'I wish that I could satisfy your desire in drawing up and framing for
you a Christian Directory.'--_Rutherford_.
Samuel Rutherford and John Fleming, Bailie of Leith, were old and fast
friends. Away back in the happy days when Rutherford was still a
student, and was still haunting the back-shop of old John Meine in the
Canongate of Edinburgh, he had formed a fast friendship with the young
wood-merchant of Leith. And all the trials and separations of life,
instead of deadening their love for one another, or making them forget
one another, had only drawn the two men the closer to one another. For
when Rutherford's two great troubles came upon him,--first his dismissal
from the Latin regency in Edinburgh University, and then his banishment
from his pulpit at Anwoth,--John Fleming came forward on both occasions
with money, and with letters, and with visits that were even better than
money, to the penniless and friendless professor and exiled pastor. 'Sir,
I thank you kindly for your care of me and of my brother. I hope it is
laid up for you and remembered in heaven.'
Robert M'Ward, the first editor of Rutherford's _Letters_, with all his
assiduity, was only able to recover four letters out of the heap of
correspondence that had passed between the rich timber-merchant of Leith
and the exiled minister, but, those four tell us volumes, both about the
intimacy of the two men and about the depth and the worth of the bailie's
character. Fleming wrote a letter to Rutherford in the spring of 1637,
which must have run in some such terms as these:--'My life is fast ebbing
away, and I am not yet begun aright to live. I am in mid-time of my
days. I sometimes feel that I am coming near the end of them; and what
evil days they have been! My business that my father left me is
prosperous. I have a good and kind wife, as you know. My children are
not wholly without promise. My place in this town is far too honourable
for me, and I have many dear friends among the godly both in Leith and in
Edinburgh. But I feel bitterly that I have no business to mix myself
among them, and to be counted one of them. For, what with the burdensome
affairs of this great seaport, and my own growing business, my days and
my nights are like a weaver's shuttle. I intend and I begin well, but
another year and another year comes to an end and I am just where I was.
I have had some success, by God's blessing, in making money, but I am a
bankrupt before Him in my soul. My inward life is a ravelled hesp, and I
need guidance and direction if I am ever to come out of this confusion
and to come to any good. Protestant and Presbyterian as I am,' he goes
on, 'if I could only find a director who would take trouble with me and
command me as I take trouble with and command my servants, I vow to you
that I would put the reins without reserve into his hands. Will you not
take me in hand? You know me of old. We used to talk in dear old John
Meine's back-shop on week-nights and upstairs on Sabbath nights about
these things. And long as it is since we saw much of one another, I feel
that you know me out and in, and through and through, as no one else
knows me. Tell me, then, what I am to do with myself. I will try to do
what you tell me, for I am wearied and worn out with my stagnant and
miserable life. Pity me, Mr. Samuel, my honoured and dear friend, for my
pirn is almost run out, and I am not near saved.'
'My worthy and dearly beloved brother in the Lord,' replied Rutherford to
Fleming, 'I dare not take it upon me to lay down rules and directions for
your inner life. I have not the judiciousness, nor the experience, nor
the success in the inner life myself that would justify me. And,
besides, there is no lack of such Directories as you ask me for. Search
the Scriptures. Buy Daniel Rogers, and Richard Greenham, and especially
William Perkins. My own wall is too much broken down, my own garden is
too much overrun with weeds; I dare not attempt to lay down the law to
you. But I will do this since you are so importunate; I will tell you,
as you have told me, some of my own mistakes and failings and shipwrecks,
and the rocks on which I have foundered may thus, be made to carry a
lantern to light your ship safely past them.'
'Fool, said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write;
and, like Sir Philip Sydney, Samuel Rutherford looked into his own heart,
and drew a Directory out of it for the better Christian conduct of his
friend John Fleming.
1. Now--would you believe it?--the first thing Samuel Rutherford found
his own heart accusing him in before God was, of all things, the way he
had wasted his time. Would you believe it that the student who was
summer and winter in his study at three o'clock in the morning, and the
minister who, as his people boasted, was always preparing his sermons,
always visiting his people, always writing books, and always entertaining
strangers,--would you believe it that one of his worst consciences was
for the bad improvement of his time? What an insatiable thirst for
absolute and unearthly perfection God has awakened in the truly gracious
heart! Give the truly gracious heart a little godliness and it cries out
night and day for more. Give it more, and it straightway demands all.
