DEAR BROTHER, -- Ye complain that ye want a mark of the sound work of
grace and love in your soul. For answer, consider for your satisfaction
(till God send more) I John 3.14. And as for your complaint of
deadnes.~ and doubting. Christ will, I hope, take your deadness and you
together. They are bodies full of holes, running boils, and broken
bones which need mending, that Christ the Physician taketh up: whole
vessels are not for the Mediator Christ's art. Publicans, sinners,
whores, harlots, are ready market-wares for Christ. The only thing that
will bring sinners within a cast of Christ's drawing arm is that which
ye write of, some feeling of death and sin. That bringeth forth
complaints; and, therefore, out of sense complain more, and be more
acquaint with all the cramps, stitches, and soulswoonings that trouble
you. The more pain, and the more night-watching, and the more fevers,
the better. A soul bleeding to death, till Christ were sent for, and
cried for in all haste, to come and stem the blood, and close up the
hole in the wound with His own heart and balm, were a very good
disease, when many are dying of a whole heart. We have all too little
of hell-pain and terrors that way; nay, God send me such a hell as
Christ has promised to make a heaven of. Alas! I am not come that far
on the way, as to say in sad earnest, 'Lord Jesus, great and sovereign
Physician, here is a pained patient for Thee.' But the thing that we
mistake is the want of victory. We hold that to be the mark of one that
has no grace. Nay, say I, the want of fighting were a mark of no grace;
but I shall not say the want of victory is such a mark. If my fire and
the devil's water make crackling like thunder in the air, I am the less
feared; for where there is fire, it is Christ's part, which I lay and
bind upon Him, to keep in the coal, and to pray the Father that my
faith fail not, if I in the meantime be wrestling, and doing, and
fighting, and mourning.
Pray for me, that the Lord would give me house-room again, to hold a
candle to this dark world. -- Grace, grace be with you.
ABERDEEN, 1637
Be the first to react on this!
Rutherford was also known for his spiritual and devotional works, such as Christ Dying and drawing Sinners to Himself and his Letters. Concerning his Letters, Charles Spurgeon wrote: "When we are dead and gone let the world know that Spurgeon held Rutherford's Letters to be the nearest thing to inspiration which can be found in all the writings of mere men". Published versions of the Letters contain 365 letters and fit well with reading one per day.
Rutherford was a strong supporter of the divine right of Presbytery, the principle that the Bible calls for Presbyterian church government. Among his polemical works are Due Right of Presbyteries (1644), Lex, Rex (1644), and Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience.
Samuel Rutherford was a Scottish Presbyterian theologian and author. He was one of the Scottish Commissioners to the Westminster Assembly.
Born in the village of Nisbet, Roxburghshire, Rutherford was educated at Edinburgh University, where he became in 1623 Regent of Humanity (Professor of Latin). In 1627 he was settled as minister of Anwoth in Galloway, from where he was banished to Aberdeen for nonconformity. His patron in Galloway was John Gordon, 1st Viscount of Kenmure. On the re-establishment of Presbytery in 1638 he was made Professor of Divinity at St. Andrews, and in 1651 Rector of St. Mary's College there. At the Restoration he was deprived of all his offices.
Rutherford's political book Lex, Rex (meaning "the law [and] the king" or "the law [is] king") presented a theory of limited government and constitutionalism. It was an explicit refutation of the doctrine of "Rex Lex" or "the king is the law." Rutherford was also known for his spiritual and devotional works, such as Christ Dying and drawing Sinners to Himself and his Letters.