Jean Brown by
Alexander Whyte
Some Interesting Thoughts on Rutherford's
Dispute with Blair and Dickson.
'Sin poisons all our enjoyments.' - Rutherford.
Jean
Brown was one of the selectest associates of the famous Rutherford circle. We
do not know so much of Jean Brown outside of the Rutherford Letters as we would
like to know, but her son, John Brown of Wamphray, is very well known to every
student of the theology and ecclesiastical history of Scotland in the second
half of the seventeenth century.
'I rejoice to hear about your son John. I
had always a great love to dear John Brown. Remember my love to John Brown. I
never could get my love off that man.' And all Rutherford's esteem and
affection for Jean Brown's gifted and amiable son was fully justified in the
subsequent history of the hard-working and well-persecuted parish minister of
Wamphray. Letter 81 is a very remarkable piece of writing even in Rutherford,
and the readers of this letter would gladly learn more than even its eloquent
pages tell them about the woman who could draw such a letter out of Samuel
Rutherford's mind and heart, the woman who was also the honoured mother of such
a student and such a minister as John Brown of Wamphray. This letter has a bite
in it - to use one of Rutherford's own words in the course of it - all its own.
And it is just that profound and pungent element in this letter, that bite in
it, that has led me to take this remarkable letter for my topic to-night.
There had been some sin in Samuel Rutherford's student days, or some
stumble sufficiently of the nature of sin, to secretly poison the whole of his
subsequent life. Sin is such a poisonous thing that even a mustard-seed of it
planted in a man's youth will sometimes spring up into a thicket of terrible
trouble both to himself and to many other people all his and all their days. An
almost invisible drop of sin let fall into the wellhead of life will sometimes
poison the whole broad stream of life, as well as all the houses and fields and
gardens, with all their flowers and fruits, that are watered out of it. When
any misfortune falls upon a Hebrew household, when any Jewish man or woman's
sin finds them out, they say that there is an ounce of the golden calf on it.
They open their Exodus and they read there in their bitterness of how Moses in
his hot anger took the calf, which the children of Israel had polluted
themselves with, and burned it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and
strewed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel to drink of it.
And, though God turned the poisoned, dust-laden waters of Samuel
Rutherford's life into very milk and wine, yet to Rutherford's subtle and
detective taste there was always a certain tang of the unclean and accursed
thing in it. The best waled and most tenderly substituted cross in Rutheford's
chastised life had always a certain galling corner in it that recalled to him,
as he bled inwardly under it, the lack of complete purity and strict regularity
in his youth. And it is to be feared that there are but too few men or women
either who have not some Rutherford-like memory behind them that still clouds
their now sheltered life and secretly poisons their good conscience. Some
disingenuity, some simulation or dissimulation of affection, some downright or
constructive dishonesty, some lack towards some one of open and entire
integrity, some breach of good faith in spirit if not in letter, some still
stinging tresspass of the golden rule, some horn or hoof of the golden calf,
the bitter dust of which they taste to this day in their sweetest cup and at
their most grace-spread table.
There are more men and women in the Church
of Christ than any one would believe who sing with a broken heart at every
communion table: He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us
according to our iniquities. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath
He removed our transgressions from us. And even after such men and women might
have learned a lesson, how soon we see all that lesson forgotten. Even after
God's own hand has so conspicuously cut the bars of iron in sunder; after He
has made the solitary to dwell in families; we still see sin continuing in new
shapes and in other forms to poison the sweetest things in human life. What
selfishness we see in family life, and that, too, after the vow and the
intention of what self-suppression and self-denial. What impatience with one
another, what bad temper, what cruel and cutting words, what coldness and
rudeness and neglect, in how many ways our abiding sinfulness continues to
poison the sweetest springs of life! And, then, how soon such unhappy men begin
to see themselves reproduced and multiplied in their children. How many fathers
see, with a secret bitterness of spirit that never can be told, their own worst
vices of character and conduct reproduced and perpetuated in their children!
One father sees his constitutional and unextirpated sensuality coming out in
the gluttony, the drunkenness, and the lust of his son; while another sees his
pride, his moroseness, his kept-up anger and his cruelty all coming out in one
who is his very image. While many a mother sees her own youthful shallowness,
frivolity, untruthfulness, deceit and parsimony in her daughter, for whose
morality and religion she would willingly give up her own soul.