Give it all and it still accuses you that it has literally got none at
all. Samuel Rutherford gave all his time and all his strength to his
pastoral and his professorial duties, and yet when he looked into his own
heart to write a letter to Bailie Fleming out of it, his whole heart
condemned him to his face because he had so mismanaged his time, and had
not aright redeemed it. 'You complain that your time is fast speeding
away, and that you have not even begun to employ it well. So is mine. I
give a good part of my time to my business, as you say you do to yours;
but, just like you, that leaves me no time to give to God. God forgive
me for the way I forget Him and neglect Him all the time that I am
bustling about in the things of His house! Let us both begin, and me
especially, to give some of God's best earthly gift back to Him again.
Let us spare a little of His time that He allows us and bestow it back
again upon Himself. He values nothing so much as a little of our
allotted time. Let us meditate on Him more, and pray more to Him. Let
us throw up ejaculations of prayer to Him more and more while we are at
our daily employments; you in the timber-yard, down among the ships, at
the desk, and at the Council-table; and I among my books, and among my
people, and in my pulpit. These are always golden moments to me, and why
they do not multiply themselves into hours and days and years is to me
but another proof of my deep depravity. And, John Fleming, sanctify you
the Sabbath. As you love and value your immortal soul, sanctify and do
not waste and desecrate the Sabbath. Let no man steal from you a single
hour of the Sabbath-day. Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work,
but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.'
2. And again and again in his letters to Fleming Rutherford returns to
the sins of the tongue. Rutherford himself was a great sinner by his
tongue, and he seems to have taken it for granted that the bailies of
Leith were all in the same condemnation. 'Observe your words well,' he
writes out of the bitterness of his own heart. 'Make conscience of all
your conversations.' Cut off a right hand, pluck out a right eye, says
Christ. And I wonder that half of His disciples have not bitten out
their offending tongues. What a world of injury and of all kinds of
iniquity has the tongue always and everywhere been! In Jerusalem in
David's day; and still in Jerusalem in James's day; in Anwoth and
Aberdeen and St. Andrews in Rutherford's day; and in Leith in John
Fleming's day; and still in all these places in our own day. The tongue
can no man tame, and no wonder, for it is set on fire of hell. 'I shall
show you,' says Rutherford, 'what I would fain be at myself, howbeit I
always come short of my purpose.' Rutherford made many enemies both as a
preacher and as a doctrinal and an ecclesiastical controversialist. He
was a hot, if not a bad-blooded man himself, and he raised both hot and
bad blood in other men. He was a passionate-hearted man, was Rutherford;
he would not have been our sainted Samuel Rutherford if he had not had a
fast and a high-beating heart. And his passionate heart was not all
spent in holy love to Jesus Christ, though much of it was. For the dregs
of it, the unholy scum and froth of it, came out too much in his books of
debate and in his differences with his own brethren. His high-mettled
and almost reckless sense of duty brought him many enemies, and it was
his lifelong sanctification to try to treat his enemies aright, and to
keep his own heart and tongue and pen clean and sweet towards them. And
he divined that among the merchants and magistrates of Leith, anger and
malice, rivalry and revenge were not unknown any more than they were
among their betters in the Presbytery and the General Assembly. He knew,
for Fleming had told him, that his very prosperity and his father's
prosperity had procured for Fleming many enemies. The Norway timber
trade was not all in the Fleming hands for nothing. The late Council
election also had left Fleming many enemies, and his simple duty at the
Council-table daily multiplied them. It was quite unaccountable to him
how enemies sprang up all around him, and it was well that he had such an
open-eyed and much-experienced correspondent as Rutherford was, to whom
he could confide such ghastly discoveries, and such terrible shocks to
faith and trust and love. 'Watch well this one thing, Bailie Fleming,
even your deep desire for revenge. Be sure that it is in your heart in
Leith to seek revenge as well as it is in my heart here in Aberdeen.
Watch, as you would the workings of a serpent, the workings of your sore-
hurt heart in the matter of its revenges. Watch how the calamities that
come on your enemies refresh and revive you. Watch how their prosperity
and their happiness depress and darken you. Disentangle the desire for
revenge and the delight in it out of the rank thickets of your wicked
heart; drag that desire and delight out of its native darkness; know it,
name it, and it will be impossible but that you will hate it like death
and hell, and yourself on account of it. Do you honestly wish, as you
say you do, for direction as to your duty to your many enemies in Leith,
and to God and your own soul among them? Then begin with this: watch and
find yourself out in your deep desire for revenge, and in your secret
satisfaction and delight to hear it and to speak it. Begin with that;
and, then, long after that, and as the divine reward of that, you will be
enabled to begin to try to love your enemies, to bless them that curse
you, to do good to them that hate you, and to pray for them that
despitefully use you and persecute you. You need no Directory for these
things from me when you have the Sermon on the Mount in your own New
Testament.'
