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