d captive of sin, yet my Lord can hew heaven out of worse timber
than I am, if worse there be.' And to Lady Kenmure: 'I am somebody in
the books of my friends, . . . but there are armies of thoughts within
me, saying the contrary, and laughing at the mistakes of my many friends.
Oh! if my inner side were only seen!' Ah no, my brethren, no land is so
fearful to them that are sent to search it out as their own heart. 'The
land,' said the ten spies, 'is a land that eateth up the inhabitants
thereof; the cities are walled up to heaven, and very great, and the
children of Anak dwell in them. We were in their sight as grasshoppers,
and so we were in our own sight.' Ah, no! no stair is so steep as the
stair of sanctification, no bread is so salt as that which is baked for a
man of God out of the wild oats of his past sin and his present
sinfulness. Even Joshua and Caleb, who brought back a good report of the
land, did not deny that the children of Anak were there, or that their
walls went up to heaven, or that they, the spies, were as grasshoppers
before their foes: Caleb and Joshua only said that, in spite of all that,
if the Lord delighted in His people, He both could and would give them a
land flowing with milk and honey. And be it recorded and remembered to
his credit and his praise that, with all his self-discoveries and self-
accusings, Rutherford did not utter one single word of doubt or despair;
so far from that was he, that in one of his letters to Hugh M'Kail he
tells us that some of his correspondents have written to him that he is
possibly too joyful under the cross. Blunt old Knockbrex, for one, wrote
to his old minister to restrain somewhat his ecstasy. So true was it,
what Rutherford said of himself to David Dickson, that he was 'made up of
extremes.' So he was, for I know no man among all my masters in personal
religion who unites greater extremes in himself than Samuel Rutherford.
Who weeps like Rutherford over his banishment from Anwoth, while all the
time who is so feasted in Christ's palace in Aberdeen? Who loathes
himself like Rutherford? Not Bunyan, not Brea, not Boston; and, at the
same time, who is so transported and lost to himself in the beauty and
sweetness of Christ? As we read his raptures we almost say with cautious
old Knockbrex, that possibly Rutherford is somewhat too full of ecstasy
for this fallen, still unsanctified, and still so slippery world.

It took two men to carry back the