passing misunderstanding about some matter that will soon be as dead to
us both as the Resolutions and Protestations of Rutherford's day now are
to all men; an accidental oversight; our simple indolence in letting an
absent friendship go too much out of repair for want of a call, or a
written message, or a timeous gift: a thing that only a too-scrupulous
mind would go the length of calling sin, will yet poison an old
friendship and embitter it beyond all our power again to sweeten it. And,
then, how party spirit poisons our best enjoyments as it did
Rutherford's. How all our minds are poisoned against all the writers and
the speakers, the statesmen and the journalists of the opposite camp, and
even against the theologians and preachers of the opposite church. And,
then, inside our own camp and church how new and still more malignant
kinds of poison begin to distil out of our incurably wicked hearts to eat
out the heart of our own nearest and dearest friendships. Envy, for one
thing, which no preacher, not even Pascal or Newman, no moralist, no
satirist, no cynic has yet dared to tell the half of the horrible truth
about: drip, drip, drip, its hell-sprung venom soaks secretly into the
oldest, the dearest and the truest friendship. Yes, let it be for once
said, the viper-like venom of envy--the most loyal, the most honourable,
the most self-forgetting and self-obliterating friendship is never in
this life for one moment proof against it. We live by admiration; yes,
but even where we admire our most and live our best this mildew still
falls with its deadly damp. What did you suppose Rutherford meant when
he wrote as he did write about himself and about herself to that so
capable and so saintly woman, Jean Brown? Do you accuse Samuel
Rutherford of unmeaning cant? Was he mouthing big Bible words without
any meaning? Or, was he not drinking at that moment of the poison-filled
cup of his own youthful, family, and friendship sins? Nobody will
persuade me that Rutherford was a canting hypocrite when he wrote those
terrible and still unparaphrased words: 'Sin, sin, this body of sin and