And then
our children, who were to be our staff and our crown, so early take their own
so wilful and so unfilial way in life. They betake themselves, for no reason so
much as just for intended disobedience and impudent independence, to other
pursuits and pleasures, to other political and ecclesiastical parties than we
have ever gone with. And when it is too late we see how we have again
mishandled and mismanaged our families as we had mishandled and mismanaged our
own youth, till it is only one grey head here and another there that does not
go down to the grave under a crushing load of domestic sorrow. When the best
things in life are so poisoned by sin, how bitter is that poison! If an
unpoisoned youth and an unembittered family life are some of the sweetest
things this earth can taste, then a circle of close and true and dear
friendships does not come very far behind them.
Rutherford had plenty of
trouble in his family life that he used to set down to the sins of his youth;
and then the way he poisoned so many of his best friendships by his so
poisonous party spirit is a humbling history to read. He quarrelled
irreconcilably with his very best friends over matters that were soon to be as
dead as Aaron's golden calf, and which never had much more life or decency in
them. The matters were so small and miserable over which Rutherford quarrelled
with such men as David Dickson and Robert Blair that I could not
interest you in them at this time of day even if I tried. They were as
parochial, as unsubstantial, and as much made up of prejudice and ill-will as
were some of those matters that have served under Satan to poison so often our
own private and public and religious life.
Rutherford actually refused to
assist Robert Blair at the Lord's Supper, so embittered and so black was his
mind against his dearest friend. 'I would rather,' said sweet-tempered
Robert Blair, 'have had my right hand hacked off at the cross of Edinburgh
than have written such things.' 'My wife and I,' wrote dear John
Livingstone, 'have had more bitterness together over these matters than we
have ever had since we knew what bitterness was.' And no one in that day
had a deeper hand in spreading that bitterness than just the hand that wrote
Rutherford's letters.
There is no fear of our calling any man master if we
once look facts fair in the face. The precariousness of our best friendships,
the brittle substance out of which they are all composed and constructed, and
the daily accidents and injuries to which they are all exposed-all this is the
daily distress of all true and loving hearts. What a little thing will
sometimes embitter and poison what promised to be a loyal and lifelong
friendship! A passing misunderstanding about some matter that will soon be as
dead to us both as the Resolutions and Protestations of Rutherford's day now
are to all men; an accidental oversight; our simple indolence in letting an
absent friendship go too much out of repair for want of a call, or a written
message, or a timeous gift: a thing that only a too scrupulous mind would go
the length of calling sin, will yet poison an old friendship and embitter it
beyond all our power again to sweeten it. And, then, how party spirit poisons
our best enjoyments as it did Rutherford's.
How all our minds are poisoned
against all the writers and the speakers, the statesmen and the journalists of
the opposite camp, and even against the theologians and preachers of the
opposite church. And, then, inside our own camp and church how new and still
more malignant kinds of poison begin to distil out of our incurably wicked
hearts to eat out the heart of our own nearest and dearest friendships. Envy,
for one thing, which no preacher, not even Pascal or Newman, no moralist, no
satirist, no cynic has yet dared to tell the half of the horrible truth about:
drip, drip, drip, its hell-sprung venom soaks secretly into the oldest, the
dearest and the truest friendship. Yes, let it be for once said, the viper-like
venom of envy - the most loyal, the most honourable, the most self-forgetting
and self-obliterating friendship is never in this life for one moment proof
against it. We live by admiration; yes, but even where we admire our most and
live our best this mildew still falls with its deadly damp.
What did you
suppose Rutherford meant when he wrote as he did write about himself and about
herself to that so capable and so saintly woman, Jean Brown? Do you accuse
Samuel Rutherford of unmeaning cant? Was he mouthing big Bible words without
any meaning? Or, was he not drinking at that moment of the poison-filled cup of
his own youthful, family, and friendship sins? Nobody will persuade me that
Rutherford was a canting hypocrite when he wrote those terrible and still
unparaphrased words: 'Sin sin, this body of sin and corruption embittereth and
poisoneth all our enjoyments. Oh that I were home where I shall sin no more!'
