George
Gillespie by Alexander Whyte
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'Our apprehensions are not canonical.'Rutherford.
George Gillespie was one of that remarkable band of
statesmanlike ministers that God gave to Scotland in the seventeenth century.
Gillespie died while yet a young man, but before he died, as Rutherford wrote
to him on his deathbed, he had done more work for his Master than many a
hundred grey-headed and godly ministers.
Gillespie and Rutherford got
acquainted with one another when Rutherford was beginning his work at Anwoth.
In the good providence of God, Gillespie was led to Kenmure Castle to be tutor
in the family of Lord and Lady Kenmure, and that threw Rutherford and Gillespie
continually together. Gillespie was still a probationer. He was ready for
ordination, and many congregations were eager to have him, but the patriotic
and pure-minded youth could not submit to receive ordination at the hands of
the bishops of that day, and this kept him out of a church of his own long
after he was ready to begin his ministry.
But the time was not lost to
Gillespie himself, or to the Church of Christ in Scotland, - the time that
threw Rutherford and Gillespie into the same near neighbourhood, and into
intimate and affectionate friendship. The mere scholarship of the two men would
at once draw them together. They read the same deep books; they reasoned out
the same constitutional, ecclesiastical, doctrinal, and experimental problems;
till one day, rising off their knees in the woods of Kenmure Castle, the two
men took one another by the hand and swore a covenant that all their days, and
amid all the trials they saw were coming to Scotland and her Church, they would
remain fast friends, would often think of one another, would often name one
another before God in prayer, and would regularly write to one another, and
that not on church questions only and on the books they were reading, but more
especially on the life of God in their own souls.
Of the correspondence of
those two remarkable men we have only three letters preserved to us, but they
are enough to let us see the kind of letters that must have frequently passed
between Kenmure Castle and Aberdeen, and between St. Andrews and Edinburgh
during the next ten years. Gillespie was born in the parish manse of Kirkcaldy
in 1613; he was ordained to the charge of the neighbouring congregation of
Wemyss in 1638, was translated thence to Edinburgh in 1642, and then became one
of the four famous deputies who were sent up from the Church of Scotland to sit
and represent her in the Westminster Assembly in 1643. Gillespie's great
ability was well known, his wide learning and his remarkable controversial
powers had been already well proved, else such a young man would never have
been sent on such a mission; but his appearance in the debates at Westminster
astonished those who knew him best, and won for him a name second to none of
the oldest and ablest statesmen and scholars who sat in that famous house.
'That noble youth,' Baillie is continually exclaiming, after each new
display of Gillespie's learning and power of argument; 'That singular ornament
of our Church'; 'He is one of the best wits of this isle,' and so on. And good
John Livingstone, in his wise and sober Characteristics, says that, being sent
as a Commissioner from the Church of Scotland to the Assembly of Divines at
Westminster, Gillespie 'promoted much the work of reformation, and attained to
a gift of clear, strong, pressing, and calm debating above any man of his
time.'
Many stories were told in Scotland of the debating powers of young
Gillespie as seen on the floor of the Westminster Assembly. Selden was one of
the greatest lawyers in England, and he had made a speech one day that both
friend and foe felt was unanswerable. One after another of the Constitutional
and Evangelical party tried to reply to Selden's speech, but failed. 'Rise,
George, man,' said Rutherford to Gillespie, who was sitting with his pencil and
note-book beside him. 'Rise, George, man, and defend the Church which Christ
hath purchased with His own blood.' George rose, and when he had sat down,
Selden is reported to have said to some one who was sitting beside him, 'That
young man has swept away the learning and labour of ten years of my life.'
Gillespie's Scottish brethren seized upon his note-book to preserve and send
home at least the heads of his magnificent speech, but all they found in his
little book were these three words: Da lucem, Domine; Give light, O Lord.
Rutherford had foreseen all this from the days when Gillespie and he talked
over Aquinas and Calvin and Hooker and Amesius and Zanchius as they took their
evening walks together on the sands of the Solway Firth. It is told also that
when the Committee of Assembly was engaged on the composition of the Shorter
Catechism, and had come to the question, What is God? like the able men they
were, they all shrank from attempting an answer to such an unfathomable
question. In their perplexity they asked Gillespie to offer prayer for help,
when he began his prayer with these words: 'O God, Thou art a Spirit, infinite,
eternal, and unchangeable in Thy being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice,
goodness, and truth.' As soon as he said Amen, his opening sentences were
remembered, and taken down, and they stand to this day the most scriptural and
the most complete answer to that unanswerable question that we have in any
creed or catechism of the Christian Church.
