remes of
one another; and the pundit and the poet meet, as nowhere else that I
know of, in the author of _Lex Rex_ and the _Letters_.

Then, again, what extremes of beauty and sweetness there are in
Rutherford's style, too often intermingled with what carelessness and
disorder. What flashes of noblest thought, clothed in the most apt and
well-fitting words, on the same page with the most slatternly and down-at-
the-heel English. Both Dr. Andrew Bonar and Dr. Andrew Thomson have
given us selections from Rutherford's _Letters_ that would quite justify
us in claiming Rutherford as one of the best writers of English in his
day; but then we know out of what thickets of careless composition these
flowers have been collected. Both Gillespie and Rutherford ran a tilt at
Hooker; but alas for the equipment and the manners of our champions when
compared with the shining panoply and the knightly grace of the author of
the incomparable _Polity_.

And then, morally, as great extremes met in Rutherford as intellectually.
Newman has a fine sermon under a fine title, 'Saintliness not forfeited
by the Penitent.' 'No degree of sin,' he says, 'precludes the
acquisition of any degree of holiness, however high. No sinner so great,
but he may, through God's grace, become a saint ever so great.' And then
he goes on to illustrate that, and balance that, and almost to retract
and deny all that, in a way that all his admirers only too well know. But
still it stands true. A friend of mine once told me that it was to him
often the most delightful and profitable of Sabbath evening exercises
just to take down Newman's sermons and read their titles over again. And
this mere title, I feel sure, has encouraged and comforted many:
'Saintliness not forfeited by the Penitent.' And Samuel Rutherford's is
just another great name to be added to the noble roll of saintly
penitents we all have in our minds taken out of Scripture and Church
History. Neither great Saintliness nor great service was forfeited by
this penitent; and he is constantly telling us how the extreme of demerit
and the extreme of gracious treatment met in him; how he had at one time
destroyed himself, and how God had helped him; how, where sin had
abounded, grace had abounded much more. In one of the very last letters
he ever wrote--his letter to James Guthrie in 166l--he is still amazed
that God has not brought his sin to the Market Cross, to use his own
word. But all through