God, so that He may shew you the only true way that will bring rest to
your soul. Ordinary faith and country holiness will not save you. Take
to heart in time the weight and worth of an immortal soul; think of
death, and of judgment at the back of death, that you may be saved.--Your
sometime pastor, and still friend in God, S. R.' The civility of the New
Jerusalem, he is continually reminding his genteel and correct-living
correspondents, is a very different thing from the civility of Edinburgh,
or Aberdeen, or St. Andrews. And so it is, else it would not be worth
both Christ and all Christian men both living and dying for it.

And this leads Rutherford on, in the last place, to say what Earlston,
and Cardoness, and Lord Boyd, while yet in their unconversion and their
early conversion, would not understand. For, writing to Robert Stuart,
the son of the Provost of Ayr, Rutherford says to him, 'Labour constantly
for a sound and lively sense of sin,' and to the Laird of Cally, 'Take
pains with your salvation, for without much wrestling and sweating it is
not to be won.' A sound and lively sense of sin. As we read these sound
and lively letters, we come to see and understand something of what their
writer means by that. He means that Stuart and Cally, Cardoness and
Earlston, young laymen as they were, were to labour in sin and in their
own hearts till they came to see something of the ungodliness of sin,
something of its fiendishness, its malignity, its loathesomeness, its
hell-deservingness, its hell-alreadyness. 'All his religious
illuminations, affections, and comforts,' says Jonathan Edwards of David
Brainerd, 'were attended with evangelical humiliation, that is to say,
with a deep sense of his own despicableness and odiousness, his
ignorance, pride, vileness, and pollution. He looked on himself as the
least and the meanest of all saints, yea, very often as the vilest and
worst of mankind.' But let Rutherford and Brainerd and Edwards pour out
their blackest vocabulary upon sin, and still sin goes and will go
without its proper name. Only let those Christian noblemen and gentlemen
to whom Rutherford wrote, labour in their own hearts all their days for
some sound and lively and piercing sense of this unspeakably evil thing,
and they will know, as Rutherford wrote to William Gordon, that they have
got to some sound and lively sense of sin when they feel that there is no
one on earth or in hell that has such a s