s God!
Away from yon heaven, that blissful abode
Where the rivers of pleasures flow o'er the bright plains,
And the noon-tide of glory eternally reigns;
Where the saints of all ages in harmony meet,
Their Saviour and brethren transported to greet;
While the songs of salvation exultingly roll,
And the love of the Lord is the bliss of the soul.'

IX. JEAN BROWN

'Sin poisons all our enjoyments.'--_Rutherford_.

Jean Brown was one of the selectest associates of the famous Rutherford
circle. We do not know so much of Jean Brown outside of the Rutherford
Letters as we would like to know, but her son, John Brown of Wamphray, is
very well known to every student of the theology and ecclesiastical
history of Scotland in the second half of the seventeenth century. 'I
rejoice to hear about your son John. I had always a great love to dear
John Brown. Remember my love to John Brown. I never could get my love
off that man.' And all Rutherford's esteem and affection for Jean
Brown's gifted and amiable son was fully justified in the subsequent
history of the hard-working and well-persecuted parish minister of
Wamphray. Letter 84 is a very remarkable piece of writing even in
Rutherford, and the readers of this letter would gladly learn more than
even its eloquent pages tell them about the woman who could draw such a
letter out of Samuel Rutherford's mind and heart, the woman who was also
the honoured mother of such a student and such a minister as John Brown
of Wamphray. This letter has a _bite_ in it--to use one of Rutherford's
own words in the course of it--all its own. And it is just that profound
and pungent element in this letter, that bite in it, that has led me to
take this remarkable letter for my topic to-night.

There had been some sin in Samuel Rutherford's student days, or some
stumble sufficiently of the nature of sin, to secretly poison the whole
of his subsequent life. Sin is such a poisonous thing that even a
mustard-seed of it planted in a man's youth will sometimes spring up into
a thicket of terrible trouble both to himself and to many other people
all his and all their days. An almost invisible drop of sin let fall
into the wellhead of life will sometimes poison the whole broad stream of
life, as well as all the houses and fields and gardens, with all their
flowers and fruits, that are watered out of it. When any misfortune
falls upon a Hebrew household, when any Jewi