sees his pride, his moroseness, his kept-up anger and his cruelty all coming out in one who is his very image.  While many a mother sees her own youthful shallowness, frivolity, untruthfulness, deceit and parsimony in her daughter, for whose morality and religion she would willingly give up her own soul.  And then our children, who were to be our staff and our crown, so early take their own so wilful and so unfilial way in life.  They betake themselves, for no reason so much as just for intended disobedience and impudent independence, to other pursuits and pleasures, to other political and ecclesiastical parties than we have ever gone with.  And when it is too late we see how we have again mishandled and mismanaged our families as we had mishandled and mismanaged our own youth, till it is only one grey head here and another there that does not go down to the grave under a crushing load of domestic sorrow.  When the best things in life are so poisoned by sin, how bitter is that poison!

If an unpoisoned youth and an unembittered family life are some of the sweetest things this earth can taste, then a circle of close and true and dear friendships does not come very far behind them.  Rutherford had plenty of trouble in his family life that he used to set down to the sins of his youth; and then the way he poisoned so many of his best friendships by his so poisonous party spirit is a humbling history to read.  He quarrelled irreconcilably with his very best friends over matters that were soon to be as dead as Aaron’s golden calf, and which never had much more life or decency in them.  The matters were so small and miserable over which Rutherford quarrelled with such men as David Dickson and Robert Blair that I could not interest you in them at this time of day even if I tried.  They were as parochial, as unsubstantial, and as much made up of prejudice and ill-will as were some of those matters that have served under Satan to poison so often our own private and public and religious life.  Rutherford actually refused to assist Robert Blair at the Lord’s Supper, so embittered and so black was his mind against his dearest friend.  ‘I would rather,’ said sweet-tempered Robert Blair, ’have had my right hand hacked off at the cross of Edinburgh than have written such things.’  ‘My wife and I,’ wrote dear John Livingstone, ’have had more bitterness together over these matters than we have ever had since we knew what bitterness was.’  And no one in that day had a deeper hand in spreading that bitterness than just the hand that wrote Rutherford’s letters.  There is no fear of our calling any man master if we once look facts fair in the face.