advices the old minister gave the new beginner were
these:—That he should remain unmarried
for four years, in order to give himself up wholly
to his great work; and that both in preaching and
in prayer he should be as succinct as possible so
as not to weary his hearers; and, lastly, ’Oh,
study God well and your own heart.’ We
have five letters of Rutherford’s to this master
of the human heart, and it is in the third of these
that Rutherford opens his heart to his father in the
Gospel, and tells him that he is made up of extremes.
In every way that was so. It is a common remark
with all Rutherford’s biographers and editors
and commentators what extremes met in that little
fair man. The finest thing that has ever been
written on Rutherford is Mr. Taylor Innes’s
lecture in the Evangelical Succession series.
And the intellectual extremes that met in Rutherford
are there set forth by Rutherford’s acute and
sympathetic critic at some length. For one thing,
the greatest speculative freedom and theological breadth
met in Rutherford with the greatest ecclesiastical
hardness and narrowness. I do not know any author
of that day, either in England or in Scotland, either
Prelatist or Puritan, who shows more imaginative freedom
and speculative power than Rutherford does in his
Christ Dying, unless it is his still greater
contemporary, Thomas Goodwin. And it is with
corresponding distress that we read some of Rutherford’s
polemical works, and even the polemical parts of his
heavenly Letters. There is a remarkable passage
in one of his controversial books that reminds us of
some of Shakespeare’s own tributes to England:
’I judge that in England the Lord hath many
names and a fair company that shall stand at the side
of Christ when He shall render up the kingdom to the
Father; and that in that renowned land there be men
of all ranks, wise, valorous, generous, noble, heroic,
faithful, religious, gracious, learned.’
Rutherford’s whole passage is worthy to stand
beside Shakespeare’s great passage on ‘this
blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.’
But persecution from England and controversy at home
so embittered Rutherford’s sweet and gracious
spirit that passages like that are but few and far
between. But let him away out into pure theology,
and, especially, let him get his wings on the person,
and the work, and the glory of Christ, and few theologians
of any age or any school rise to a larger air, or
command a wider scope, or discover a clearer eye of
speculation than Rutherford, till we feel exactly like
the laird of Glanderston, who, when Rutherford left
a controversial passage in a sermon and went on to
speak of Christ, cried out in the church—’Ay,
hold you there, minister; you are all right there!’
A domestic controversy that arose in the Church of
Scotland towards the end of Rutherford’s life
so separated Rutherford from Dickson and Blair that
Rutherford would not take part with Blair, the ‘sweet,
majestic-looking man,’ in the Lord’s Supper.
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