t of
itself will give them many sufficiently sick days and nights too, both as
new beginners and as old believers. And tell them, also, from me, that
once they have seen themselves in their own hearts, and Jesus Christ in
His heart, it will be impossible for them ever to go back from Him.
Absolutely impossible. So much so that it is perfectly certain that he
who goes back from Christ has never really seen himself or Christ either.
He may have seen something somewhat more or less like Christ, but, all
the time, it was not Christ. Let your soul once come up to close
quarters with Christ, and I defy you ever to forget Him again. Tell all
your new beginners that from me, Samuel Rutherford, who, after all, am
not yet well begun myself.'

3. 'You complain bitterly of a dead ministry in your bounds. I have
heard as much. But I will reply that a living ministry is not
indispensable to a parish. All our parishes ought to have it, and we
ought to see to it that they all get it; but neither the conversion of
sinners, nor the sanctification and comfort of God's saints, is tied up
to any man's lips. You will read your unread Bibles more: you will buy
more good books: you will meet more in private converse and prayer: and
it will not be bad for you for a season to look above the pulpit, and to
look Jesus Christ Himself more immediately in the face.' As Fraser of
Brea also said in a striking passage in his diary, so Rutherford says in
his reply letter: 'in your sore famine of the water of life, run your
pipe right up to the fountain.'

4. If the parishioners of Kilmacolm were severe on their minister it was
not that they let themselves escape. And there was something in their
present letters that led Rutherford to warn them against a mistake that
only people of the Kilmacolm type will ever fall into. 'Some of the
people of God,' says their sharp-eyed censor, 'slander the grace of God
in their own soul.' And that is true of some of God's best people still.
We meet with such people now and then in our own parishes to-day. They
are so possessed with penitence and humility; they have such high and
inflexible and spiritual standards for measuring themselves by; the law
has so fatally entered their innermost souls that they will not even
admit or acknowledge what the grace of God has, to all other men's
knowledge, done in them. Seek out, says Rutherford, the signs of true
grace in yourselves as well as the signs of secret s