'You crave my mind.'--_Rutherford_.
As a rule the difficulties of a divinity student are not at all the
difficulties of the best of his future people. A divinity student's
difficulties are usually academic and speculative, whereas the
difficulties of the best people in his coming congregation will be
difficulties of the most intensely real and practical kind. And thus it
is that we so often hear lately-ordained ministers confessing that they
have come to the end of their resources and experiences, and have nothing
either fresh or certain left to preach to the people about. Just as, on
the other hand, so many congregations complain that they look up to the
pulpit from Sabbath to Sabbath and are not fed. It is not much to be
wondered at that a raw college youth cannot all at once feed and guide
and extricate an old saint; or that a minister, whose deepest
difficulties hitherto have been mostly of the debating society kind,
should not be able to afford much help to those of his people who are
wading through the deep and drowning waters of the spiritual life. And
whether something could not be done by the institution of chairs of
genuine pastoral and experimental theology for the help of our students
and the good of our people is surely a question that well deserves the
earnest attention of all the evangelical churches. Meantime we are to be
introduced to a divinity student of the middle of the seventeenth century
who was early and deeply exercised in those intensely real problems of
the soul which occupied such a large place both in the best religious
literature and in the best pulpit work of that intensely earnest day.
James Bautie, or Beattie, as we shall here call him on Dr. Bonar's
suggestion, was a candidate for the ministry such that the ripest and
most deeply exercised saints in Scotland might well have rejoiced to have
had such an able and saintly youth for their preacher on the Sabbath-day
as well as for their pastor all the week. As James Beattie's college
days drew on to an end he became more and more exercised about his mental
deficiencies, and still more about his spiritual unfitness to be
anybody's minister. Beattie had, to begin with, this always infallible
mark of an able man--an increasing sense of his own inability: and he
had, along with that, this equally infallible mark of a
spiritually-minded man--an overwhelming sense of his utter lack of
anything like a spiritual mind. No man but a very able man could have
written the letter that Beattie wrote about himself to Samuel Rutherford;
and Rutherford's letter back to Beattie will not be a bad test of a
divinity student whether he has enough of the true divinity student mind
in him to read that letter, to understand it, and to translate it.
Beattie had an excellent intellect, and his excellent intellect had not
been laid out at college on those windy fields that so puff up a beginner
in knowledge and in life; his whole mind had been given up already to
those terrible problems of the soul that both humble and exalt the man
who spends his life among them. Beattie's future congregation will not
vaunt themselves about their minister's ability or scholarship or
eloquence; his sermons will soon push his people back behind all such
superficial matters. Beattie's preaching and his whole pastorate will
soon become another illustration of the truth that it is not gifts but
graces in a minister that will in the long-run truly edify the body of
Christ. You have James Beattie's portrait as a divinity student in
Rutherford's 249th letter, and you will find a complementary portrait of
Beattie as a grey-haired pastor in Dr. Stalker's _Preacher and his
Models_. 'He was a man of competent scholarship, and had the reputation
of having been in early life a powerful and popular preacher. But it was
not to those gifts that he owed his unique influence. He moved through
the town, with his white hair and somewhat staid and dignified demeanour,
as a hallowing presence. His very passing in the street was a kind of
benediction; the people, as they looked after him, spoke of him to each
other with affectionate reverence. Children were proud when he laid his
hand on their heads, and they treasured the kindly words which he spoke
to them. They who laboured along with him in the ministry felt that his
mere existence in the community was an irresistible demonstration of
Christianity and a tower of strength to every good cause. Yet he had not
gained this position of influence by brilliant talents or great
achievements or the pushing of ambition; for he was singularly modest,
and would have been the last to credit himself with half the good he did.
The whole mystery lay in this, that he had lived in the town for forty
years a blameless life, and was known by everybody to be a godly and a
prayerful man. The prime qualification for the ministry is goodness.'
Beattie as a student challenged himself severely on this account also,
that some truths found a more easy and unshaken credit with him than
other truths. This is a common difficulty with many of our modern
students also, and how best to advise with them under this real
difficulty constantly puts their professors and their pastors to the
test. Whatever Beattie may have got, I confess I do not get much help in
this difficulty out of Rutherford's letter back to Beattie. Rutherford,
with all his splendid gifts of mind and heart, had sometimes a certain
dogmatic and dictatorial way with him, and this is just the temper that
our students still meet with too often in their old and settled censors.
The 'torpor of assurance' has not yet settled on the young divine as it
has done on too many of the old. There was a modest, a genuine, and an
every way reasonable difficulty in this part of Beattie's letter to
Rutherford, and I wish much that Rutherford had felt himself put upon his
quite capable mettle to deal with the difficulty. Or, if he had not time
to go to the bottom of all Beattie's deep letter, as he says he has not,
he might have referred his correspondent--for his correspondent was a
well-read student--to a great sermon by the greatest of English
Churchmen--a sermon that a reader like Rutherford must surely have had by
heart, entitled, 'A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certainty and
Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect.' But, unfortunately for England and
Scotland both, England was thrusting that sermon and all the other
writings of its author on the Church of Christ in Scotland at the point
of the bayonet, and that is the very worst instrument that can be
employed in the interests of truth and of ecclesiastical comprehension
and conformity. And among the many things we have to be thankful for in
our more emancipated and more catholic day, it is not the least that
Rutherford and Hooker lie in peace and in complemental fulness beside one
another on the tables of all our students of divinity.
