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Transcribed from the 1894 Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier edition byDavid Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

SAMUEL RUTHERFORD
AND SOME OF
HIS CORRESPONDENTS

LECTURES DELIVERED IN
ST. GEORGE’S FREE CHURCH
EDINBURGH: BY
ALEXANDER WHYTE, D.D.

AUTHOR OF ‘BUNYAN CHARACTERS’
ETC.

PUBLISHED BY
OLIPHANT ANDERSON AND FERRIER

30 ST. MARY STREET, EDINBURGH, AND
24 OLD BAILEY, LONDON
1894

p. 1I.  JOSHUA REDIVIVUS

‘He sent me as a spy to see the land and to trythe ford.’
Rutherford.

Samuel Rutherford, the author of the seraphic Letters, wasborn in the south of Scotland in the year of our Lord 1600.  ThomasGoodwin was born in England in the same year, Robert Leighton in 1611,Richard Baxter in 1615, John Owen in 1616, John Bunyan in 1628, andJohn Howe in 1630.  A little vellum-covered volume now lies openbefore me, the title-page of which runs thus:—‘Joshua Redivivus,or Mr. Rutherford’s Letters, now published for the use of thepeople of God: but more particularly for those who now are, or may afterwardsbe, put to suffering for Christ and His cause.  By a well-wisherto the work and to the people of God.  Printed in the year 1664.’ That is all.  It would not have been safe in 1664 to say more. There is no editor’s name on the title-page, no publisher’sname, and no place of printing or of publication.  Only two textsof forewarning and reassuring Scripture, and then the year of grace1664.

p. 2Joshua Redivivus:That is to say, Moses’ spy and pioneer, Moses’ successorand the captain of the Lord’s covenanted host come back again. A second Joshua sent to Scotland to go before God’s people inthat land and in that day; a spy who would both by his experience andby his testimony cheer and encourage the suffering people of God. For all this Samuel Rutherford truly was.  As he said of himselfin one of his letters to Hugh Mackail, he was indeed a spy sent outto make experiment upon the life of silence and separation, banishmentand martyrdom, and to bring back a report of that life for the vindicationof Christ and for the support and encouragement of His people. It was a happy thought of Rutherford’s first editor, Robert M’Ward,his old Westminster Assembly secretary, to put at the top of his title-page,Joshua risen again from the dead, or, Mr. Rutherford’s Letterswritten from his place of banishment in Aberdeen.

In selecting his twelve spies, Moses went on the principle of choosingthe best and the ablest men he could lay hold of in all Israel. And in selecting Samuel Rutherford to be the first sufferer for Hiscovenanted people in Scotland, our Lord took a man who was already famousfor his character and his services.  For no man of his age in broadScotland stood higher as a scholar, a theologian, a controversialist,a preacher and a very saint than Samuel Rutherford.  He had beensettled at Anwoth on the Solway in 1627, and for the next nine yearshe had lived such a noble life among his people as to make Anwoth famousas long as Jesus Christ has a Church p. 3inScotland.  As we say Bunyan and Bedford, Baxter and Kidderminster,Newton and Olney, Edwards and Northampton, Boston and Ettrick, M’Cheyneand St. Peter’s, so we say Rutherford and Anwoth.

His talents, his industry, his scholarship, his preaching power,his pastoral solicitude and his saintly character all combined to makeRutherford a marked man both to the friends and to the enemies of thetruth.  His talents and his industry while he was yet a studentin Edinburgh had carried him to the top of his classes, and all hisdays he could write in Latin better than either in Scotch or English. His habits of work at Anwoth soon became a very proverb.  His peopleboasted that their minister was always at his books, always among hisparishioners, always at their sick-beds and their death-beds, alwayscatechising their children and always alone with his God.  Andthen the matchless preaching of the parish church of Anwoth.  Wecan gather what made the Sabbaths of Anwoth so memorable both to Rutherfordand to his people from the books we still have from those great Sabbaths:The Trial and the Triumph of Faith; Christ Dying and DrawingSinners to Himself; and such like.  Rutherford was the ‘mostmoving and the most affectionate of preachers,’ a preacher determinedto know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified, but not so muchcrucified, as crucified and risen again—crucified indeed, butnow glorified.  Rutherford’s life for his people at Anwothhas something altogether superhuman and unearthly about it.  Hiscorrespondents in his own day and his critics in our day stumble athis too intense p. 4devotionto his charge; he lived for his congregation, they tell us, almost tothe neglect of his wife and children.  But by the time of his banishmenthis home was desolate, his wife and children were in the grave. And all the time and thought and love they had got from him while theywere alive had, now that they were dead, returned with new and intensifieddevotion to his people and his parish.

Fair Anwoth by the Solway,
   To me thou still art dear,
E’en from the verge of heaven

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