3.  ’You complain bitterly of a dead ministry in your bounds.  I have heard as much.  But I will reply that a living ministry is not indispensable to a parish.  All our parishes ought to have it, and we ought to see to it that they all get it; but neither the conversion of sinners, nor the sanctification and comfort of God’s saints, is tied up to any man’s lips.  You will read your unread Bibles more:  you will buy more good books:  you will meet more in private converse and prayer:  and it will not be bad for you for a season to look above the pulpit, and to look Jesus Christ Himself more immediately in the face.’  As Fraser of Brea also said in a striking passage in his diary, so Rutherford says in his reply letter:  ’in your sore famine of the water of life, run your pipe right up to the fountain.’

4.  If the parishioners of Kilmacolm were severe on their minister it was not that they let themselves escape.  And there was something in their present letters that led Rutherford to warn them against a mistake that only people of the Kilmacolm type will ever fall into.  ’Some of the people of God,’ says their sharp-eyed censor, ’slander the grace of God in their own soul.’  And that is true of some of God’s best people still.  We meet with such people now and then in our own parishes to-day.  They are so possessed with penitence and humility; they have such high and inflexible and spiritual standards for measuring themselves by; the law has so fatally entered their innermost souls that they will not even admit or acknowledge what the grace of God has, to all other men’s knowledge, done in them.  Seek out, says Rutherford, the signs of true grace in yourselves as well as the signs of secret sin.  And when you have found such and such an indubitable sign of grace, say so.  Say this, and this, and this, pointing it out, is assuredly the work of God in my soul.  When you, after all defeat, really discover your soul growing in grace; in patience under injuries; in meekness under reproofs and corrections; in love for, or at least in peace of heart toward, those you at one time did not like, but disliked almost to downright hatred; in silent and assenting acceptance, if not yet in actual and positive enjoyment, of another man’s talents and success, gain and fame; in the decay and disappearance of party spirit, and in openness to all the good and the merit of other men; in prayerfulness; in liberality, and so on; when you cannot deny these things in yourself, then speak good of Christ, and do not traduce and backbite His work because it is in your own soul.  ’Some wretches murmur of want while all the time their money in the bank and their fat harvests make them liars.’  Rutherford thinks he has put his finger upon some such saintly liars in the kirk-session of Kilmacolm.