'The short man who could not bow.'--_Cromwell_.
James Guthrie was the son of the laird of that ilk in the county of
Angus. St. Andrews was his _alma mater_, and under her excellent nurture
young Guthrie soon became a student of no common name. His father had
destined him for the Episcopal Church, and, what with his descent from an
ancient and influential family, his remarkable talents, and his excellent
scholarship, it is not to be wondered at that a bishop's mitre sometimes
dangled before his ambitious eyes. 'He was then prelatic,' says Wodrow
in his _Analecta_, 'and strong for the ceremonies.' But as time went on,
young Guthrie's whole views of duty and of promotion became totally
changed, till, instead of a bishop's throne, he ended his days on the
hangman's ladder. After having served his college some time as regent or
assistant professor in the Moral Philosophy Chair, Guthrie took licence,
and was immediately thereafter settled as parish minister of Lauder, in
the momentous year 1638. And when every parish in Scotland sent up its
representatives to Edinburgh to subscribe the covenant in Greyfriars
Churchyard, the parish of Lauder had the pride of seeing its young
minister take his life in his hand, like all the best ministers and
truest patriots in the land. But just as Guthrie was turning in at the
gate of the Greyfriars, who should cross the street before him, so as
almost to run against him, but the city executioner! The omen--for it
was a day of omens--made the young minister stagger for a moment, but
only for a moment. At the same time the ominous incident made such an
impression on the young Covenanter's heart and imagination, that he said
to some of his fellow-subscribers as he laid down the pen, 'I know that I
shall die for what I have done this day, but I cannot die in a better
cause.'
In the lack of better authorities we are compelled to trace the footsteps
of James Guthrie through the Laodicean pages of Robert Baillie for
several years to come. Baillie did not like Guthrie, and there was no
love lost between the two men. The one man was all fire together in
every true and noble cause, and the other we spew out of our mouth at
every page of his indispensable book. As Carlyle says, Baillie contrived
to 'carry his dish level' through all that terrible jostle of a time. And
accordingly while we owe Baillie our very grateful thanks that he kept
such a diary, and carried on such an extensive and regular correspondence
during all that distracted time, we owe him no other thanks. He carried
his dish level, and he had his reward.
As we trace James Guthrie's passionate footsteps for the years to come
through Principal Baillie's sufficiently gossiping, but not unshrewd,
pages, we soon see that he is travelling fast and sure toward the Nether
Bow. We hear continually from our time-serving correspondent of
Guthrie's 'public invective,' of his 'passionate debates,' of his
'venting of his mind,' of his 'peremptory letters,' of his 'sharp
writing,' and of his being 'rigid as ever,' and so on. All that about
his too zealous co-presbyter, and then his fulsome eulogy of the
returning king--his royal wisdom, his moderation, his piety, and his
grave carriage--as also what he says of 'the conspicuous justice of God
in hanging up the bones of Oliver Cromwell, the disgracing of the two
Goodwins, blind Milton, John Owen, and others of that maleficent crew,'
all crowned with the naive remark that 'the wisest and best are quiet
till they see whither these things will go'--it is plain that while our
wise and good author is carrying his dish as level as the uneven roads
will allow, Guthrie is as plainly carrying his head straight to the Cross
of Edinburgh, and to the iron spikes of the Canongate.
All the untold woes of that so woful time came of the sword of the civil
power being still grafted on the crook of the Church; as also of the
insane attempt of so many of our forefathers to solder the crown of
Charles Stuart to the crown of Jesus Christ. How those two so fatal, and
not even yet wholly remedied, mistakes, brought Argyll to the block and
Guthrie to the ladder in one day in Edinburgh, we read in the instructive
and inspiriting histories of that terrible time; and we have no better
book on that time for the mass of readers than just honest John Howie's
_Scots Worthies_. There is a passage in our Scottish martyr's last
defence of himself that has always reminded me of Socrates' similar
defence before the judges of Athens. 'My lords,' said Guthrie, 'my
conscience I cannot submit. But this old and crazy body I do submit, to
do with it whatsoever you will; only, I beseech you to ponder well what
profit there is likely to be in my blood. It is not the extinguishing of
me, or of many more like me, that will extinguish the work of reformation
in Scotland. My blood will contribute more for the propagation of the
Covenant and the full reformation of the kirk than my life and liberty
could do, though I should live on for many years.' One can hardly help
thinking that Guthrie must have been reading _The Apology_ in his manse
in Stirling at the moment he was apprehended. But in the case of
Guthrie, as in the case of Socrates, no truth, no integrity, and no
eloquence could save him; for, as Bishop Burnet frankly says, 'It was
resolved to make a public example of a Scottish minister, and so Guthrie
was singled out. I saw him suffer,' the Bishop adds, 'and he was so far
from showing any fear that he rather expressed a contempt of death.'
