nd.' But
persecution from England and controversy at home so embittered
Rutherford's sweet and gracious spirit that passages like that are but
few and far between. But let him away out into pure theology, and,
especially, let him get his wings on the person, and the work, and the
glory of Christ, and few theologians of any age or any school rise to a
larger air, or command a wider scope, or discover a clearer eye of
speculation than Rutherford, till we feel exactly like the laird of
Glanderston, who, when Rutherford left a controversial passage in a
sermon and went on to speak of Christ, cried out in the church--'Ay, hold
you there, minister; you are all right there!' A domestic controversy
that arose in the Church of Scotland towards the end of Rutherford's life
so separated Rutherford from Dickson and Blair that Rutherford would not
take part with Blair, the 'sweet, majestic-looking man,' in the Lord's
Supper. 'Oh, to be above,' Blair exclaimed, 'where there are no
misunderstandings!' It was this same controversy that made John
Livingstone say in a letter to Blair that his wife and he had had more
bitterness over that dispute than ever they had tasted since they knew
what bitterness meant. Well might Rutherford say, on another such
occasion, 'It is hard when saints rejoice in the sufferings of saints,
and when the redeemed hurt, and go nigh to hate the redeemed.' Watch and
pray, my brethren, lest in controversy--ephemeral and immaterial
controversy--you also go near to hate and hurt one another, as Rutherford
did.

And then, what strength, combined with what tenderness, there is in
Rutherford! In all my acquaintance with literature I do not know any
author who has two books under his name so unlike one another, two books
that are such a contrast to one another, as _Lex Rex_ and the _Letters_.
A more firmly built argument than _Lex Rex_, an argument so clamped
together with the iron bands of scholastic and legal lore, is not to be
met with in any English book; a more lawyer-looking production is not in
all the Advocates' Library than just _Lex Rex_. There is as much emotion
in the multiplication table as there is in _Lex Rex_; and then, on the
other hand, the _Letters_ have no other fault but this, that they are
overcharged with emotion. The _Letters_ would be absolutely perfect if
they were only a little more restrained and chastened in this one
respect. The pundit and the poet are the opposites and the ext