e a deep divine, I recommend you to
sanctification.' What with his father and his mother, his books, his
acquaintance with Rutherford and Hume, and, best of all, his acquaintance
with his own evil heart, young John Meine must have been a somewhat deep
divine already, else Rutherford would not have cast such pearls of
experience down before him.

A divine, according to our division of labour, is a man who has chosen as
his life-work to study the things of God; the things, that is, of God in
Christ, in Scripture, in the Church, and in the heart and life of man.
John and James and Peter and Andrew ceased to be fishermen, and became
divines when Christ said to them 'Follow me.' And after seventy years of
sanctification the second son of Zebedee had at last attained to divinity
enough to receive the Revelation, to write it out, and to be called by
the early Church John the Divine.

But what is this process of sanctification that makes a young man already
a deep divine? What is sanctification? Rutherford had a deep hand in
drawing up the well-known definition, and, therefore, we may take it as
not far from the truth: 'Sanctification is the work of God's free grace,
whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are
enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness.' That,
or something like that, was the recipe that Samuel Rutherford sent south
to John Meine, student of divinity, with the assurance that, if he
followed it close enough and long enough, it would result in making him a
deep divine. I wonder if he took the recipe; I wonder if he kept to it;
I wonder how he pictured to himself the image of God; I wonder, nay, I
know, how he felt as he submitted his whole man--body, soul, and
spirit--to the renewing of the Holy Ghost. And did he begin and continue
to die more and more unto sin, till he died altogether to this sinful
world, and live more and more unto righteousness, till he went to live
with Knox, and Rutherford, and Hume, and his father and mother in the
Land of Life?

'Did he begin with regeneration?' Dr. John Duncan, of the New College,
asked his daughter, one Sabbath when she had come home from church full
of praise of a sermon she had just heard on sanctification. Dr. Duncan
was perhaps the deepest divine this century has seen in Edinburgh; and
his divinity took its depth from the same study and the same exercise
that Rutherford recommended to John Meine. Dr. Dunca