I
have sinned, O Preserver of mankind, Thou hast waled and selected out for
me a joyful sorrow--an honest, spiritual, glorious sorrow. Oh, what am
I, such a rotten mass of sin, to be counted worthy of the most honourable
rod in my Father's house, even the golden rod wherewith the Lord the Heir
was Himself stricken. Thou wast a God that forgavest them, though Thou
tookest vengeance of their inventions.' Rutherford also was forgiven,
and the only vengeance that God took of his inventions, the
irregularities of his youth, was taken in the form of a 'waled cross.' 'I
might have been proclaimed on the crown of the causey,' says Rutherford,
'but He has so waled my cross and His vengeance that I am suffering not
for my sin but for His name.' What a life hid with Christ in God he must
live, who, like Rutherford, takes all his trials on earth as a transmuted
and substituted cross for his sins: and who is able to take all his
deserved and demanded chastisements in the shape of inward and spiritual
and sanctifying pain. O sweet vengeance of grace on our sinful
inventions! O most intimate and most awful of all our secrets, the
secrets of a love-waled, love-substituted cross! O rare outgate from the
scorn of the causeway to the smelting-house of 'Him who hath His fire in
Zion!'

'The sorrows of death compassed me,' sings the Psalmist, and 'the pains
of hell gat hold upon me; I found trouble and sorrow.' What, you may
well ask, were those pains of hell that gat such hold of David while yet
he was a living and unreprobated man? Was it not too strong language to
use about any earthly experience, however terrible, to call it the pains
of hell? Ask that man whose sin has found him out what he thinks the
pains of hell were in David's case, and he will tell you that
remorse--unsoftened, unsweetened, unquenchable remorse--is hell; at any
rate, it is hell upon earth; and till he confessed his sin it was David's
hell. Sin taken up and laid by God's hand on the sinner's conscience,
that makes that sinner's conscience hell. And, then, do we not read that
Jehovah laid on our Surety the sin of us all till He was three hours in
hell for us, and came out of it, as Rutherford says, with the keys of
hell at His proud girdle? And it is with those captured keys that He now
unlocks the true hell-gate in every guilty sinner's conscience.

'He comes the prisoners to relieve
In Satan's bondage held;
The gates of brass before Hi