were all in the same condemnation. 'Observe your words well,' he
writes out of the bitterness of his own heart. 'Make conscience of all
your conversations.' Cut off a right hand, pluck out a right eye, says
Christ. And I wonder that half of His disciples have not bitten out
their offending tongues. What a world of injury and of all kinds of
iniquity has the tongue always and everywhere been! In Jerusalem in
David's day; and still in Jerusalem in James's day; in Anwoth and
Aberdeen and St. Andrews in Rutherford's day; and in Leith in John
Fleming's day; and still in all these places in our own day. The tongue
can no man tame, and no wonder, for it is set on fire of hell. 'I shall
show you,' says Rutherford, 'what I would fain be at myself, howbeit I
always come short of my purpose.' Rutherford made many enemies both as a
preacher and as a doctrinal and an ecclesiastical controversialist. He
was a hot, if not a bad-blooded man himself, and he raised both hot and
bad blood in other men. He was a passionate-hearted man, was Rutherford;
he would not have been our sainted Samuel Rutherford if he had not had a
fast and a high-beating heart. And his passionate heart was not all
spent in holy love to Jesus Christ, though much of it was. For the dregs
of it, the unholy scum and froth of it, came out too much in his books of
debate and in his differences with his own brethren. His high-mettled
and almost reckless sense of duty brought him many enemies, and it was
his lifelong sanctification to try to treat his enemies aright, and to
keep his own heart and tongue and pen clean and sweet towards them. And
he divined that among the merchants and magistrates of Leith, anger and
malice, rivalry and revenge were not unknown any more than they were
among their betters in the Presbytery and the General Assembly. He knew,
for Fleming had told him, that his very prosperity and his father's
prosperity had procured for Fleming many enemies. The Norway timber
trade was not all in the Fleming hands for nothing. The late Council
election also had left Fleming many enemies, and his simple duty at the
Council-table daily multiplied them. It was quite unaccountable to him
how enemies sprang up all around him, and it was well that he had such an
open-eyed and much-experienced correspondent as Rutherford was, to whom
he could confide such ghastly discoveries, and such terrible shocks to
faith and trust and love. 'Watch well this one