thing, Bailie Fleming,
even your deep desire for revenge. Be sure that it is in your heart in
Leith to seek revenge as well as it is in my heart here in Aberdeen.
Watch, as you would the workings of a serpent, the workings of your sore-
hurt heart in the matter of its revenges. Watch how the calamities that
come on your enemies refresh and revive you. Watch how their prosperity
and their happiness depress and darken you. Disentangle the desire for
revenge and the delight in it out of the rank thickets of your wicked
heart; drag that desire and delight out of its native darkness; know it,
name it, and it will be impossible but that you will hate it like death
and hell, and yourself on account of it. Do you honestly wish, as you
say you do, for direction as to your duty to your many enemies in Leith,
and to God and your own soul among them? Then begin with this: watch and
find yourself out in your deep desire for revenge, and in your secret
satisfaction and delight to hear it and to speak it. Begin with that;
and, then, long after that, and as the divine reward of that, you will be
enabled to begin to try to love your enemies, to bless them that curse
you, to do good to them that hate you, and to pray for them that
despitefully use you and persecute you. You need no Directory for these
things from me when you have the Sermon on the Mount in your own New
Testament.'

3. And, still looking into his own heart and writing straight out of it,
Rutherford says to Fleming, 'I have been much challenged in my
conscience, and still am, for not referring all I do to God as my last
and chiefest end.' Which is just Samuel Rutherford's vivid way of taking
home to himself the first question of the Shorter Catechism which he had
afterwards such a deep hand in drawing up. I do not know any other
author who deals so searchingly with this great subject as that prince
among experimental divines, Thomas Shepard, the founder of Yale in New
England. His insight is as good as his style is bad. His English is
execrable, but his insight is nothing short of divine. 'The pollution of
the whole man, and of all his actions,' he says in his _Parable of the
Ten Virgins_, 'consists chiefly in his self-seeking, in making ourselves
our utmost end. This makes our most glorious actions vile; this stains
them all. And so the sanctification of a sinner consists chiefly in
making the Lord our utmost end in all that we do. Every man living seeks