apprehension in your death, recollect that your apprehensions are not
canonical.' And the dying man answered: 'There is nothing that I have
done that can stand the touchstone of God's justice. Christ is my all,
and I am nothing.'

XIX. JOHN FERGUSHILL

'Ho, ye that have no money, come and buy in the poor man's
market.'--_Rutherford_.

It makes us think when we find two such men as Samuel Rutherford and John
Fergushill falling back for their own souls on a Scripture like this. We
naturally think of Scriptures like this as specially sent out to the
chief of sinners; to those men who have sold themselves for naught, or,
at least, to new beginners in the divine life. We do not readily think
of great divines and famous preachers like Rutherford, or of godly and
able pastors like Fergushill, as at all either needing such Scriptures as
this, or as finding their own case at all met in them. But it is surely
a great lesson to us all--a great encouragement and a great rebuke--to
find two such saintly men as the ministers of Anwoth and Ochiltree
reassuring and heartening one another about the poor man's market as they
do in their letters to one another. And their case is just another
illustration of this quite familiar fact in the Church of Christ, that
the preachers who press their pulpits deepest into the doctrines of
grace, and who, at the same time, themselves make the greatest
attainments in the life of grace, are just the men, far more than any of
their hearers, both to need and to accept the simplest, plainest, freest,
fullest offer of the Gospel. If the men of the house of Israel will not
accept the peace you preach to them, said our Lord to His first apostles,
then take that peace home to yourselves. And how often has that been
repeated in the preaching of the Gospel since the days of Peter and John!
How often have our best preachers preached their best sermons to
themselves! 'I preached the following Lord's Day,' says Boston in his
diary, 'on "Why art thou cast down, O my soul?" and my sermon was mostly
on my own account.' And it was just because Boston preached so often in
that egoistical way that the people of Ettrick were able to give such a
good account of what they heard. Weep yourselves, if you would have your
readers weep, said the shrewd old Roman poet to the shallow poetasters of
his Augustan day. And the reproof and the instruction come up from every
pew to every pulpit still. 'F