'Our apprehensions are not canonical.'--_Rutherford_.
George Gillespie was one of that remarkable band of statesmanlike
ministers that God gave to Scotland in the seventeenth century. Gillespie
died while yet a young man, but before he died, as Rutherford wrote to
him on his deathbed, he had done more work for his Master than many a
hundred grey-headed and godly ministers. Gillespie and Rutherford got
acquainted with one another when Rutherford was beginning his work at
Anwoth. In the good providence of God, Gillespie was led to Kenmure
Castle to be tutor in the family of Lord and Lady Kenmure, and that threw
Rutherford and Gillespie continually together. Gillespie was still a
probationer. He was ready for ordination, and many congregations were
eager to have him, but the patriotic and pure-minded youth could not
submit to receive ordination at the hands of the bishops of that day, and
this kept him out of a church of his own long after he was ready to begin
his ministry. But the time was not lost to Gillespie himself, or to the
Church of Christ in Scotland,--the time that threw Rutherford and
Gillespie into the same near neighbourhood, and into intimate and
affectionate friendship. The mere scholarship of the two men would at
once draw them together. They read the same deep books; they reasoned
out the same constitutional, ecclesiastical, doctrinal, and experimental
problems; till one day, rising off their knees in the woods of Kenmure
Castle, the two men took one another by the hand and swore a covenant
that all their days, and amid all the trials they saw were coming to
Scotland and her Church, they would remain fast friends, would often
think of one another, would often name one another before God in prayer,
and would regularly write to one another, and that not on church
questions only and on the books they were reading, but more especially on
the life of God in their own souls. Of the correspondence of those two
remarkable men we have only three letters preserved to us, but they are
enough to let us see the kind of letters that must have frequently passed
between Kenmure Castle and Aberdeen, and between St. Andrews and
Edinburgh during the next ten years.
Gillespie was born in the parish manse of Kirkcaldy in 1613; he was
ordained to the charge of the neighbouring congregation of Wemyss in
1638, was translated thence to Edinburgh in 1642, and then became one of
the four famous deputies who were sent up from the Church of Scotland to
sit and represent her in the Westminster Assembly in 1643. Gillespie's
great ability was well known, his wide learning and his remarkable
controversial powers had been already well proved, else such a young man
would never have been sent on such a mission; but his appearance in the
debates at Westminster astonished those who knew him best, and won for
him a name second to none of the oldest and ablest statesmen and scholars
who sat in that famous house. 'That noble youth,' Baillie is continually
exclaiming, after each new display of Gillespie's learning and power of
argument; 'That singular ornament of our Church'; 'He is one of the best
wits of this isle,' and so on. And good John Livingstone, in his wise
and sober _Characteristics_, says that, being sent as a Commissioner from
the Church of Scotland to the Assembly of Divines at Westminster,
Gillespie, 'promoted much the work of reformation, and attained to a gift
of clear, strong, pressing, and calm debating above any man of his time.'
Many stories were told in Scotland of the debating powers of young
Gillespie as seen on the floor of the Westminster Assembly. Selden was
one of the greatest lawyers in England, and he had made a speech one day
that both friend and foe felt was unanswerable. One after another of the
Constitutional and Evangelical party tried to reply to Selden's speech,
but failed. 'Rise, George, man,' said Rutherford to Gillespie, who was
sitting with his pencil and note-book beside him. 'Rise, George, man,
and defend the Church which Christ hath purchased with His own blood.'
George rose, and when he had sat down, Selden is reported to have said to
some one who was sitting beside him, 'That young man has swept away the
learning and labour of ten years of my life.' Gillespie's Scottish
brethren seized upon his note-book to preserve and send home at least the
heads of his magnificent speech, but all they found in his little book
were these three words: _Da lucem_, _Domine_; Give light, O Lord.
Rutherford had foreseen all this from the days when Gillespie and he
talked over Aquinas and Calvin and Hooker and Amesius and Zanchius as
they took their evening walks together on the sands of the Solway Firth.