As her best tribute to the
talents and services of her youngest Commissioner, the Edinburgh Assembly of
1648 appointed Gillespie her Moderator; but his health was fast failing, and he
died in the December of that year, in the thirty-sixth year of his age. The
inscription on his tombstone at Kirkcaldy ends with these sober and true words:
'A man profound in genius, mild in disposition, acute in argument, flowing in
eloquence, unconquered in mind. He drew to himself the love of the good, the
envy of the bad, and the admiration of all.' Such was the life and work of
George Gillespie one of the most intimate and confidential correspondents of
Samuel Rutherford; - for it was to him that Rutherford wrote the words now
before us, 'Our apprehensions are not canonical.' Every line of life has its
own language, its own peculiar vocabulary, that none but its experts, and those
who have been brought up to it, know. Go up to the Parliament House and you
will hear the advocates and judges talking to one another in a professional
speech that the learned layman no more than the ignorant can understand. Our
doctors, again, have a shorthand symbolism that only themselves and the
chemists understand. And so it is with every business and profession; each
several trade strikes out a language for itself. And so does divinity, and,
especially, experimental divinity, of which Rutherford's letters are full. We
not only need a glossary for the obsolete Scotch, but we need the most simple
and everyday expressions of the things of the soul explained to us till once we
begin to speak and to write those expressions ourselves.
There are judges
and advocates and doctors and specialists of all kinds among us who will only
be able to make a far-off guess at the meaning of my text, just as I could only
make a far-off guess at some of their trade texts. This technical term,
'apprehension,' does not once occur in the Bible, and only once or twice in
Shakespeare. 'Our death is most in apprehension,' says that master of
expression; and, again, he says that 'we cannot outfly our apprehensions.' And
Milton has it once in Samson, who says: 'Thoughts, my tormentors, armed with
deadly stings, Mangle my apprehensive tenderest parts.' But, indeed, we all
have the thing in us, though we may never have put its proper name upon it.
We all know what a forecast of evil is - a secret fear that evil is coming
upon us. It lays hold of our heart, or of our conscience, as the case may be,
and will not let go its hold. And then the heart and the conscience run out
continually and lay hold of the future evil and carry it home to our terrified
bosoms. We apprehend the coming evil, and feel it long before it comes. We die,
like the coward, many times before our death.
Now, Rutherford just takes
that well-known word and applies it to his fears and his sinkings of heart
about his past sins, and about the unsettled wages of his sins. His conscience
makes him a coward, till he thinks every bush an officer. But then he reasons
and remonstrates with himself in his deep and intimate letter to Gillespie and
says that these his doubts, and terrors, and apprehensions are not canonical.
He is writing to a divine and a scholar, as well as to an experienced Christian
man, and he uses words that such scholars and such Christian men quite well
understand and like to make use of. The canon that he here refers to is the
Holy Scriptures; they are the rule of our faith, and they are also the rule of
God's faithfulness. What God has said to us in His word, that we must believe
and hold by; that, and not our deserts or our apprehensions, must rule and
govern our faith and our trust, just as God's word will be the rule and
standard of His dealings with us. His word rules us in our faith and life; and
again it rules Him also in His dealings with our faith and with our life. God
does not deal with us as we deserve; He does not deal with us as we, in our
guilty apprehensions, fear He will. He deals with the apprehensive, penitent,
believing sinner according to the grace and the truth of His word. His promises
are canonical to Him, not our apprehensions. Thomas Goodwin, that perfect
prince of pulpit exegetes, lays down this canon, and continually himself acts
upon it, that 'the context of a scripture is half its interpretation;... if a
man would open a place of scripture, he should do it rationally; he should go
and consider the words before and the words after.'
