his letters this same note of admiration and
wonder runs--that he has been taken from among the pots and his wings
covered with silver and gold. Truly, in his case the most seraphic
Saintliness was not forfeited, and we who read his books may well bless
God it was so.

And then, experimentally also, what extremes met in our author! Pascal
in Paris and Rutherford in Anwoth and St. Andrews were at the very
opposite poles ecclesiastically from one another. I do not like to think
what Rutherford would have said of Pascal, but I cannot embody what I
have to say of Rutherford's experimental extremes better than just by
this passage taken from the _Thoughts_: 'The Christian religion teaches
the righteous man that it lifts him even to a participation in the divine
nature; but that, in this exalted state, he still bears within him the
fountain of all corruption, which renders him during his whole life
subject to error and misery, to sin and death, while at the same time it
proclaims to the most wicked that they can still receive the grace of
their Redeemer.' And again, 'Did we not know ourselves full of pride,
ambition, lust, weakness, misery and injustice, we were indeed blind. . .
. What then can we feel but a great esteem for a religion that is so
well acquainted with the defects of man, and a great desire for the truth
of a religion that promises remedies so precious.' And yet again, what
others thought of him, and how they treated him, compared with what he
knew himself to be, caused Rutherford many a bitter reflection. Every
letter he got consulting him and appealing to him as if he had been God's
living oracle made him lie down in the very dust with shame and
self-abhorrence. Writing on one occasion to Robert Blair he told him
that his letter consulting him about some matter of Christian experience
had been like a blow in the face to him; it affects me much, said
Rutherford, that a man like you should have any such opinion of me. And,
apologising for his delay in replying to a letter of Lady Boyd's, he says
that he is put out of all love of writing letters because his
correspondents think things about him that he himself knows are not true.
'My white side comes out on paper--but at home there is much black work.
All the challenges that come to me are true.' There was no man then
alive on the earth so much looked up to and consulted in the deepest
matters of the soul, in the secrets of the Lord with the soul, as