he said of himself in one of his letters
to Hugh Mackail, he was indeed a spy sent out to make experiment upon the
life of silence and separation, banishment and martyrdom, and to bring
back a report of that life for the vindication of Christ and for the
support and encouragement of His people. It was a happy thought of
Rutherford's first editor, Robert M'Ward, his old Westminster Assembly
secretary, to put at the top of his title-page, Joshua risen again from
the dead, or, Mr. Rutherford's Letters written from his place of
banishment in Aberdeen.

In selecting his twelve spies, Moses went on the principle of choosing
the best and the ablest men he could lay hold of in all Israel. And in
selecting Samuel Rutherford to be the first sufferer for His covenanted
people in Scotland, our Lord took a man who was already famous for his
character and his services. For no man of his age in broad Scotland
stood higher as a scholar, a theologian, a controversialist, a preacher
and a very saint than Samuel Rutherford. He had been settled at Anwoth
on the Solway in 1627, and for the next nine years he had lived such a
noble life among his people as to make Anwoth famous as long as Jesus
Christ has a Church in Scotland. As we say Bunyan and Bedford, Baxter
and Kidderminster, Newton and Olney, Edwards and Northampton, Boston and
Ettrick, M'Cheyne and St. Peter's, so we say Rutherford and Anwoth.

His talents, his industry, his scholarship, his preaching power, his
pastoral solicitude and his saintly character all combined to make
Rutherford a marked man both to the friends and to the enemies of the
truth. His talents and his industry while he was yet a student in
Edinburgh had carried him to the top of his classes, and all his days he
could write in Latin better than either in Scotch or English. His habits
of work at Anwoth soon became a very proverb. His people boasted that
their minister was always at his books, always among his parishioners,
always at their sick-beds and their death-beds, always catechising their
children and always alone with his God. And then the matchless preaching
of the parish church of Anwoth. We can gather what made the Sabbaths of
Anwoth so memorable both to Rutherford and to his people from the books
we still have from those great Sabbaths: _The Trial and the Triumph of
Faith_; _Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself_; and such like.
Rutherford was the 'most moving and the most affectionate o