ave had, comparatively speaking, little
or no interest for us. What think ye of sin? is the crucial question we
put to any character, scriptural or ecclesiastical, who claims our time
and our attention. If they are right about sin, they are all the more
likely to be right about everything else; and if they are either wrong or
only shallow about sin, their teaching and their experience on other
matters are not likely to be of much value or much interest to us. We
have had written over our portals against all comers: Know thyself if
thou wouldst either interest us or benefit us, or with the understanding
and the spirit worship with us. And all the true Rutherford circle,
without one exception, have known the true secret and have given the true
password. Their keen sense and scriptural estimate of the supreme evil
of sin first made them correspondents of Rutherford's; and as that sense
and estimate grew in them they passed on into an inner and a still more
inner circle of those Scottish saints and martyrs who corresponded with
Rutherford, and closed, with so much honour and love, around him. And
the two Guthries, James and William, as we shall see, were famous even in
that day for their praying and for their preaching about sin.

There is an excellent story told of James Guthrie's family worship in the
manse of Stirling, that bears not unremotely on the matter we have now on
hand. Guthrie was wont to pray too much, both at the family altar and in
the pulpit, as if he had been alone with his own heart and God. And he
carried that bad habit at last to such a length in his family, that he
almost drove poor James Cowie, his man-servant, out of his senses, till
when Cowie could endure no longer to be singled out and exposed and
denounced before the whole family, he at last stood up with some boldness
before his master and demanded to be told out, as man to man, and not in
that cruel and injurious way, what it was he had done that made his
master actually every day thus denounce and expose him. 'O James, man,
pardon me, pardon me. I was, I see now, too much taken up with my own
heart and its pollutions to think enough of you and the rest.' 'It was
that, and the like of that,' witnessed Cowie, 'that did me and my wife
more good than all my master's well-studied sermons.' The intimacy and
tenderness of the minister and his man went on deeper and grew closer,
till at the end we find Cowie reading to him at his own request