him also from the snares and traps into which he had fallen by the sins
and follies of his unregenerate youth. Whatever trouble came on
Rutherford all his days--the persecution of the bishop, his banishment to
Aberdeen, the shutting of his mouth from preaching Christ, the loss of
wife and child, and the poignant pains of sanctification--he gathered
them all up under the familiar figure of a waled and chosen cross.
'Seeing that the sins of my youth deserved strokes, how am I obliged to
my Lord, who, out of many possible crosses, hath given me this waled and
chosen cross to suffer for the name of Jesus Christ. Since I must have
chains, He has put golden chains on me. Seeing I must have sorrow, for I
have sinned, O Preserver of mankind, Thou hast waled and selected out for
me a joyful sorrow--an honest, spiritual, glorious sorrow. Oh, what am
I, such a rotten mass of sin, to be counted worthy of the most honourable
rod in my Father's house, even the golden rod wherewith the Lord the Heir
was Himself stricken. Thou wast a God that forgavest them, though Thou
tookest vengeance of their inventions.' Rutherford also was forgiven,
and the only vengeance that God took of his inventions, the
irregularities of his youth, was taken in the form of a 'waled cross.' 'I
might have been proclaimed on the crown of the causey,' says Rutherford,
'but He has so waled my cross and His vengeance that I am suffering not
for my sin but for His name.' What a life hid with Christ in God he must
live, who, like Rutherford, takes all his trials on earth as a transmuted
and substituted cross for his sins: and who is able to take all his
deserved and demanded chastisements in the shape of inward and spiritual
and sanctifying pain. O sweet vengeance of grace on our sinful
inventions! O most intimate and most awful of all our secrets, the
secrets of a love-waled, love-substituted cross! O rare outgate from the
scorn of the causeway to the smelting-house of 'Him who hath His fire in
Zion!'