James Cowie, his precentor, and beadle, and body-servant, also saw his
master suffer, and, like Bishop Burnet, he used to tell the impression
that his old master's last days made upon him. 'When he had received
sentence of death,' Cowie told Wodrow's informant, 'he came forth with a
kind of majesty, and his face seemed truly to shine.' It needed
something more than this world could supply to make a man's face to shine
under the sentence that he be hanged at the Cross of Edinburgh, his body
dismembered, and his head fixed on an iron spike in the West Port of the
same city. The disgraceful and ghastly story of his execution, and the
hacking up of his body, may all be read in Howie, beside a picture of the
Nether Bow as it still stands in our Free Church and Free State Day. 'Art
not Thou from everlasting, O Lord my God?' were James Guthrie's last
words as he stood on the ladder. 'O mine Holy One: I shall not die, but
live. Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace; for mine eyes have
seen Thy salvation.'
There is one fine outstanding feature that has always characterised and
distinguished the whole of the Rutherford circle in our eyes, and that is
their deep, keen Pauline sense of sin. Without this, all their
patriotism, all their true statesmanship, and even all their martyrdom
for the sake of the truth, would have had, comparatively speaking, little
or no interest for us. What think ye of sin? is the crucial question we
put to any character, scriptural or ecclesiastical, who claims our time
and our attention. If they are right about sin, they are all the more
likely to be right about everything else; and if they are either wrong or
only shallow about sin, their teaching and their experience on other
matters are not likely to be of much value or much interest to us. We
have had written over our portals against all comers: Know thyself if
thou wouldst either interest us or benefit us, or with the understanding
and the spirit worship with us. And all the true Rutherford circle,
without one exception, have known the true secret and have given the true
password. Their keen sense and scriptural estimate of the supreme evil
of sin first made them correspondents of Rutherford's; and as that sense
and estimate grew in them they passed on into an inner and a still more
inner circle of those Scottish saints and martyrs who corresponded with
Rutherford, and closed, with so much honour and love, around him. And
the two Guthries, James and William, as we shall see, were famous even in
that day for their praying and for their preaching about sin.
There is an excellent story told of James Guthrie's family worship in the
manse of Stirling, that bears not unremotely on the matter we have now on
hand. Guthrie was wont to pray too much, both at the family altar and in
the pulpit, as if he had been alone with his own heart and God. And he
carried that bad habit at last to such a length in his family, that he
almost drove poor James Cowie, his man-servant, out of his senses, till
when Cowie could endure no longer to be singled out and exposed and
denounced before the whole family, he at last stood up with some boldness
before his master and demanded to be told out, as man to man, and not in
that cruel and injurious way, what it was he had done that made his
master actually every day thus denounce and expose him. 'O James, man,
pardon me, pardon me. I was, I see now, too much taken up with my own
heart and its pollutions to think enough of you and the rest.' 'It was
that, and the like of that,' witnessed Cowie, 'that did me and my wife
more good than all my master's well-studied sermons.' The intimacy and
tenderness of the minister and his man went on deeper and grew closer,
till at the end we find Cowie reading to him at his own request the
Epistle to the Romans, and when the reader came to the passage, 'I will
have mercy on whom I will have mercy,' the listener burst into tears, and
exclaimed, 'James, James, halt there, for I have nothing but that to
lippen to.' And then, on the ladder, and before a great crowd of
Edinburgh citizens: 'I own that I am a sinner--yea, and one of the vilest
that ever made a profession of religion. My corruptions have been strong
and many, and they have made me a sinner in all things--yea, even in
following my duty. But blessed be God, who hath showed His mercy to such
a wretch, and hath revealed His Son unto me, and made me a minister of
the everlasting Gospel, and hath sealed my ministry on the hearts of not
a few of His people.' James Guthrie's ruling passion, as Cowie remarked,
was still strong in his death.
