more work for his Master than many a
hundred grey-headed and godly ministers. Gillespie and Rutherford got
acquainted with one another when Rutherford was beginning his work at
Anwoth. In the good providence of God, Gillespie was led to Kenmure
Castle to be tutor in the family of Lord and Lady Kenmure, and that threw
Rutherford and Gillespie continually together. Gillespie was still a
probationer. He was ready for ordination, and many congregations were
eager to have him, but the patriotic and pure-minded youth could not
submit to receive ordination at the hands of the bishops of that day, and
this kept him out of a church of his own long after he was ready to begin
his ministry. But the time was not lost to Gillespie himself, or to the
Church of Christ in Scotland,--the time that threw Rutherford and
Gillespie into the same near neighbourhood, and into intimate and
affectionate friendship. The mere scholarship of the two men would at
once draw them together. They read the same deep books; they reasoned
out the same constitutional, ecclesiastical, doctrinal, and experimental
problems; till one day, rising off their knees in the woods of Kenmure
Castle, the two men took one another by the hand and swore a covenant
that all their days, and amid all the trials they saw were coming to
Scotland and her Church, they would remain fast friends, would often
think of one another, would often name one another before God in prayer,
and would regularly write to one another, and that not on church
questions only and on the books they were reading, but more especially on
the life of God in their own souls. Of the correspondence of those two
remarkable men we have only three letters preserved to us, but they are
enough to let us see the kind of letters that must have frequently passed
between Kenmure Castle and Aberdeen, and between St. Andrews and
Edinburgh during the next ten years.

Gillespie was born in the parish manse of Kirkcaldy in 1613; he was
ordained to the charge of the neighbouring congregation of Wemyss in
1638, was translated thence to Edinburgh in 1642, and then became one of
the four famous deputies who were sent up from the Church of Scotland to
sit and represent her in the Westminster Assembly in 1643. Gillespie's
great ability was well known, his wide learning and his remarkable
controversial powers had been already well proved, else such a young man
would never have been sent on such a mission; but his appe