to melt His own metal,
and knoweth well what to do with His furnace. Let your heart be
willing that God's fire have your tin, and brass, and dross. To
consent to want corruption is a greater mercy than many professors do
well know; and to refer the manner of God's physic to His own wisdom,
whether it be by drawing blood, or giving sugared drinks. That He
cureth sick folks without pain, is a great point of faith; and to
believe Christ's cross to be a friend, as He Himself is a Friend, is
also a special act of faith. But when ye are over the water, this case
shall be a yesterday past a hundred years ere ye were born; and the
cup of glory shall wash the memory of all this away, and make it as
nothing. Only now take Christ in with you under your yoke, and let
patience have her perfect work; for this haste is your infirmity. The
Lord is rising up to do you good in the latter end; put on the faith
of His salvation, and see Him posting and hasting towards you.
[424] Ps. xcvii. 11.
Sir, my employments (being so great) hinder me to write at more
length. Excuse me; I hope to be mindful of you. I shall be obliged to
you, if ye help me with your prayers for this people, this college,
and my own poor soul.
Grace be with you. Remember my love to your wife.
Yours, in Christ Jesus,