It is told also that when the Committee of Assembly was engaged on the
composition of the Shorter Catechism, and had come to the question, What
is God? like the able men they were, they all shrank from attempting an
answer to such an unfathomable question. In their perplexity they asked
Gillespie to offer prayer for help, when he began his prayer with these
words: 'O God, Thou art a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in
Thy being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.' As
soon as he said Amen, his opening sentences were remembered, and taken
down, and they stand to this day the most scriptural and the most
complete answer to that unanswerable question that we have in any creed
or catechism of the Christian Church.
As her best tribute to the talents and services of her youngest
Commissioner, the Edinburgh Assembly of 1648 appointed Gillespie her
Moderator; but his health was fast failing, and he died in the December
of that year, in the thirty-sixth year of his age. The inscription on
his tombstone at Kirkcaldy ends with these sober and true words: 'A man
profound in genius, mild in disposition, acute in argument, flowing in
eloquence, unconquered in mind. He drew to himself the love of the good,
the envy of the bad, and the admiration of all.' Such was the life and
work of George Gillespie, one of the most intimate and confidential
correspondents of Samuel Rutherford;--for it was to him that Rutherford
wrote the words now before us, 'Our apprehensions are not canonical.'
Every line of life has its own language, its own peculiar vocabulary,
that none but its experts, and those who have been brought up to it,
know. Go up to the Parliament House and you will hear the advocates and
judges talking to one another in a professional speech that the learned
layman no more than the ignorant can understand. Our doctors, again,
have a shorthand symbolism that only themselves and the chemists
understand. And so it is with every business and profession; each
several trade strikes out a language for itself. And so does divinity,
and, especially, experimental divinity, of which Rutherford's letters are
full. We not only need a glossary for the obsolete Scotch, but we need
the most simple and everyday expressions of the things of the soul
explained to us till once we begin to speak and to write those
expressions ourselves. There are judges and advocates and doctors and
specialists of all kinds among us who will only be able to make a far-off
guess at the meaning of my text, just as I could only make a far-off
guess at some of their trade texts. This technical term, 'apprehension,'
does not once occur in the Bible, and only once or twice in Shakespeare.
'Our death is most in apprehension,' says that master of expression; and,
again, he says that 'we cannot outfly our apprehensions.' And Milton has
it once in _Samson_, who says:--
'Thoughts, my tormentors, armed with deadly stings,
Mangle my apprehensive tenderest parts.'
But, indeed, we all have the thing in us, though we may never have put
its proper name upon it. We all know what a forecast of evil is--a
secret fear that evil is coming upon us. It lays hold of our heart, or
of our conscience, as the case may be, and will not let go its hold. And
then the heart and the conscience run out continually and lay hold of the
future evil and carry it home to our terrified bosoms. 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. He is
writing to a divine and a scholar, as well as to an experienced Christian
man, and he uses words that such scholars and such Christian men quite
well understand and like to make use of. The canon that he here refers
to is the Holy Scriptures; they are the rule of our faith, and they are
also the rule of God's faithfulness. What God has said to us in His
word, that we must believe and hold by; that, and not our deserts or our
apprehensions, must rule and govern our faith and our trust, just as
God's word will be the rule and standard of His dealings with us. His
word rules us in our faith and life; and again it rules Him also in His
dealings with our faith and with our life. God does not deal with us as
we deserve; He does not deal with us as we, in our guilty apprehensions,
fear He will. He deals with the apprehensive, penitent, believing sinner
according to the grace and the truth of His word. His promises are
canonical to Him, not our apprehensions.
Thomas Goodwin, that perfect prince of pulpit exegetes, lays down this
canon, and continually himself acts upon it, that 'the context of a
scripture is half its interpretation; . . . if a man would open a place
of scripture, he should do it rationally; he should go and consider the
words before and the words after.' Now, let us apply this rule to the
interpretation of this text out of Rutherford, and look at the context,
before and after, out of which it is taken.
