ehensive tenderest parts.'

But, indeed, we all have the thing in us, though we may never have put
its proper name upon it. We all know what a forecast of evil is--a
secret fear that evil is coming upon us. It lays hold of our heart, or
of our conscience, as the case may be, and will not let go its hold. And
then the heart and the conscience run out continually and lay hold of the
future evil and carry it home to our terrified bosoms. We apprehend the
coming evil, and feel it long before it comes. We die, like the coward,
many times before our death.

Now, Rutherford just takes that well-known word and applies it to his
fears and his sinkings of heart about his past sins, and about the
unsettled wages of his sins. His conscience makes him a coward, till he
thinks every bush an officer. But then he reasons and remonstrates with
himself in his deep and intimate letter to Gillespie, and says that these
his doubts, and terrors, and apprehensions are not canonical. He is
writing to a divine and a scholar, as well as to an experienced Christian
man, and he uses words that such scholars and such Christian men quite
well understand and like to make use of. The canon that he here refers
to is the Holy Scriptures; they are the rule of our faith, and they are
also the rule of God's faithfulness. What God has said to us in His
word, that we must believe and hold by; that, and not our deserts or our
apprehensions, must rule and govern our faith and our trust, just as
God's word will be the rule and standard of His dealings with us. His
word rules us in our faith and life; and again it rules Him also in His
dealings with our faith and with our life. God does not deal with us as
we deserve; He does not deal with us as we, in our guilty apprehensions,
fear He will. He deals with the apprehensive, penitent, believing sinner
according to the grace and the truth of His word. His promises are
canonical to Him, not our apprehensions.

Thomas Goodwin, that perfect prince of pulpit exegetes, lays down this
canon, and continually himself acts upon it, that 'the context of a
scripture is half its interpretation; . . . if a man would open a place
of scripture, he should do it rationally; he should go and consider the
words before and the words after.' Now, let us apply this rule to the
interpretation of this text out of Rutherford, and look at the context,
before and after, out of which it is taken.

Remembering his covenant wi