correspondents than when they consult him about their ebb tides, and find
that he himself either has been, or still is, in the same experience.

But why do we disinter such texts as this out of such an author as Samuel
Rutherford? Why do we tell to all the world that such an eminent saint
was full of such sad extremes? Well, we surely do so out of obedience to
the divine command to comfort God's people; for, next to their having no
such extremes in themselves, their next best comfort is to be told that
great and eminent saints of God have had the very same besetting sins and
staggering extremes as they still have. If the like of Samuel Rutherford
was vexed and weakened with such intellectual contradictions and
spiritual extremes in his mind, in his heart and in his history, then may
we not hope that some such saintliness, if not some such service as his,
may be permitted to us also?




III. MARION M'NAUGHT


'O woman beloved of God.'--_Rutherford_.

'The world knows nothing of its greatest men,' says Sir Henry Taylor in
his _Philip Van Artevelde_; and it knows much less of its greatest women.
I have not found Marion M'Naught's name once mentioned outside of Samuel
Rutherford's Letters. But she holds a great place--indeed, the foremost
place--in that noble book, to be written in which is almost as good as to
be written in heaven.