S. R.
Aberdeen, May 1, 1637.
[CLXIX.—To the Laird of Carleton.]
(GOD'S WORKING INCOMPREHENSIBLE—LONGING AFTER ANY DROP OF CHRIST'S FULNESS.)
W ORTHY SIR,—Grace, mercy, and peace be to you. I received your letter, and am heartily glad that our Lord hath begun to work for the apparent delivery of this poor oppressed kirk. Oh that salvation would come for Zion!
I am for the present hanging by hope, waiting what my Lord will do with me, and if it will please my sweet Master to send me amongst you again, and keep out a hireling from my poor people and flock. It were my heaven till I come home, even to spend this life in gathering in some to Christ. I have still great heaviness for my silence, and my forced standing idle in the market, when this land hath such a plentiful, thick harvest. But I know that His judgments, who hath done it, pass finding out. I have no knowledge to take up the Lord in all His strange ways, and passages of deep and unsearchable providences. For the Lord is before me, and I am so bemisted that I cannot follow Him; He is behind me, and following at the heels, and I am not aware of Him; He is above me, but His glory so dazzleth my twilight of short knowledge, that I cannot look up to Him. He is upon my right hand, and I see Him not; He is upon my left hand, and within me, and goeth and cometh, and His going and coming are a dream to me; He is round about me, and compasseth all my goings, and still I have Him to seek. He is every way higher, and deeper, and broader than the shallow and ebb handbreadth of my short and dim light can take up; and, therefore, I would that my heart could be silent, and sit down in the learnedly-ignorant wondering at the Lord, whom men and angels cannot comprehend. I know that the noon-day light of the highest angels, who see Him face to face, seeth not the borders of His infiniteness. They apprehend God near hand; but they cannot comprehend Him. And, therefore, it is my happiness to look afar off, and to come near to the Lord's back parts, and to light my dark candle at His brightness, and to have leave to sit and content myself with a traveller's light, without the clear vision of an enjoyer. I would seek no more till I were in my country, than a little watering and sprinkling of a withered soul, with some half out-breakings and half out-lookings of the beams, and small ravishing smiles of the fairest face of a revealed and believed-on Godhead. A little of God would make my soul bank-full. Oh that I had but Christ's odd off-fallings; that He would let but the meanest of His love-rays and love-beams fall from Him, so as I might gather and carry then with me! I would not be ill to please with Christ, and vailed visions of Christ; neither would I be dainty in seeing and enjoying of Him: a kiss of Christ blown over His shoulder, the parings and crumbs of glory that fall under His table in heaven, a shower like a thin May-mist of His love, would make me green, and sappy, and joyful, till the summer-sun of an eternal glory break up (Song ii. 17). Oh that I had anything of Christ! Oh that I had a sip, or half a drop, out of the hollow of Christ's hand, of the sweetness and excellency of that lovely One! Oh that my Lord Jesus would rue upon me, and give me but the meanest alms of felt and believed salvation! Oh, how little were it for that infinite sea, that infinite fountain of love and joy, to fill as many thousand thousand little vessels (the like of me) as there are minutes of hours since the creation of God! I find it true that a poor soul, finding half a smell of the Godhead of Christ, hath desires (paining and wounding the poor hearts so with longings to be up at Him) that make it sometimes think, "Were it not better never to have felt anything of Christ, than thus to lie dying twenty deaths, under these felt wounds, for the want of Him?" Oh, where is He? O Fairest, where dwellest Thou? O never-enough admired Godhead, how can clay win up to Thee? how can creatures of yesterday be able to enjoy Thee? Oh, what pain is it, that time and sin should be so many thousand miles betwixt a loved and longed-for Lord and a dwining and love-sick soul, who would rather than all the world have lodging with Christ! Oh, let this bit of love of ours, this inch and half-span length of heavenly longing, meet with Thy infinite love! Oh, if the little I have were swallowed up with the infiniteness of that excellency which is in Christ! Oh that we little ones were in at the greatest Lord Jesus! Our wants should soon be swallowed up with His fulness.
Grace, grace be with you.
Yours, in his sweet Lord Jesus,