Now, let us apply this
rule to the interpretation of this text out of Rutherford, and look at the
context, before and after, out of which it is taken. Remembering his covenant
with young Gillespie in the woods of Kenmure, Rutherford wrote of himself to
his friend, and said: - 'At my first entry on my banishment here my
apprehensions worked despairingly upon my cross.' By that he means, and
Gillespie would quite well understand his meaning, that his banishment from his
work threw him in upon his conscience, and that his conscience whispered to him
that he had been banished from his work because of his sins. God is angry with
you, his conscience said; He does not love you, He has not forgiven you. But
his sanctified good sense, his deep knowledge of God's word, and of God's ways
with His people, came to his rescue, and he went on to say to Gillespie that
our apprehensions are not canonical. No, he says, our apprehensions tell lies
of God and of His grace.
So they do in our case also. When any trouble
falls upon us, for any reason, - and there are many reasons other than His
anger why God sends trouble upon us, - conscience is up immediately with her
interpretation and explanation of our troubles. This is your wages now,
conscience says. God has been slow to wrath, but His patience is exhausted now.
As Rutherford says in another letter, our tearful eyes look asquint at Christ
and He appears to be angry, when all the time He pities and loves us.
Is
there any man here to-night whose apprehensions are working upon his cross? Is
there any man of God here who has lost hold of God in the thick darkness, and
who fears that his cross has come to him because God is angry with him? Let him
hear and imitate what Rutherford says when in the same distress: 'I will lay
inhibitions on my apprehensions,' he says; 'I will not let my unbelieving
thoughts slander Christ. Let them say to me "there is no hope," yet I will die
saying, It is not so; I shall yet see the salvation of God. I will die if it
must be so, under water, but I will die gripping at Christ. Let me go to hell,
I will go to hell believing in and loving Christ.' Rutherford's worst
apprehensions, his best-grounded apprehensions, could not survive an assault of
faith like that. Imitate him, and improve upon him, and say, that with a
thousand times worse apprehensions than ever Rutherford could have, yet, like
him, you will make your bed in hell, loving, and adoring, and justifying Jesus
Christ. And, if you do that, hell will have none of you; all hell will cast you
out, and all heaven will rise up and carry you in.
'Challenges' is another
of Rutherford's technical terms that he constantly uses to his expert
correspondents. 'I was under great challenges,' he says, in this same letter;
and in a letter written the same month of March to William Rigg, of Athernie,
he says, 'Old challenges revive, and cast all down.'
Dr. Andrew Bonar, Rutherford's
expert editor, gives this glossary upon these passages: 'Charges,
self-upbraidings, self-accusations.' Challenges of conscience came to
Rutherford like these: Why art thou writing letters of counsel to other men?
Counsel thyself first. Why art thou appealed to and trusted and loved by God's
best people in Scotland, when thou knowest that thou art a Cain in malice and a
Judas in treachery, all but the outbreaks? Why art thou taking thy cross so
easily, when thou knowest the unsettled controversy the Lord still has with
thee? 'Hall binks are slippery,' wrote stern old Knockbrex, challenging his old
minister for his too great joy. 'Old challenges now and then revive and cast
all down again.'
That reminds me of a fine passage in that great book of
Rutherford's, Christ Dying, where he shows us how to take out a new charter for
all our possessions, and for the salvation of our souls themselves when our
salvation, or our possessions and our right to them, is challenged. It is
better, he says, to hold your souls and your lands by prayer than by obedience,
or conquest, or industry. Have you wisdom, honour, learning, parts, eloquence,
godliness, grace, a good name, wife, children, a house, peace, case, pleasure?
Challenge yourself how you got them, and see that you hold them by an
unchallengeable charter, even by prayer, and then by grace. And if you hold
these things by any other charter, hasten to get a new conveyance made and a
new title drawn out. And thus old, and angry, and threatening challenges will
work out a charter that cannot be challenged. And, then, when George Gillespie
was lying on his deathbed in Edinburgh, with his pillow filled with stinging
apprehensions, as is often the case with God's best servants and ripest saints,
hear how his old friend, now professor of divinity in St. Andrews, writes to
him: 'My reverend and dear brother, look to the east. Die well. Your life of
faith is just finishing. Finish it well. Let your last act of faith be your
best act. Stand not upon sanctification, but upon justification. Hand all your
accounts over to free grace. And if you have any bands of apprehension in your
death, recollect that your apprehensions are not canonical.' And the dying man
answered: 'There is nothing that I have done that can stand the touchstone of
God's justice. Christ is my all, and I am nothing.'
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