'If you would be a deep divine I recommend you to
sanctification.'--_Rutherford_.
Old John Meine's shop was a great howf of Samuel Rutherford's all the
time of his student life in Edinburgh. Young Rutherford had got an
introduction to the Canongate shopkeeper from one of the elders of
Jedburgh, and the old shopkeeper and the young student at once took to
one another, and remained fast friends all their days. John Meine's shop
was so situated at a corner of the Canongate that Rutherford could see
the Tolbooth and John Knox's house as he looked up the street, and
Holyrood Palace as he looked down, and the young divine could never hear
enough of what the old shopkeeper had to tell him of Holyrood and its
doings on the one hand, and of the Reformer's house on the other. The
very paving-stones of the Canongate were full of sermons on the one hand,
and of satires on the other, in that day. 'He was an old man when he
came to live near my father's shop,' John Meine would say to the eager
student. 'But, even as an errand boy, taking parcels up his stair, I
felt what a good man's house I was in, and I used to wish I was already a
man, that I might either be a soldier or a minister.' The divinity
student often sat in the shopkeeper's pew on Sabbath-days, and after
sermon they never went home till they had again visited John Knox's
grave. And as they turned homeward, old Meine would lay his hand on
young Rutherford's shoulder and say: 'Knoxes will be needed in Edinburgh
again, before all is over, and who knows but you may be elect, my lad, to
be one of them?'
Barbara Hamilton, who lived above her husband's shop, was almost more
young Rutherford's intimate friend than even her intimate husband.
Barbara Hamilton was both a woman of eminent piety and of a high and bold
public spirit. And stories are still told in the Wodrow Books of her
interest and influence in the affairs of the Kirk and its silenced
ministers. The godly old couple had two children: John, called after his
father, and Barbara, called after her mother, and Barbara assisted her
mother in the house, while John ran errands and assisted his father.
Rutherford and the little boy had made a great friendship while the
latter was still a boy; and one of Rutherford's fellow-students had made
a still deeper friendship upstairs than any but the two friends
themselves suspected. Twenty years after this Barbara Hume will receive
a letter from Samuel Rutherford, written in the Jerusalem Chamber at
Westminster, consoling and sanctifying her for the death of his old
friend William Hume, lately chaplain in the Covenanters' army at
Newcastle.
By the time that Rutherford was minister at Anwoth, and then prisoner in
Aberdeen, John Meine, junior, had grown up to be almost a minister
himself. He is not yet a minister, but he is now a divinity student,
hard at work at his books, and putting on the shopkeeper's apron an hour
every afternoon to let his father have a rest. The old merchant used to
rise at all hours in the morning, and spend the early summer mornings on
Arthur's Seat with his Psalm-book in his hand, and the winter mornings at
his shop fire, reading translations from the Continental Reformers,
comparing them with his Bible, singing Psalms by himself and offering
prayer. Till his student son felt, as he stood behind the counter for an
hour in the afternoon, that he was like Aaron and Hur holding up his
father's praying and prevailing hands.
There have always been speculative difficulties and animated debates in
our Edinburgh Theological Societies, and, from the nature of the study,
from the nature of the human mind, and from the nature of the Scottish
mind, there will always be. John Meine's difficulties were not the same
difficulties that exercise the minds of the young divines in our day, but
they were anxious and troublesome enough to him, and he naturally turned
to his old friend at Anwoth for counsel and advice. When Rutherford came
in to Edinburgh, there was always a prophet's chamber in Barbara
Hamilton's house ready for him; and when the winter session came to a
close her young son would set off to Anwoth with a thousand questions in
his head. But Aberdeen was too far away, and, though the posts of that
day were expensive and uncertain, the old merchant did not grudge to see
his son's letters sent off to Samuel Rutherford. Samuel Rutherford knew
that John Meine, junior, was not shallow in his divinity, young as he
was, nor an entire stranger to sanctification, else he would not have
written that still extant letter back to him:--'I have little of Christ
in this prison, little but desires. All my present stock of Christ is
some hunger for Him; I cannot say but that I am rich in that. But,
blessed be my Lord, who taketh me as I am. Christ had only one summer in
His year, and shall we insist on two? My love to your father. And, for
yourself, if you would be a deep divine, I recommend you to
sanctification.' What with his father and his mother, his books, his
acquaintance with Rutherford and Hume, and, best of all, his acquaintance
with his own evil heart, young John Meine must have been a somewhat deep
divine already, else Rutherford would not have cast such pearls of
experience down before him.
A divine, according to our division of labour, is a man who has chosen as
his life-work to study the things of God; the things, that is, of God in
Christ, in Scripture, in the Church, and in the heart and life of man.
