had been like a blow in the face to him; it affects me much, said
Rutherford, that a man like you should have any such opinion of me. And,
apologising for his delay in replying to a letter of Lady Boyd's, he says
that he is put out of all love of writing letters because his
correspondents think things about him that he himself knows are not true.
'My white side comes out on paper--but at home there is much black work.
All the challenges that come to me are true.' There was no man then
alive on the earth so much looked up to and consulted in the deepest
matters of the soul, in the secrets of the Lord with the soul, as
Rutherford was, and his letters bear evidence on every page that there
was no man who had a more loathsome and a more hateful experience of his
own heart, not even Taylor, not even Owen, not even Bunyan, not even
Baxter. What a day of extremest men that was, and what an inheritance we
extreme men have had left us, in their inward, extreme, and heavenly
books!

Once more, hear him on the tides of feeling that continually rose and
fell within his heart. Writing from Aberdeen to Lady Boyd, he says: 'I
have not now, of a long time, found such high springtides as formerly.
The sea is out, and I cannot buy a wind and cause it to flow again; only
I wait on the shore till the Lord sends a full sea. . . . But even to
dream of Him is sweet.' And then, just over the leaf, to Marion
M'Naught: 'I am well: honour to God. . . . He hath broken in upon a poor
prisoner's soul like the swelling of Jordan. I am bank and brim full: a
great high springtide of the consolations of Christ hath overwhelmed me.'
. . . But sweet as it is to read his rapturous expressions when the tide
is full, I feel it far more helpful to hear how he still looks and waits
for the return of the tide when the tide is low, and when the shore is
full, as all left shores are apt to be, of weeds and mire, and all
corrupt and unclean things. Rutherford is never more helpful to his