3. And, still looking into his own heart and writing straight out of it,
Rutherford says to Fleming, 'I have been much challenged in my
conscience, and still am, for not referring all I do to God as my last
and chiefest end.' Which is just Samuel Rutherford's vivid way of taking
home to himself the first question of the Shorter Catechism which he had
afterwards such a deep hand in drawing up. I do not know any other
author who deals so searchingly with this great subject as that prince
among experimental divines, Thomas Shepard, the founder of Yale in New
England. His insight is as good as his style is bad. His English is
execrable, but his insight is nothing short of divine. 'The pollution of
the whole man, and of all his actions,' he says in his _Parable of the
Ten Virgins_, 'consists chiefly in his self-seeking, in making ourselves
our utmost end. This makes our most glorious actions vile; this stains
them all. And so the sanctification of a sinner consists chiefly in
making the Lord our utmost end in all that we do. Every man living seeks
himself as his last end and chiefest good, and out of this captivity no
human power can redeem us. . . . Make this your last and best end--to
live to Christ and to do His will. This is your last end; this is the
end of your being born again--nay, of your being redeemed by His
blood--that you may live unto Christ.' And in the same author's
_Meditations and Spiritual Experiences_, he says, 'On Sabbath morning I
saw that I had a secret eye to my own name in all that I did, and I
judged myself to be worthy of death because I was not weaned from all
created glory, from all honour and praise, and from the esteem of men. .
. . On Sabbath, again, when I came home, I saw into the deep hypocrisy
of my own heart, because in my ministry I sought to comfort and quicken
the people that the glory might reflect on me as well as on God. . . . On
the evening before the sacrament I saw it to be my duty to sequester
myself from all other things and to prepare me for the next day. And I
saw that I must pitch first on the right end. I saw that mine own ends
were to procure honour to myself and not to the Lord. There was some
poor little eye in seeking the name and glory of Christ, yet I sought not
it only, but my own glory, too. After my Wednesday sermon I saw the
pride of my heart acting thus, that when I had done public work my heart
would presently look out and inquire whether I had done it well or ill.
Hereupon I saw my vileness to be to make men's opinions my rule, and that
made me vile in mine own eyes, and that more and more daily.' 'I have
been much challenged,' writes Rutherford to Fleming, 'because I do not
refer all I do to God as my last end: that I do not eat and drink and
sleep and journey and speak and think for God.' And, the fanatic that he
is, he seems to think that that is the calling and chief end not only of
ministers like himself and Shepard, but of the bailies and
timber-merchants of Edinburgh and Leith also.
4. Lastly, in the closing sentences of this inexhaustible letter,
Rutherford says to his waiting and attentive correspondent: 'Growth in
grace, sir, should be cared for by you above all other things.' And so
it should. Literally and absolutely above all other things. Above good
health, above good name, above wealth, and station, and honour. These
things, take them all together, if need be, are to be counted loss in
order to gain growth in grace. But what is growth in grace? It is
growth in everything that is truly good; but Fleming, as he read his
Directory daily, would always think of growth in grace as the right
improvement of his remaining time, and, especially, its religious use and
dedication to God; as also of the government of his own untamed tongue;
the extinction of the desire for revenge, and of all delight in the
injury of his enemies; and, above all, and including all, in making God
his chief end in all that he did. How all-important, then, is a sound
and Scriptural Directory to instruct us how we are to grow in grace. And
how precious must that directory-letter have been to a man in dead
earnest like John Fleming. It was precious to his heart, you may be
sure, above all his ships, and all his woodyards, and all his fine
houses, and all his seats of honour. And if his growth in grace in Leith
has now become full-grown glory in Heaven, how does he there bless God to-
day that ever he met with Samuel Rutherford in old John Maine's shop in
his youth, and had him for a friend and a director all his after-days.
And when John Fleming at the table above forgets not all His benefits,
high up, you may be very sure, among them all he never forgets to put
Samuel Rutherford's letters; and, more especially, this very directory-
letter we have read here for our own direction and growth in grace this
Communion-Sabbath night.