an who showed him all his own heart was
David Dickson. Dr. M'Crie says of David Dickson that he was singularly
successful in dissecting the human heart and in winning souls to the
Redeemer, and all that we know of Dickson bears out that high estimate.
When he was presiding on one occasion at the ordination of a young
minister, whom he had had some hand in bringing up, among the advices the
old minister gave the new beginner were these:--That he should remain
unmarried for four years, in order to give himself up wholly to his great
work; and that both in preaching and in prayer he should be as succinct
as possible so as not to weary his hearers; and, lastly, 'Oh, study God
well and your own heart.' We have five letters of Rutherford's to this
master of the human heart, and it is in the third of these that
Rutherford opens his heart to his father in the Gospel, and tells him
that he is made up of extremes.

In every way that was so. It is a common remark with all Rutherford's
biographers and editors and commentators what extremes met in that little
fair man. The finest thing that has ever been written on Rutherford is
Mr. Taylor Innes's lecture in the Evangelical Succession series. And the
intellectual extremes that met in Rutherford are there set forth by
Rutherford's acute and sympathetic critic at some length. For one thing,
the greatest speculative freedom and theological breadth met in
Rutherford with the greatest ecclesiastical hardness and narrowness. I
do not know any author of that day, either in England or in Scotland,
either Prelatist or Puritan, who shows more imaginative freedom and
speculative power than Rutherford does in his _Christ Dying_, unless it
is his still greater contemporary, Thomas Goodwin. And it is with
corresponding distress that we read some of Rutherford's polemical works,
and even the polemical parts of his heavenly Letters. There is a
remarkable passage in one of his controversial books that reminds us of
some of Shakespeare's own tributes to England: 'I judge that in England
the Lord hath many names and a fair company that shall stand at the side
of Christ when He shall render up the kingdom to the Father; and that in
that renowned land there be men of all ranks, wise, valorous, generous,
noble, heroic, faithful, religious, gracious, learned.' Rutherford's
whole passage is worthy to stand beside Shakespeare's great passage on
'this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Engla