and the attainments of his hearers and readers and correspondents. Thomas
Goodwin was always telling the theological students of Oxford in those
days to thicken their too thin homilies with more doctrine: Rutherford's
very thinnest books are almost too thick, both with theology and with
thought.

How ever a woman like Jane Campbell came to marry a man like John Gordon
will remain a mystery. It was not that he was a man of no mind; he was a
man of no worth or interest of any kind. He was a rake and a
lick-spittle, the very last man in Scotland for Jane Campbell to throw
herself away upon. And she was too clever and too good a woman not to
make a speedy and a heart-breaking discovery of the fatal mistake she had
committed. Poor Jane Campbell soon wakened up to the discovery that she
had exchanged the name and the family of a brave and noble house for the
name and the house of a poltroon. No wonder that Rutherford's letters to
her are so often headed: 'To Lady Kenmure, under illness and depression
of mind.' Could you have kept quite well had you been a Campbell with
John Gordon for a husband? Think of having to nurse your humbug of a
husband through a shammed illness. Think of having to take a hand in
sending in a sham doctor's certificate because your husband was too much
of a time-server to go to Edinburgh to give his vote for a persecuted
church. Think of having to wear the title and decoration your husband
had purchased for you at the cost of his truth and honour and manhood.
Lady Kenmure needed Samuel Rutherford's very best letters to help to keep
her in bare life all the time the county dames were green with envy at
the dear-bought honours. And Kenmure himself had to be brought to his
death-bed before he became a husband worthy of his wife. We still read
in his _Last Speeches_ how God made Lord Gordon's sins to find him out,
and with what firmness and with what tenderness Rutherford handled the
soul of the dying man till all his cowardice, title-hunting, and truth-