3. ‘You complain bitterly of a dead ministry in your bounds. I have heard as much. But I will reply that a living ministry is not indispensable to a parish. All our parishes ought to have it, and we ought to see to it that they all get it; but neither the conversion of sinners, nor the sanctification and comfort of God’s saints, is tied up to any man’s lips. You will read your unread Bibles more: you will buy more good books: you will meet more in private converse and prayer: and it will not be bad for you for a season to look above the pulpit, and to look Jesus Christ Himself more immediately in the face.’ As Fraser of Brea also said in a striking passage in his diary, so Rutherford says in his reply letter: ‘in your sore famine of the water of life, run your pipe right up to the fountain.’
4. If the parishioners of Kilmacolm were severe on their minister it was not that they let themselves escape. And there was something in their present letters that led Rutherford to warn them against a
mistake that only people of the Kilmacolm type will ever fall into. ‘Some of the people of God,’ says their sharp-eyed censor, ‘slander the grace of God in their own soul.’ And that is true of some of God’s best people still. We meet with such people now and then in our own parishes to-day. They are so possessed with penitence and humility; they have such high and inflexible and spiritual standards for measuring themselves by; the law has so fatally entered their innermost souls that they will not even admit or acknowledge what the grace of God has, to all other men’s knowledge, done in them. Seek out, says Rutherford, the signs of true grace in yourselves as well as the signs of secret sin. And when you have found such and such an indubitable sign of grace, say so. Say this, and this, and this, pointing it out, is assuredly the work of God in my soul. When you, after all defeat, really discover your soul growing in grace; in patience under injuries; in meekness under reproofs and corrections; in love for, or at least in peace of heart toward, those you at one time did not like, but disliked almost to downright hatred; in silent and assenting acceptance, if not yet in actual and positive enjoyment, of another man’s talents and success, gain and fame; in the decay and disappearance of party spirit, and in openness to all the good and the merit of other men; in prayerfulness; in liberality, and so on; when you cannot deny these things in yourself, then speak good of Christ, and do not traduce and backbite His work because it is in your own soul. ‘Some wretches murmur of want while all the time their money in the bank and their fat harvests
make them liars.’ Rutherford thinks he has put his finger upon some such saintly liars in the kirk-session of Kilmacolm.
5. ‘Fear your light, my lord,’ wrote Rutherford to Lord Craighall from Aberdeen; ‘stand in awe of your light.’ But the poor Kilmacolm people did not need that sharp rebuke, for they had written to Rutherford at their own instance to consult him in their terror of conscience about this very matter, till Rutherford had to exhaust his vocabulary of comfort in trying to pacify his correspondents just in this sufficiently disquieting matter of light in the mind with great darkness in the heart and the life. Our light in this world, he tells them, is a broad and shining field, whereas our life of obedience is at best but a short and straggling furrow. Only in heaven shall the broad and basking fields of light and truth be covered from end to end with the songs of the rejoicing reapers. And Rutherford is very bold in this matter, because he knows he has the truth about it. A perfect life, he says, up to our ever-increasing light, is impossible to us here, if only because our light always increases with every new progress in duty. The field of light expands to a new length and breadth every time the plough passes through it. And, knowing well to whom he writes on this subject, Rutherford goes on to say that there is a sorrow for sin, and for shortcoming in service, that is as acceptable with God in the evangelical covenant as would be the very service itself. But, then, it must be what Rutherford calls ‘honest sorrow after a sincere aim.’ And let no man easily allow himself to take shelter under that, lest
it turn out to him like taking shelter in a thunderstorm under a lightning rod. For what an aim must that be, and then, what a sorrow, that is as good in the sight of God as a full obedience is itself. At the same time, ‘A sincere aim, and then an honest sorrow, both of the right quality and quantity, taken together with Christ’s intercession, must be our best life before God till we be over in the other country where the law of God will get a perfect soul in which to fulfil itself. Your complaint on this head is already booked in the New Testament (Rom. vii. 18).’
6. ‘The less sense of liberty and sweetness, the more true spirituality in the service of God,’ is Rutherford’s reply to their next perplexity. Ought we to go on with our work and with our worship when our hearts are dry and when we have no delight in what we do? That is just the time to persevere, replies their evangelical guide, for it is in the absence of all sense of liberty and sweetness that our duties prove themselves to be truly spiritual. A sweet service has often its sweetness from an altogether other source than the spiritual world. Let a man be engaged in divine service, or in any other religious work, and let him have sensible support and success in it; let him have liberty and enjoyment in the performance of it; and, especially, let him have the praise of men after it, and he will easily be deceived into thinking that he has had God’s Spirit with him, and the light of God’s countenance, whereas all the time it has only been an outpouring on his deceived heart of his own lying spirit of self-seeking, self-pleasing, and self-exalting.
While, again, a man’s spirit may be all day as dry as the heath in the wilderness, and all other men’s spirits around him and toward him the same, yet a very rich score may be set down beside that unindulged servant’s name against the day of the ‘well-dones.’ ‘I believe that many think that obedience is lifeless and formal unless the wind be in the west, and all their sails are filled with the joys of sense. But I am not of their mind who think so.’
7. The scrupulosity of the Kilmacolm people was surely singular and remarkable even in that day of tests and marks and scruples in the spiritual life. The ministry may not have been wholly dead in and around Kilmacolm, though it could not keep pace and patience with those so eager and so anxious souls who would have Rutherford’s mind on all possible points of their complicated case. Six of their complaints we have just seen, but their troubles are not yet all told. ‘Surely,’ they wrote, ‘a Master like our Lord, who gave such service when He was still a servant Himself,—surely He will have hearty and unfeigned service from us, or none at all. Will He not spue the lukewarm servant out of His mouth?’ I grant you, wrote Rutherford, that our Master must have honesty. The one thing He will unmask and will not endure is hypocrisy. But if you mean to insinuate that our hearts must always be entirely given up to His service in all that we do, else He will cast us away, for all I am worth in the world I would not have that true of me. I would not have that true, else where would my hope be? An English contemporary of Rutherford’s puts it
memorably: ‘Our Master tries His servants not with the balances of the sanctuary, but with the touchstone.’ Take that, says Rutherford, for my reply to your opinion that Christ must always have a perfect service at our hands, or none at all.