Samuel Rutherford
by J. C. Philpot
We wish to drop a few remarks on the leading features of
Rutherford's letters.
1. The amazing warmth and energy which seem to
flash through them as an electric flame must strike every gracious reader.
His heart and soul were all on fire, and his pen was as if the electric
conductor to transmit the sparks to paper and thence to the heart of his
correspondent. It was not with him as sometimes with us, "What shall I say
next?" or, "What have I to write about?" but, "How shall I soonest pour my
soul into the soul of my friend?"
2. The views and feelings which he had of time and
eternity are expressed in them with amazing force. What weight and
energy, for instance, are there in the following lines—"O thrice-blinded
souls, whose hearts are charmed and bewitched with dreams, shadows, night
vanities, and night fancies, of a miserable life of sin! Poor fools! who are
beguiled with painted things, and this world's fair weather, and smooth
promises, and rotten hopes. May not the devil laugh, to see us give away our
souls for the corrupt and counterfeit pleasures of sin? O for a sight of
eternity's glory, and a little tasting of the Lamb's marriage supper! How
far are we bereft of wit, to chase, and hunt, and run, until our souls be
out of breath, after a condemned happiness of our own making! O that we were
out of ourselves, and dead to this world, and this world dead and crucified
to us!"
3. His love to the Lord Jesus, and the breathings
and longings of his soul after his manifested presence, shine forth very
conspicuously in his Letters. He had such transporting views of his Person,
blood, righteousness, grace, and glory, that to those who never had any
powerful manifestation of the Lord Jesus, some of his expressions may seem
strained. Thus he wishes that the ocean were a sea of ink, and the expanded
sky a scroll on which he could write the praises of Jesus. These may seem
exaggerated expressions; but if millions of saints will find eternity too
short to see his beauty, behold his glory, and sing his praise, why should a
redeemed sinner on earth be grudged anticipating a foretaste of heaven? What
is a sea of ink to eternity, or the blue skies to the realms of endless day?
4. The godly, practical, and yet thoroughly
experimental admonitions that dropped from his pen, stamp Rutherford's
Letters with singular power and force. They carry a sharp edge, and yet are
so blended with tenderness and affection that the wound and the balm come
together. He is like one who sees a friend lying asleep on the edge of a
precipice. He roughly awakens him, and yet at the same moment catches him in
his arms, and bears him away from the danger with the affectionate chiding,
"Dear friend, how could you go to sleep on the top of the cliff?"
5. The pith and originality of expression in these
Letters are a marked feature in them, and have embalmed them from decay. No
writer will survive his own generation whose thoughts and expressions are
not stamped with that force and originality which mark them as peculiarly
his own. It is a man's own mint which stamps his coins and gives them
currency. Here Rutherford peculiarly shines; and by engrafting on his own
stock of original thoughts the forcible though homely Scotticisms to which
we have before alluded, he has, without intending it, become one of the most
forcible and original writers that has ever edified the church of God.