aid Amen, his opening sentences were remembered, and taken
down, and they stand to this day the most scriptural and the most
complete answer to that unanswerable question that we have in any creed
or catechism of the Christian Church.

As her best tribute to the talents and services of her youngest
Commissioner, the Edinburgh Assembly of 1648 appointed Gillespie her
Moderator; but his health was fast failing, and he died in the December
of that year, in the thirty-sixth year of his age. The inscription on
his tombstone at Kirkcaldy ends with these sober and true words: 'A man
profound in genius, mild in disposition, acute in argument, flowing in
eloquence, unconquered in mind. He drew to himself the love of the good,
the envy of the bad, and the admiration of all.' Such was the life and
work of George Gillespie, one of the most intimate and confidential
correspondents of Samuel Rutherford;--for it was to him that Rutherford
wrote the words now before us, 'Our apprehensions are not canonical.'

Every line of life has its own language, its own peculiar vocabulary,
that none but its experts, and those who have been brought up to it,
know. Go up to the Parliament House and you will hear the advocates and
judges talking to one another in a professional speech that the learned
layman no more than the ignorant can understand. Our doctors, again,
have a shorthand symbolism that only themselves and the chemists
understand. And so it is with every business and profession; each
several trade strikes out a language for itself. And so does divinity,
and, especially, experimental divinity, of which Rutherford's letters are
full. We not only need a glossary for the obsolete Scotch, but we need
the most simple and everyday expressions of the things of the soul
explained to us till once we begin to speak and to write those
expressions ourselves. There are judges and advocates and doctors and
specialists of all kinds among us who will only be able to make a far-off
guess at the meaning of my text, just as I could only make a far-off
guess at some of their trade texts. This technical term, 'apprehension,'
does not once occur in the Bible, and only once or twice in Shakespeare.
'Our death is most in apprehension,' says that master of expression; and,
again, he says that 'we cannot outfly our apprehensions.' And Milton has
it once in _Samson_, who says:--

'Thoughts, my tormentors, armed with deadly stings,
Mangle my appr