pposite of wretchedness is
happiness. Yes! but you will search all the Book of God and all its
promises, and you will not find one single letter of them all addressed
to the abounding and the gladsome and the self-satisfied. It is the poor
man's market; and this market goes best when the poor man is not only
poor, but poor beyond all ordinary poverty: poor, as Samuel Rutherford
always was, to 'absolute and loathsome wretchedness.' Let him here,
then, whose sad case is best described in Rutherford's dreadful words,
let him come to Rutherford's market and make Rutherford's merchandise,
and let him do it now. Ho, he that hath no money, he that hath only
misery, let him come, and let him come now.

XX. JAMES BAUTIE, STUDENT OF DIVINITY

'You crave my mind.'--_Rutherford_.

As a rule the difficulties of a divinity student are not at all the
difficulties of the best of his future people. A divinity student's
difficulties are usually academic and speculative, whereas the
difficulties of the best people in his coming congregation will be
difficulties of the most intensely real and practical kind. And thus it
is that we so often hear lately-ordained ministers confessing that they
have come to the end of their resources and experiences, and have nothing
either fresh or certain left to preach to the people about. Just as, on
the other hand, so many congregations complain that they look up to the
pulpit from Sabbath to Sabbath and are not fed. It is not much to be
wondered at that a raw college youth cannot all at once feed and guide
and extricate an old saint; or that a minister, whose deepest
difficulties hitherto have been mostly of the debating society kind,
should not be able to afford much help to those of his people who are
wading through the deep and drowning waters of the spiritual life. And
whether something could not be done by the institution of chairs of
genuine pastoral and experimental theology for the help of our students
and the good of our people is surely a question that well deserves the
earnest attention of all the evangelical churches. Meantime we are to be
introduced to a divinity student of the middle of the seventeenth century
who was early and deeply exercised in those intensely real problems of
the soul which occupied such a large place both in the best religious
literature and in the best pulpit work of that intensely earnest day.
James Bautie, or Beattie, as we shall here call h