h, and has not only forgiven your many sins, but
has saved you from breaking out, as it may be better men have done; but
He has covered you and restrained you; has loved you freely and has made
His saints to love you; who will guide you also with His counsel, and
afterwards receive you to His glory.'

It was from his silent prison in Aberdeen that Samuel Rutherford wrote to
Lady Culross the letter in which this sentence stands: 'I see that grace
groweth best in winter.' Rutherford had had but a short and unsettled
summer among the birds at Anwoth. His wife and his two children had been
taken from him there, and now that which he loved more than wife or child
had been taken from him too--his pulpit and pastoral work for Jesus
Christ. He felt his banishment all the more keenly that he was the first
of the evangelical ministers of Scotland to be so silenced. He will have
plenty of companions in tribulation soon, if that will be any comfort to
him; but, as it is, he confesses to Lady Culross that it was a peculiar
pang to him to be 'the first in the kingdom put to utter silence.' The
bitterness of banishment has been sung in immortal strains by Dante,
whose grace under banishment also grew to a fruitfulness we still partake
of to this day:--

'Thou shall leave each thing
Beloved most dearly: this is the first shaft
Shot from the bow of exile. Thou shall prove
How salt the savour is of other's bread,
How hard the passage to descend and climb
By other's stairs. But that shall gall thee most
Will be the worthless and vile company
With whom thou must be thrown into these straits.'

But all this, to use a figure familiar among the Puritans of that day,
only made Rutherford's true life return, like sap in winter, into its
proper root, till we read in his later Aberdeen letters a rapture and a
richness that his remain-at-home correspondents are fain to tone down.

Not only does true grace grow best in winter, but winter is the best
season for planting grace. 'I was to be married, and she died,' was a
young man's explanation to me the other day for proposing to sit down at
the Lord's Table. The winter cold that carried off his future wife saw
planted in his ploughed-up heart the seeds of divine grace; and, no
doubt, all down the coming winters, with such short interludes of summers
as may be before him in this cold climate, the grace that was planted in
winter will grow. It is not a s