true
believer's love.

It was one of the great experimental problems much agitated among the
greater evangelical divines of that deep, clear-eyed, and honest day, Why
the truly regenerate are all left so full of all manner of indwelling
sin. We never hear that question raised nowadays, nor any question at
all like that. The only difficulty in our day is why any man should have
any difficulty about his own indwelling sin at all. But neither Beattie,
nor Rutherford, nor any of the masters who remain to us had got so far as
we. And as for the Antinomian, perfectionist, and higher-life preachers
of that day, they are all so dead and forgotten that you would not know
their names even if I repeated them. Beattie, as a beginner in the
spiritual life, had made this still not uncommon mistake. He had taken
those New Testament passages in which the apostles portray an ideal
Christian man as he stands in the election and calling of God, and as he
will be found at last and for ever in heaven, and he had prematurely and
inconsequently applied all that to himself as a young man under
sanctification and under the painful and humiliating beginnings of it;
and no wonder that, so confusing the very first principles of the Gospel,
he confused and terrified himself out of all peace and all comfort and
all hope. Now, that was just the kind of difficulty with which
Rutherford could deal with all his evangelical freedom and fulness, depth
and insight. No preacher or writer of that day held up the absolute
necessity of holiness better than Rutherford did; but then, that only the
more compelled him to hold up also such comfort as he conveys in his
consoling and reassuring letter to despairing Beattie: 'Comparing the
state of one truly regenerate, whose heart is a temple of the Holy Ghost,
with your own, which is full of uncleanness and corruption, you stand
dumb and dare not call Christ heartsomely your own. But, I answer, the
best regenerate have their defilements, and, wash as they will, there
will be the filth of sin in their hearts to the end. Glory alone will
make our hearts pure and perfect, never till then will they be absolutely
sinless.' And if we, Rutherford's so weak-kneed successors, preached the
law of God and true holiness as he preached those noble doctrines, the
sheer agony of our despairing people would compel us to preach also the
true nature, the narrow limits, and the whole profound laws of
evangelical sanctifica