M ISTRESS,—Grace, mercy, and peace be to you.—I hope ye know what conditions passed betwixt Christ and you, at your first meeting. Ye remember that He said, your summer days would have clouds, and your rose a prickly thorn beside it. Christ is unmixed in heaven, all sweetness and honey. Here we have Him with His thorny and rough cross; yet I know no tree that beareth sweeter fruit than Christ's cross, except I would raise a lying report on it. It is your part to take Christ, as He is to be had in this life. Sufferings are like a wood planted round about His house, over door and window. If we could hold fast our grips of Him, the field were won. Yet a little while, and Christ shall triumph. Give Christ His own short time to spin out these two long threads of heaven and hell to all mankind, for certainly the thread will not break; and when He hath accomplished His work in Mount Zion, and hath refined His silver, He will bring new vessels out of the furnace, and plenish His house, and take up His house again.
I counsel you to free yourself of clogging temptations, by overcoming some, and contemning others, and watching over all. Abide true and loyal to Christ, for few now are fast to Him. They give Christ blank paper for a bond of service and attendance, now when Christ hath most ado. To waste a little blood with Christ, and to put our part of this drossy world in pawn over in His hand, as willing to quit it for Him, is the safest cabinet to keep the world in. But those who would take the world and all their flitting on their back, and run away from Christ, shall fall by the way, and leave their burden behind them, and be taken captive themselves. Well were my soul to have put all I have, life and soul, over into Christ's hands. Let Him be forthcoming for all.
If any ask how I do? I answer, None can be but well that are in Christ: and if I were not so, my sufferings had melted me away in ashes and smoke. I thank my Lord, that He hath something in me that His fire cannot consume.
Remember my love to your husband; and show him from me, that I desire he may set aside all things, and make sure work of salvation, that it be not a-seeking when the sand-glass is run out, and time and eternity shall tryst together. There is no errand so weighty as this. Oh that he would take it to heart! Grace be with you.
Yours, in Christ Jesus his Lord,
S. R.
Aberdeen.
[CCLI.—To the Lady Dungueich.]
[Lady Dungeuch, or Dungueich, was sister to Marion M'Naught, for her own name was Sarah M'Naught, and she is mentioned in the Registers as "second heir to her father, John M'Naught of Kilquhannady" [or Kilquhanatie (Letter V.)], "on 31st March 1646, in the three merk lands of Dumgeuich, in Lanarkshire." She married Samuel Lockhart, merchant burgess in Edinburgh.
Near the Bridge of Deach, two miles from Carsphairn, not far from Earlston, there is the poor ruin of an old Dundeuch castle on the roadside, mentioned in the life of John Semple. But that is not the same place, though resembling it in sound. The Gordons of Dengeuch (a branch of the Lochinvar family) were no doubt connected.]