roud when he laid his
hand on their heads, and they treasured the kindly words which he spoke
to them. They who laboured along with him in the ministry felt that his
mere existence in the community was an irresistible demonstration of
Christianity and a tower of strength to every good cause. Yet he had not
gained this position of influence by brilliant talents or great
achievements or the pushing of ambition; for he was singularly modest,
and would have been the last to credit himself with half the good he did.
The whole mystery lay in this, that he had lived in the town for forty
years a blameless life, and was known by everybody to be a godly and a
prayerful man. The prime qualification for the ministry is goodness.'

Beattie as a student challenged himself severely on this account also,
that some truths found a more easy and unshaken credit with him than
other truths. This is a common difficulty with many of our modern
students also, and how best to advise with them under this real
difficulty constantly puts their professors and their pastors to the
test. Whatever Beattie may have got, I confess I do not get much help in
this difficulty out of Rutherford's letter back to Beattie. Rutherford,
with all his splendid gifts of mind and heart, had sometimes a certain
dogmatic and dictatorial way with him, and this is just the temper that
our students still meet with too often in their old and settled censors.
The 'torpor of assurance' has not yet settled on the young divine as it
has done on too many of the old. There was a modest, a genuine, and an
every way reasonable difficulty in this part of Beattie's letter to
Rutherford, and I wish much that Rutherford had felt himself put upon his
quite capable mettle to deal with the difficulty. Or, if he had not time
to go to the bottom of all Beattie's deep letter, as he says he has not,
he might have referred his correspondent--for his correspondent was a
well-read student--to a great sermon by the greatest of English
Churchmen--a sermon that a reader like Rutherford must surely have had by
heart, entitled, 'A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certainty and
Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect.' But, unfortunately for England and
Scotland both, England was thrusting that sermon and all the other
writings of its author on the Church of Christ in Scotland at the point
of the bayonet, and that is the very worst instrument that can be
employed in the interests of truth and