Remembering his covenant with young Gillespie in the woods of Kenmure,
Rutherford wrote of himself to his friend, and said:--'At my first entry
on my banishment here my apprehensions worked despairingly upon my
cross.' By that he means, and Gillespie would quite well understand his
meaning, that his banishment from his work threw him in upon his
conscience, and that his conscience whispered to him that he had been
banished from his work because of his sins. God is angry with you, his
conscience said; He does not love you, He has not forgiven you. But his
sanctified good sense, his deep knowledge of God's word, and of God's
ways with His people, came to his rescue, and he went on to say to
Gillespie that our apprehensions are not canonical. No, he says, our
apprehensions tell lies of God and of His grace. So they do in our case
also. When any trouble falls upon us, for any reason,--and there are
many reasons other than His anger why God sends trouble upon
us,--conscience is up immediately with her interpretation and explanation
of our troubles. This is your wages now, conscience says. God has been
slow to wrath, but His patience is exhausted now. As Rutherford says in
another letter, our tearful eyes look asquint at Christ and He appears to
be angry, when all the time He pities and loves us. Is there any man
here to-night whose apprehensions are working upon his cross? Is there
any man of God here who has lost hold of God in the thick darkness, and
who fears that his cross has come to him because God is angry with him?
Let him hear and imitate what Rutherford says when in the same distress:
'I will lay inhibitions on my apprehensions,' he says; 'I will not let my
unbelieving thoughts slander Christ. Let them say to me "there is no
hope," yet I will die saying, It is not so; I shall yet see the salvation
of God. I will die if it must be so, under water, but I will die
gripping at Christ. Let me go to hell, I will go to hell believing in
and loving Christ.' Rutherford's worst apprehensions, his best-grounded
apprehensions, could not survive an assault of faith like that. Imitate
him, and improve upon him, and say, that with a thousand times worse
apprehensions than ever Rutherford could have, yet, like him, you will
make your bed in hell, loving, and adoring, and justifying Jesus Christ.
And, if you do that, hell will have none of you; all hell will cast you
out, and all heaven will rise up and carry you in.
'Challenges' is another of Rutherford's technical terms that he
constantly uses to his expert correspondents. 'I was under great
challenges,' he says, in this same letter; and in a letter written the
same month of March to William Rigg, of Athernie, he says, 'Old
challenges revive, and cast all down.' Dr. Andrew Bonar, Rutherford's
expert editor, gives this glossary upon these passages: 'Charges, self-
upbraidings, self-accusations.' Challenges of conscience came to
Rutherford like these: 'Why art thou writing letters of counsel to other
men? Counsel thyself first. Why art thou appealed to and trusted and
loved by God's best people in Scotland, when thou knowest that thou art a
Cain in malice and a Judas in treachery, all but the outbreaks? Why art
thou taking thy cross so easily, when thou knowest the unsettled
controversy the Lord still has with thee?' 'Hall binks are slippery,'
wrote stern old Knockbrex, challenging his old minister for his too great
joy. 'Old challenges now and then revive and cast all down again.' That
reminds me of a fine passage in that great book of Rutherford's, _Christ
Dying_, where he shows us how to take out a new charter for all our
possessions, and for the salvation of our souls themselves when our
salvation, or our possessions and our right to them, is challenged. It
is better, he says, to hold your souls and your lands by prayer than by
obedience, or conquest, or industry. Have you wisdom, honour, learning,
parts, eloquence, godliness, grace, a good name, wife, children, a house,
peace, ease, pleasure? Challenge yourself how you got them, and see that
you hold them by an unchallengeable charter, even by prayer, and then by
grace. And if you hold these things by any other charter, hasten to get
a new conveyance made and a new title drawn out. And thus old, and
angry, and threatening challenges will work out a charter that cannot be
challenged.
And, then, when George Gillespie was lying on his deathbed in Edinburgh,
with his pillow filled with stinging apprehensions, as is often the case
with God's best servants and ripest saints, hear how his old friend, now
professor of divinity in St. Andrews, writes to him:--
'My reverend and dear brother, look to the east. Die well. Your life of
faith is just finishing. Finish it well. Let your last act of faith be
your best act. Stand not upon sanctification, but upon justification.
Hand all your accounts over to free grace. And if you have any bands of
apprehension in your death, recollect that your apprehensions are not
canonical.' And the dying man answered: 'There is nothing that I have
done that can stand the touchstone of God's justice. Christ is my all,
and I am nothing.'