Rutherford was, and his letters bear evidence on every page that there
was no man who had a more loathsome and a more hateful experience of his
own heart, not even Taylor, not even Owen, not even Bunyan, not even
Baxter. What a day of extremest men that was, and what an inheritance we
extreme men have had left us, in their inward, extreme, and heavenly
books!

Once more, hear him on the tides of feeling that continually rose and
fell within his heart. Writing from Aberdeen to Lady Boyd, he says: 'I
have not now, of a long time, found such high springtides as formerly.
The sea is out, and I cannot buy a wind and cause it to flow again; only
I wait on the shore till the Lord sends a full sea. . . . But even to
dream of Him is sweet.' And then, just over the leaf, to Marion
M'Naught: 'I am well: honour to God. . . . He hath broken in upon a poor
prisoner's soul like the swelling of Jordan. I am bank and brim full: a
great high springtide of the consolations of Christ hath overwhelmed me.'
. . . But sweet as it is to read his rapturous expressions when the tide
is full, I feel it far more helpful to hear how he still looks and waits
for the return of the tide when the tide is low, and when the shore is
full, as all left shores are apt to be, of weeds and mire, and all
corrupt and unclean things. Rutherford is never more helpful to his
correspondents than when they consult him about their ebb tides, and find
that he himself either has been, or still is, in the same experience.

But why do we disinter such texts as this out of such an author as Samuel
Rutherford? Why do we tell to all the world that such an eminent saint
was full of such sad extremes? Well, we surely do so out of obedience to
the divine command to comfort God's people; for, next to their having no
such extremes in themselves, their next best comfort is to be told that
great and eminent saints of God have had the very same besetting sins and
staggering extremes as they still have. If the like of Samuel Rutherford
was vexed and weakened with such intellectual contradictions and
spiritual extremes in his mind, in his heart and in his history, then may
we not hope that some such saintliness, if not some such service as his,
may be permitted to us also?

III. MARION M'NAUGHT

'O woman beloved of God.'--_Rutherford_.

'The world knows nothing of its greatest men,' says Sir Henry Taylor in
his _Philip Van Artevelde_; and it knows much less