'If you would be a deep divine I recommend you to
sanctification.'--_Rutherford_.

Old John Meine's shop was a great howf of Samuel Rutherford's all the
time of his student life in Edinburgh. Young Rutherford had got an
introduction to the Canongate shopkeeper from one of the elders of
Jedburgh, and the old shopkeeper and the young student at once took to
one another, and remained fast friends all their days. John Meine's shop
was so situated at a corner of the Canongate that Rutherford could see
the Tolbooth and John Knox's house as he looked up the street, and
Holyrood Palace as he looked down, and the young divine could never hear
enough of what the old shopkeeper had to tell him of Holyrood and its
doings on the one hand, and of the Reformer's house on the other. The
very paving-stones of the Canongate were full of sermons on the one hand,
and of satires on the other, in that day. 'He was an old man when he
came to live near my father's shop,' John Meine would say to the eager
student. 'But, even as an errand boy, taking parcels up his stair, I
felt what a good man's house I was in, and I used to wish I was already a
man, that I might either be a soldier or a minister.' The divinity
student often sat in the shopkeeper's pew on Sabbath-days, and after
sermon they never went home till they had again visited John Knox's
grave. And as they turned homeward, old Meine would lay his hand on
young Rutherford's shoulder and say: 'Knoxes will be needed in Edinburgh
again, before all is over, and who knows but you may be elect, my lad, to
be one of them?'

Barbara Hamilton, who lived above her husband's shop, was almost more
young Rutherford's intimate friend than even her intimate husband.
Barbara Hamilton was both a woman of eminent piety and of a high and bold
public spirit. And stories are still told in the Wodrow Books of her
interest and influence in the affairs of the Kirk and its silenced
ministers. The godly old couple had two children: John, called after his
father, and Barbara, called after her mother, and Barbara assisted her
mother in the house, while John ran errands and assisted his father.
Rutherford and the little boy had made a great friendship while the
latter was still a boy; and one of Rutherford's fellow-students had made
a still deeper friendship upstairs than any but the two friends
themselves suspected. Twenty years after this Barbara Hume will receive
a letter from Samuel Rutherford,