has all the keys of your body and your soul too at His girdle, will not
consider that you have got your full outgate, or that He has at all
discharged His duty by you, till, as Rutherford says, your sinful habits
and practices are all loosened off from your life and are driven back
into the inner world of your inclinations; and then, after that, He will
only take up still more skilful and still more intricate keys wherewith
to turn the locks of delight, desire, and inclination. O blessed keys of
hell and of death, of habit and inclination and evil affection! O
blessed people who are under such a Redeemer from sin and death and hell!
O truly famous saint, the Lady Robertland, who got so many and so rare
outgates from the Amen with the keys! Who shall give me an outgate from
this body? cries the great apostle, not chafing in his chains for death,
but for the true life that lies beyond death. Paul, with all his intense
love of life and service--nay, because of that intense love--felt
sometimes that this present life at its very best was but a life of
relaxed imprisonment rather than of true liberty. Paul was, as we say, a
kind of first-class misdemeanant, as Samuel Rutherford also was in his
prison-palace in Aberdeen, and the Lady Robertland in Stewarton House;
they had a liberty that was not to be despised; they had light and air
and exercise; they were not in chains in the dungeon; they had pen and
ink; they had books and papers, and their friends might on occasion visit
them. They might have better food also if they paid for it; and, best of
all, they could, till their full release came, beguile and occupy the
time in work for Christ and His Church. But still they were present in
this body of sin and death, and absent from the Lord, and they pined,
and, I fear, sinfully murmured sometimes, for the last and the greatest
and the best outgate of all. 'As for myself,' writes Rutherford, 'I
think that if a poor, weak, dying sheep seeks for an old dyke, and the
lee-side of a hill in a storm, I surely may be allowed to long for
heaven. I see little in this life but sin, and the sour fruits of sin;