eutica_
himself would have been put to it to answer fully and satisfactorily
those two so acute and so searching letters. The Kilmacolm people had
heard about the famous answers that Samuel Rutherford, now home again in
Anwoth, had written both from Anwoth and from Aberdeen to all classes of
people and on all kinds of subjects; copies, indeed, of some of those now
already widespread letters had come to Kilmacolm itself, till, at one of
their private meetings for conference and prayer, it was resolved that a
small committee of their elders should gather up their painful
experiences in the spiritual life that got no help from the parish
pulpit, and should set them by way of submission and consultation before
the great spiritual casuist. Everybody else was getting what counsel and
comfort they needed from the famous adviser of Anwoth, and why not they,
the neglected parishioners of Kilmacolm? And thus it was that two or
three of the oldest and ablest men in the kirk-session so wrote to
Rutherford, as, after some delay, to get back the elaborate letter from
Anwoth numbered 286 in Dr. Bonar's edition.

I am tempted to think it possible that the old, long-experienced, and
much-exercised saints of Kilmacolm may have demanded a little too much of
their minister: at any rate, I am quite as anxious to hear what
Rutherford shall say to them as they can be to hear from him themselves.
And all that leads me to believe that not only must there have been some
quite remarkable people in the parish church at that date, but that they
must also have had some very special pulpit and pastoral work expended on
them in former years. Or, if not that, then their case is just another
illustration of what Rutherford says in his reassuring answer, namely,
that the life of grace among a people is not at all tied up to the lips
of their minister. Which, again, is just another way of putting what the
Psalmist says of himself in his humble and happy boast: 'I have more
understanding than all my teachers, for Thy testimonies are my
meditation. I understand more than the ancients, because I keep Thy
precepts.'

1. The first complaint that came to Anwoth from Kilmacolm was expressed
in the quaint and graphic language natural to that day. 'Security,
strong and sib to nature, is stealing in upon us.' The holy law of God,
they mean, was never preached in their parish; at any rate, it was never
carried home to any man's conscience. Nobody was ever