'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 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 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?