eligious life. Rutherford actually refused to assist
Robert Blair at the Lord's Supper, so embittered and so black was his
mind against his dearest friend. 'I would rather,' said sweet-tempered
Robert Blair, 'have had my right hand hacked off at the cross of
Edinburgh than have written such things.' 'My wife and I,' wrote dear
John Livingstone, 'have had more bitterness together over these matters
than we have ever had since we knew what bitterness was.' And no one in
that day had a deeper hand in spreading that bitterness than just the
hand that wrote Rutherford's letters. There is no fear of our calling
any man master if we once look facts fair in the face.

The precariousness of our best friendships, the brittle substance out of
which they are all composed and constructed, and the daily accidents and
injuries to which they are all exposed--all this is the daily distress of
all true and loving hearts. What a little thing will sometimes embitter
and poison what promised to be a loyal and lifelong friendship! A
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 lif