Coming still closer home to himself, our divinity student puts this acute
difficulty to his spiritual casuist: Whether a man of God, and especially
a minister of Christ, can be right who does not love God for Himself, for
His nature and for His character solely and purely, and apart altogether
from all His benefactions both in nature and in grace. James Beattie had
been brought up with such a love for the Kirk of Scotland, and for her
ministers and her people; he had of late grown into such a love for his
books also, and for the work of the ministry, that in examining himself
in prospect of his approaching licence he had felt afraid that he loved
the thought of a study, and a pulpit, and a manse, and its inhabitants,
and, indeed, the whole prospective life of a minister, with more keenness
of affection than he loved the souls of men, or even his Master Himself.
And he put that most distressing difficulty also before Rutherford. Now
there was an expression on that matter that was common in the pulpits of
Rutherford's school in that day that Rutherford would be sure to quote in
his second letter to Beattie, if not in his first. It was a Latin
proverb, but all the common people of that day quite well understood it,
not to speak of a student like Beattie. _Aliquid in Christo formosius
Salvatore_, wrote Rutherford to distressed Beattie; that is to say, There
is that in Christ which is far more fair and sweet than merely His being
a Saviour. Never be content, that is, till you can rise up above manses
and pulpits and books and sermons, and even above your own salvation, to
see the pure and infinite loveliness of Christ Himself. Dost thou, O my
soul, love Jesus Christ for Himself alone, and not only as thy Redeemer?
though to love Him as such He doth allow thee, yet there is that in
Christ that is far more amiable than merely in His being thy Saviour. And
yet the two kinds of love may quite well stand together, writes
Rutherford, just as a child loves his mother because she is his mother,
and yet his love leaps the more out when she gives him an apple. At the
same time, to love Christ for Himself alone is the last end of a true
believer's love.
It was one of the great experimental problems much agitated among the
greater evangelical divines of that deep, clear-eyed, and honest day, Why
the truly regenerate are all left so full of all manner of indwelling
sin. We never hear that question raised nowadays, nor any question at
all like that. The only difficulty in our day is why any man should have
any difficulty about his own indwelling sin at all. But neither Beattie,
nor Rutherford, nor any of the masters who remain to us had got so far as
we. And as for the Antinomian, perfectionist, and higher-life preachers
of that day, they are all so dead and forgotten that you would not know
their names even if I repeated them. Beattie, as a beginner in the
spiritual life, had made this still not uncommon mistake. He had taken
those New Testament passages in which the apostles portray an ideal
Christian man as he stands in the election and calling of God, and as he
will be found at last and for ever in heaven, and he had prematurely and
inconsequently applied all that to himself as a young man under
sanctification and under the painful and humiliating beginnings of it;
and no wonder that, so confusing the very first principles of the Gospel,
he confused and terrified himself out of all peace and all comfort and
all hope. Now, that was just the kind of difficulty with which
Rutherford could deal with all his evangelical freedom and fulness, depth
and insight. No preacher or writer of that day held up the absolute
necessity of holiness better than Rutherford did; but then, that only the
more compelled him to hold up also such comfort as he conveys in his
consoling and reassuring letter to despairing Beattie: 'Comparing the
state of one truly regenerate, whose heart is a temple of the Holy Ghost,
with your own, which is full of uncleanness and corruption, you stand
dumb and dare not call Christ heartsomely your own. But, I answer, the
best regenerate have their defilements, and, wash as they will, there
will be the filth of sin in their hearts to the end. Glory alone will
make our hearts pure and perfect, never till then will they be absolutely
sinless.' And if we, Rutherford's so weak-kneed successors, preached the
law of God and true holiness as he preached those noble doctrines, the
sheer agony of our despairing people would compel us to preach also the
true nature, the narrow limits, and the whole profound laws of
evangelical sanctification as we never preach, and scarce dare to preach,
those things now. They who preach true holiness best are just thereby
the more compelled to preach its partial, tentative, elementary, and
superficial character in this life. And the hearer who knows in the word
of God and in his own heart what indeed true holiness is, will insist on
having its complementary truths frequently preached to him to keep him
from despair; or else he will turn continually to those great divines
who, though dead, yet preach such things in their noble books. And that
those books are not still read and preached among us, and that the need
for them and their doctrines is so little felt, is only another
illustration of the true proverb that where no oxen are the crib is
clean.
James Beattie was in very good company when he said that he must have
more assurance, both of his gifts and his graces, before he could enter
on his ministry. For Moses, and Isaiah, and Jeremiah, and many another
minister who could be named, have all felt and said the same thing. Now
that he is near the door of the pulpit, Beattie feels that he cannot
enter it till he has more certainty that it is all right with himself.
But our young ministers will attain to assurance not so much by
consulting Rutherford, skilled casuist in such matters as he is, as by
themselves going forward in a holy life and a holy ministry. 'It is not
God's design,' says Jonathan Edwards, 'that men should obtain assurance
in any other way than by mortifying corruption, increasing in grace, and
obtaining the lively exercises of it. Assurance is not to be obtained so
much by self-examination as by action. Paul obtained assurance of
winning the prize more by running than by reflecting. The swiftness of
his pace did more toward his assurance of the goal than the strictness of
his self-examination.' 'I wish you a share of my feast,' replies
Rutherford. 'But, for you, hang on our Lord, and He will fill you with a
sense of His love, as He has so often filled me. Your feast is not far
off. Hunger on; for there is food already in your hunger for Christ.
Never go away from Him, but continue to fash Him; and if He delays, yet
come not away, albeit you should fall aswoon at His feet.' Pray, says
Rutherford, and you will not long lack assurance. Work, says Edwards,
and assurance of God's love will be an immediate earnest of your full
wages.