urch, and to the Scottish Covenant; the inward
life he was commanded and expected to live alone with God; the seven
things he was every day to remember; the evangelical graces of heart and
life and character he was to be told and to be enabled to put on; the
death he was to die, and the 'freehold' he was after all these things to
enter on in heaven. And it is of that sand-glass that was at that moment
running so fast and so low within the veil that Rutherford writes so
often and so earnestly to the so-forgetful laird of Rusco. And how
solemnising it is, if anything would solemnise our hard hearts, that we
all have a sand-glass standing before God with our names written upon it,
and that it is running out before God day and night unceasingly. We
shall all be too suddenly solemnised when the last grain of our measured-
out sand has dropped down, and the blind Fury will come, and without pity
and without remorse will slit our thin-spun life with her abhorred
shears. And that whether our life-work is finished or no, half-finished
or no, or not even begun. The night cometh, and the shears with it, when
no man can work. Our family must then be left behind us, however they
have been brought up; our farm also, however it has been worked; our
estate also, however it has been managed; our pulpit, our pew, our
church, our character, and even our salvation, and we must, all alone
with God, face and account for the empty sand-glass and the accusing
book. Is it any wonder that John Gordon's minister, when he was in the
spirit in Patmos, should write him as we here read? What kind of a
minister would he have been, and what a sand-glass, and what a book of
angry account he would have had soon to face himself, if he had let all
his people in Anwoth live on and suddenly die in total forgetfulness of
the sand and the shears, the book of duty and the book of judgment.
'Remember,' Rutherford wrote, 'remember and misspend not your short sand-
glass, for your forenoon is already spent, your afternoon has come, and
your night will be on you when you will not see to work. Let your heart,
therefore, be set upon finishing your journey and summing up and laying
out the accounts of your life and the grounds of your death alone before
God.'

7. And, above all, remember that after you have done all, it is the
blood of Christ alone that will set you down safely as a freeholder in
Heaven. But His blood, and your everyday remembrance of His bl