'Build your nest, Madam, upon no tree here, for God hath sold this
whole forest to death.'--_Rutherford_.
Lady Kenmure was one of the Campbells of Argyll, a family distinguished
for the depth of their piety, their public spirit, and their love for the
Presbyterian polity; and Lady Jane was one of the most richly-gifted
members of that richly-gifted house. But, with all that, Lady Jane
Campbell had her own crosses to carry. She had the sore cross of bad
health to carry all her days. Then she had the sad misfortune to make a
very bad marriage in the morning of her days; and, partly as the result
of all that, and partly because of her peculiar mental constitution, her
whole life was drenched with a deep melancholy. But, as we are told in
John Howie and elsewhere, all these evils and misfortunes were made to
work together for good to her through the special grace of God, and
through the wise and wistful care of her lifelong friend and minister and
correspondent, Samuel Rutherford. Lady Jane Campbell had very remarkable
gifts of mind. We would have expected that from her distinguished
pedigree; and we have abundant proof of that in Rutherford's sheaf of
letters to her. His dedication of that most remarkable piece, _The Trial
and Triumph of Faith_, is sufficient of itself to show how highly
Rutherford esteemed Lady Kenmure, both as to her head and her heart. Till
our theological students have been led to study _The Trial and Triumph of
Faith: Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself_--which, to my mind,
is by far the best of Rutherford's works--_The Covenant of Grace_ and
_The Influences of Grace_, they will have no conception of the
intellectual rank of Samuel Rutherford himself, or of the intelligence
and the attainments of his hearers and readers and correspondents. Thomas
Goodwin was always telling the theological students of Oxford in those
days to thicken their too thin homilies with more doctrine: 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. Poor Jane Campbell soon wakened up to the discovery that she
had exchanged the name and the family of a brave and noble house for the
name and the house of a poltroon. No wonder that Rutherford's letters to
her are so often headed: 'To Lady Kenmure, under illness and depression
of mind.' Could you have kept quite well had you been a Campbell with
John Gordon for a husband? Think of having to nurse your humbug of a
husband through a shammed illness. Think of having to take a hand in
sending in a sham doctor's certificate because your husband was too much
of a time-server to go to Edinburgh to give his vote for a persecuted
church. Think of having to wear the title and decoration your husband
had purchased for you at the cost of his truth and honour and manhood.
Lady Kenmure needed Samuel Rutherford's very best letters to help to keep
her in bare life all the time the county dames were green with envy at
the dear-bought honours. And Kenmure himself had to be brought to his
death-bed before he became a husband worthy of his wife. 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. 'Dig deeper,' said Rutherford to the dying courtier, and Kenmure
did dig deeper, till he came down to the seals and the titles and the
ribbons for which he had sold his soul. But he that confesses and
forsakes his sins even at the eleventh hour shall always find mercy, and
so it was with Lord Kenmure.
'Between the stirrup and the ground
Mercy I sought and mercy found.'
We do not grudge Viscount Kenmure all the grace he got from God; we shall
need as much grace and more ourselves; but we do somewhat grudge such a
man a place of honour among the Scots worthies. We are tempted to throw
down the book and to demand what right John Gordon has to stand beside
such men as Patrick Hamilton, and John Knox, and John Wishart, and
Archibald Campbell, and Hugh M'Kail, and Richard Cameron, and Alexander
Shields? But Lochgoin answers us that God sometimes accepts the late
will for the whole timeous deed, and the bravery and loyalty of the wife
for the meanness and poltroonery of the husband. 'Have you a present
sense of God's love?' 'I have, I have,' said the dying Viscount. As
Rutherford continued in prayer, Kenmure was observed to smile and look
upwards. About sunset Lord Kenmure died, at the same instant that
Rutherford said Amen to his prayer. _The Last and Heavenly Speeches_ is
a rare pamphlet that will well repay its price to him who will seek it
out and read it.
This was the correspondent, then, to whom Samuel Rutherford wrote such
counsels and encouragements as these: 'Therefore, madam, herein have
comfort, that He who seeth perfectly through all your evils, and who
knoweth the frame and constitution of your nature, and what is most
healthful for your soul, holdeth every cup of affliction to your head
with his own gracious hand. Never believe that your tender-hearted
Saviour will mix your cup with one drachm-weight of poison. Drink, then,
with the patience of the saints: wrestle, fight, go forward, watch, fear,
believe, pray, and then you have all the infallible symptoms of one of
the elect of Christ within you' (_Letter_ III.). On the death of her
infant daughter, Rutherford writes to the elect lady: 'She is only sent
on before, like unto a star, which, going out of our sight, doth not die
and vanish, but still shineth in another hemisphere. What she wanted of
time she hath gotten of eternity, and you have now some plenishing up in
heaven. Build your nest upon no tree here, for God hath sold the whole
forest to death' (_Letter_ IV.). 'Madam, when you are come to the other
side of the water and have set down your foot on the shore of glorious
eternity, and look back to the water and to your wearisome journey, and
shall see in that clear glass of endless glory nearer to the bottom of
God's wisdom, you shall then be forced to say, "If God had done otherwise
with me than He hath done, I had never come to the enjoying of this crown
of glory"' (_Letter_ XL). 'Madam, tire not, weary not; for I dare find
you the Son of God caution that when you are got up thither and have cast
your eyes to view the golden city and the fair and never-withering Tree
of Life that beareth twelve manner of fruits every month, you shall then
say, "Four-and-twenty hours' abode in this place is worth threescore and
ten years' sorrow upon earth"' (_Letter_ XIX.). 'Your ladyship goeth on
laughing and putting on a good countenance before the world, and yet you
carry heaviness about with you. You do well, madam, not to make them
witnesses of your grief who cannot be curers of it' (_Letter_ XX.).
'Those who can take the crabbed tree of the cross handsomely upon their
backs and fasten it on cannily shall find it such a burden as its wings
are to a bird or its sails to a ship' (_Letter_ LXIX.). 'I thought it
had been an easy thing to be a Christian, and that to seek God had been
at the next door; but, oh, the windings, the turnings, the ups and downs
He hath led me through!' (_Letter_ CIV.) 'I may be a book-man and yet be
an idiot and a stark fool in Christ's way! The Bible beguiled the
Pharisees, and so may I be misled' (_Letter_ CVI.). 'I find you
complaining of yourself, and it becometh a sinner so to do. I am not
against you in that. The more sense the more life. The more sense of
sin the less sin' (_Letter_ CVI.). 'Seeing my sins and the sins of my
youth deserved strokes, how am I obliged to my Lord who hath given me a
waled and chosen cross! Since I must have chains, He would put golden
chains on me, watered over with many consolations. Seeing I must have
sorrow (for I have sinned, O Preserver of men!), He hath waled out for me
joyful sorrow--honest, spiritual, glorious sorrow' (_Letter_ CCVI.).
There are hundreds of passages as good as these scattered up and down the
forty-seven letters we have had preserved to us out of the large and
intimate correspondence that passed between Samuel Rutherford and Lady
Kenmure.