Puritan was an English nickname rather than a Scottish, but our Scots
Presbyterians were Puritans at bottom like their English brethren both in their
statesmanship and in their churchmanship, as well as in their family and
personal religion. And they held the same protest as the English Puritans held
against the way in which the scandalous corruptions of the secular court, and
the equally scandalous corruptions of the sacred bench, were together fast
poisoning the public enjoyments of England and of Scotland. You will hear
cheap, shallow, vinous speeches at public dinners and suchlike resorts about
the Puritans, and about how they denounced so much of the literature and the
art of that day. When, if those who so find fault had but the intelligence and
the honesty to look an inch beneath the surface of things they would see that
it was not the Puritans but their persecutors who really took away from the
serious-minded people of Scotland and England both the dance and the drama, as
well as so many far more important things in that day.
Had the Puritans and
their fathers always had their own way, especially in England, those sources of
public and private enjoyment would never have been poisoned to the people as
they were and are, and that cleft would never have been cut between the
conscience and some kinds of culture and delight which still exists for so many
of the best of our people. Charles Kingsley was no ascetic, and his famous
North British article, 'Plays and Puritans,' was but a popular admission of
what a free and religious-minded England owes on one side of their many-sided
service to the Puritans of that impure day. Christina Rossetti is no Calvinist,
but she puts the Calvinistic and Puritan position about the sin-poisoned
enjoyments of this life in her own beautiful way: 'Yes, all our life long we
shall be bound to refrain our soul, and keep it low; but what then? For the
books we now forbear to read we shall one day be endued with wisdom and
knowledge. For the music we will not now listen to we shall join in the song of
the redeemed. For the pictures from which we turn we shall gaze unabashed on
the beatific vision. For the companionship we shun we shall be welcomed into
angelic society and the companionship of triumphant saints. For the amusements
we avoid we shall keep the supreme jubilee. For all the pleasure we miss we
shall abide, and for ever abide, in the rapture of heaven.'
All through
Rutherford's lifetime preaching was his chiefest enjoyment and his most
exquisite delight. He was a born preacher, and his enjoyment of preaching was
correspondingly great. Even when he was removed from Anwoth to St. Andrews,
where, what with his professorship and principalship together, one would have
thought that he had his hands full enough, he yet stipulated with the Assembly
that he should be allowed to preach regularly every Sabbath-day. But sin,
again, that dreadful, and, to Rutherford, omnipresent evil, poisoned all his
preaching also and made it one of the heaviest burdens of his conscience and
his heart and his life. There is a proverb to the effect that when the best
things become corrupt then that is corruption indeed. And so Rutherford
discovered it to be in the matter of his preaching. Do what he would,
Rutherford, like Shepard, could not keep the thought of what men would think
out of his weak and evil mind, both before, and during, but more especially
after his preaching. And that poisoned and corrupted and filled the pulpit with
death to Rutherford, in a way and to a degree that nobody but a self-seeking
preacher will believe or understand. Rutherford often wondered that he had not
been eaten up of worms in his pulpit like King Herod on his throne, and that
for the very same atheistical and blasphemous reason.
Those in this house
who have followed all this with that intense and intelligent sympathy that a
somewhat similar experience alone will give, will not be stumbled to read what
Rutherford says in his letter to his near neighbour, William Glendinning: 'I
see nothing in this life but sin, sin and the sour fruits of sin. O what a
miserable bondage it is to be at the nod and beck of Sin!' Nor will they wonder
to read in his letter to Lady Boyd, that she is to be sorry all her days on
account of her inborn and abiding corruptions. Nor, again, that he himself was
sick at his heart, and at the very yolk of his heart, at sin, dead-sick with
hatred and disgust at sin, and correspondingly sick with love and longing after
Jesus Christ. Nor, again, that he awoke ill every morning to discover that he
had not yet awakened in his Saviour's sinless likeness. Nor will you wonder,
again, at the seraphic flights of love and worship that Samuel Rutherford, who
was so poisoned with sin, takes at the name and the thought of his divine
Physician. For to Rutherford that divine Physician has promised to come 'the
second time without sin unto salvation.'
The first time He came He sucked
the poison of sin out of the souls of sinners with His own lips, and out of all
the enjoyments that He had sanctified and prepared for them in heaven. And He
is coming backHe has now for a long time come back and taken Rutherford
home to that sanctification that seemed to go further and further away from
Rutherford the longer he lived in this sin-poisoned world. And, amongst all
those who are now home in heaven, I cannot think there can be many who are
enjoying heaven with a deeper joy than Samuel Rutherford's sheer, solid,
uninterrupted, unadulterated, and unmitigated joy.
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