John and James and Peter and Andrew ceased to be fishermen, and became
divines when Christ said to them 'Follow me.' And after seventy years of
sanctification the second son of Zebedee had at last attained to divinity
enough to receive the Revelation, to write it out, and to be called by
the early Church John the Divine.
But what is this process of sanctification that makes a young man already
a deep divine? What is sanctification? Rutherford had a deep hand in
drawing up the well-known definition, and, therefore, we may take it as
not far from the truth: 'Sanctification is the work of God's free grace,
whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are
enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness.' That,
or something like that, was the recipe that Samuel Rutherford sent south
to John Meine, student of divinity, with the assurance that, if he
followed it close enough and long enough, it would result in making him a
deep divine. I wonder if he took the recipe; I wonder if he kept to it;
I wonder how he pictured to himself the image of God; I wonder, nay, I
know, how he felt as he submitted his whole man--body, soul, and
spirit--to the renewing of the Holy Ghost. And did he begin and continue
to die more and more unto sin, till he died altogether to this sinful
world, and live more and more unto righteousness, till he went to live
with Knox, and Rutherford, and Hume, and his father and mother in the
Land of Life?
'Did he begin with regeneration?' Dr. John Duncan, of the New College,
asked his daughter, one Sabbath when she had come home from church full
of praise of a sermon she had just heard on sanctification. Dr. Duncan
was perhaps the deepest divine this century has seen in Edinburgh; and
his divinity took its depth from the same study and the same exercise
that Rutherford recommended to John Meine. Dr. Duncan was a great
scholar, but it was not his scholarship that made him such a singularly
deep divine. He was a profound philosopher also; but neither was it his
philosophy. He was an immense reader also; but neither was it the piles
of books; it was, he tells us, first the new heart that he got as a
student in Aberdeen, and then it was the lifelong conflict that went on
within him between the old heart and the new. And it is this that makes
sanctification rank and stand out as the first and the oldest of all the
experimental sciences. Long before either of the Bacons were born, the
humblest and most obscure of God's saints were working out their own
salvation on the most approved scientific principles and methods. Long
before science and philosophy had discovered and set their seal to that
method, the Church of Christ had taught it to all her true children, and
all her best divines had taken a deep degree by means of it. What
experimentalists were David and Asaph and Isaiah and Paul; and that, as
the subtlest and deepest sciences must be pursued, not upon foreign
substances but upon themselves, upon their own heart, and mind, and will,
and disposition, and conversation, and character. Aristotle says that
'Young men cannot possess practical judgment, because practical judgment
is employed upon individual facts, and these are learned only by
experience, and a youth has not experience, for experience is gained only
by a course of years.'
'A truly great divine,' was Jonathan Edwards' splendid certificate to our
own Thomas Boston. Now, when we read his _Memoirs_, written by himself,
we soon see what it was that made Boston such a truly great and deep
divine. It was not the number of his books, for he tells us how he was
pained when a brother minister opened his book-press and smiled at its
few shelves. 'I may be a great bookman,' writes Rutherford to Lady
Kenmure, 'and yet be a stark idiot in the things of Christ.' It was not
his knowledge of Hebrew, though he almost discovered that hidden language
in Ettrick. No, but it was his discovery of himself, and his
experimental study of his own heart. 'My duties, the best of them, would
damn me; they must all be washed with myself in that precious blood.
Though I cannot be free of sin, God Himself knows that He would be
welcome to make havoc of all my lusts to-night, and to make me holy. I
know no lust I would not be content to part with to-night. The first
impression on my spirit this morning was my utter inability to put away
sin. I saw that it was as possible for a rock to raise itself as it was
for me to raise my heart from sin to holiness.'
But the study of divinity is not a close profession: a profession for men
only, and from which women are shut out; nor is the method of it shut off
from any woman or any man. 'I counsel you to study sanctification,'
wrote Rutherford, the same year to the Lady Cardoness. And if you think
that Rutherford was a closet mystic and an unpractical and head-carried
enthusiast, too good for this rough world, read his letter to Lady
Cardoness, and confess your ignorance of this great and good man. 'Deal
kindly with your tenants,' he writes, 'and let your conscience be your
factor'; and again, 'When your husband's passion overcomes him, my
counsel to your ladyship is, that a soft answer putteth away wrath.' And
lastly, 'Let it not be said that the Lord hath forsaken your house
because of your neglect of the Sabbath-day and its exercises. I counsel
you to study sanctification among your tenants, and beside your husband,
and among your children and your guests. Your lawful and loving pastor,
in his only, only Lord,--SAMUEL RUTHERFORD.