On one occasion Guthrie and some of his fellow-ministers were comparing
experiences and confessing to one another their 'predominant sins,' and
when it came to Guthrie's turn he told them that he was much too eager to
die a violent death. For, said he, I would like to die with all my wits
about me. I would not like eyesight and memory and reason and faith all
to die out on my deathbed and leave me to tumble into eternity bereft of
them all. Guthrie was greatly afraid at the thought of death, but it was
the premature death of his reason, and even of his faith, that so much
alarmed and horrified him to think of. He envied the men who kneeled
down on the scaffold, or leaped off the ladder, in full possession at the
last moment of all their senses and all their graces. 'Give me a direct
answer, sir,' demanded Dr. Johnson of his physician when on his deathbed.
. . . 'Then I will take no more opiates, for I have prayed that I may be
able to render up my soul to God unclouded.' And when pressed by his
attendants to take some generous nourishment, he replied almost with his
last breath, 'I will take anything but inebriating sustenance.'
But in nothing was good James Guthrie's tenderness to sin better seen
than in the endless debates and dissensions of which that day was so
full. So sensitive was he to the pride and the anger and the ill-will
that all controversy kindles in our hearts that, as soon as he felt any
unholy heat in his own heart, or saw it in the hearts of the men he
debated with, he at once cut short the controversy with some such words
as these: 'We have said too much on this matter already; let us leave it
till we love one another more.' If hot-blooded Samuel Rutherford had sat
more at James Guthrie's feet in the matter of managing a controversy, his
name would have been almost too high and too spotless for this present
life. Samuel Rutherford's one vice, temper, was one of James Guthrie's
chief virtues.
We have only two, or at most three, of the many letters that must have
passed between Rutherford and Guthrie preserved to us. And, as is usual
with Rutherford when he writes to any member of his innermost circle, he
writes to Guthrie so as still more completely to win his heart. And in
nothing does dear Rutherford win all our hearts more than in his deep
humility, and quick, keen sense of his own inability and utter
unworthiness. 'I am at a low ebb,' he writes to Guthrie from the
Jerusalem Chamber, 'yea, as low as any gracious soul can possibly be.
Shall I ever see even the borders of the good land above?' I read that
fine letter again last Sabbath afternoon in my room at hospitable
Helenslee, overlooking the lower reaches of the Clyde, and as I read this
passage, I recollected the opportune sea-view commanded by my window. I
had only to rise and look out to see an excellent illustration of my much-
exercised author; for the forenoon tide had just retreated to the sea,
and the broad bed of the river was left by the retreated tide less a
river than a shallow, clammy channel. Shoals of black mud ran out from
our shore, meeting and mingling with shoals of black mud from the
opposite shore. There was scarce clean water enough to float the
multitude of buoys that dipped and dragged in their bed of mire. That
any ship, to call a ship, could ever work its way up that sweltering
sewer seemed an utter impossibility. There was Rutherford's low ebb,
then, under my very eyes. There was low water indeed. And the low water
seemed to laugh the waiting seamen's hopes to scorn. But next morning my
heart rose high as I looked out at my window and saw all the richly-laden
vessels lighting their fires and spreading their sails, and setting their
faces to the replenished river. And I thought of Samuel Rutherford's
ship, far past all her ebbing tides now, and for ever anchored in her
haven above.
On the wall of my room in the same beautiful house there was a powerful
cartoon of Peter's crucifixion, head downwards, for his Master's sake.
The masterpiece of Filippino Lippi I felt to be an excellent illustration
also of Rutherford's letter to James Guthrie and the rest of the
ministers and elders who were imprisoned in the Castle of Edinburgh for
daring to remind Charles Stuart of the contents of the Covenant to which
both he and the whole nation had solemnly sworn. 'If Christ doth own
me,' Rutherford wrote to the martyrs in the Castle, 'let me be laid in my
grave in a bloody winding-sheet; let me go from the scaffold to the
spikes in four quarters--grave or no grave, as He pleases, if only He but
owns me.' And I seemed to see the crucified disciple's glorified Master
appearing over his reversed cross and saying, 'Thou art Peter, and with
this thy blood I will sow widespread my Church.' Yes, my brethren, if
Christ but owns us, that will far more than make up to us in a moment for
all our imprisonments, and all our martyrdoms, and all our ebbing tides
down here. 'Angels, men, and Zion's elders eye us in all our suffering
for Christ's sake, but what of all these? Christ is by us, and looketh
on, and writeth it all up Himself.'
James Guthrie was hanged and dismembered at the Cross of Edinburgh on the
first day of June, 1661. His snow-white head was cut off, and was fixed
on a spike in the Nether Bow. James Guthrie got that day that which he
had so often prayed for--a sudden plunge into everlasting life with all
his senses about him and all his graces at their brightest and their
keenest exercise.