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[0:00] Of the greatest of all Christian classics, leaving out the Bible, relevant letters must find a place, time for time, with Augustine's Confessions, Calvin's Institutes, Bunyan's Pilgrim, Baxter's, Reformed Palsy.

[0:23] The Scottish Presbyterian Divine, Saint and Scholar, rose born in the year 1600 and died in the year 1661.

[0:39] He was therefore contemporary with many of our great English puritans, Benjamin Baxter, Owen and Goodwin, Sins and Charles, men whose spirit he shared, whose gospel he preached.

[0:59] There were spiritual giants in the land of Scotland as well as in England in those days. It was, of course, the era, the aftermath of the Scottish Reformation.

[1:10] A Reformation which took place in and around the year 1560 under the hand and the guidance of the great John Knox.

[1:23] Unlike the very tardy and sluggish English Reformation that took place under Henry VIII, the Scottish Reformation had been radical. Not hard ago.

[1:34] Total. But, like all radical movements, it had its reaction. It had its repercussions. And so it was in Scotland some 50, 60, 70 years after the Reformation.

[1:51] When the Scottish and the English crowns were united in the year 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England.

[2:03] The king threatened to harry the puritans out of the land. And he made his threat in the interests of his policy of high church episcopacy.

[2:21] And this, of course, is what gave rise to the main covenanting movement in Scotland. The heart of which was the covenanting or contracting or bonding and binding together under oath of a vast number of people, ministers and people.

[2:44] No wars and commoners in the interests of what was the definitive principle of puritanism. The definitive principle of puritanism was puritanism.

[2:57] Purity of religion. Purity of worship according to the word of God. Purity of religion.

[3:35] as the greater proportion of England did for Cromwell and the Commonwealth. Although, of course, it has to be said that they in Scotland benefited from the religious freedom and tolerance of the Commonwealth, as the English did, and they suffered just as much as the English did at the restoration of the monarchy when Charles II came back from exile in Holland in 1660.

[4:10] Enough to show you that Rutherford's times were turbulent times. When then Rutherford was a turbulent man. At least, one aspect of him was.

[4:24] Because he was a man, he was a character, he was a person and a personality in whom there was the blending of a very accomplished controversialist.

[4:36] On the one hand. And on the other hand, a very devout, godly, humble, tender-hearted, conscientious preacher and pastor.

[4:48] he was the author of at least 24 weighty books. But Rutherford's heart is best discerned and best known in his letters.

[5:03] These, of course, were written to various people at various times. There have been many, at least 30 or 40 editions of Rutherford's letters.

[5:15] The best edition is that which is edited by Dr. Andrew Boner. From which, there is a paperback selection in print at the present time, published by the Band of Truth, for a few coppers.

[5:29] It's a little book, it's only a sample of the real thing, but it's a gem that will warm your heart and introduce you to the heart of this man whose heart was a play with the love of Christ.

[5:45] Well, Rutherford was born, as I've said, in the year 1600 in the parish of Misbet, not far from the old-day town of Jedburgh in the border county of Roxburghshire.

[5:57] His father was a farmer who was able to give his son, first, what education was available in the little town of Jedburgh.

[6:11] As it may be remarked in passing, that Scotland was far in the glance of England in matters of general education. That was due to Knox's policy for reformation. Every town of any size had a school for ordinary people and ordinary people's children in the 17th century.

[6:29] Then, when he gave evidence through that schooling in Jedburgh of his ability, his father sent young Samuel on to Edinburgh University at the age of 17.

[6:42] in those days, when England could claim only two universities, Scotland had five, of which Edinburgh was the youngest in terms of years and possibly the poorest in terms of resources.

[6:59] well, at any rate, he went there. And, he graduated Master of Arts and, it may be a sign of his ability and also a sign of the poverty of the Edinburgh University at that point, that, now, sooner that he graduated that he was appointed Professor of Latin Language in literature in his Alma Mater, a post that he held for two years.

[7:33] Two years that, for him, were troubled years. Troubled years in personal matters, troubled years in terms of spiritual matters and spiritual strivings and strugglings and awakens.

[7:50] There is on record no detail of Rutherford's call by grace but there is plenty of evidence of the fact in everything that the Arthur was wrote and spoke.

[8:06] During this time, he felt a call to the ministry and feeling that call burning in his heart, he turned from Latin to theology and, through the diligence and the exacting study of the word of God which occupied his mind for several years.

[8:33] And so, in 1627, at the age of 27 years of age, Rutherford was sent to be parish minister in the sparsely populated parish of Anwell in Kirkcoubrish in southwestern Scotland, an area that borders on the Solway Perth.

[9:00] It's needful, of course, to remember that reformed religion in Scotland was presbyterian. It never was Anglican. It's also needful to remember that in Rutherford's day there were no independent or Baptist churches in Scotland.

[9:19] Anglicanism, as an alien thing, was in various ways being forced on the people by the king.

[9:32] The country was divided into parishes, just as England was, and was divided into these chastical parishes. The parish minister in Scotland, of course, was a Presbyterian minister.

[9:47] And the Presbyterian ministers, in general, were governed and guided and directed by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. And in those days, Rutherford's days, the days when Rutherford came into Galloway, to his parish of Antwoch, there were various royal measures on foot to avert the Reformed religion, to return it to the religion of the Roman Church, and by the help of certain unscrupulous members of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

[10:30] This was gradually being brought about, and influence and pressures were coming on the parish ministers. the parish of Antwoch was, then, what it is today.

[10:47] Hills and glens, sheep and shepherds, and not much else. Many years ago now, I went there and was delighted to find the ruins of Rutherford's old church.

[11:01] Still there, still to be seen, with many a covenant of tombstone and this inscription still readable. The dominant impression that the whole place makes upon one's spirit, I think, can be summed up in the word remoteness.

[11:22] Remoteness. Loneliness. Yet, it's on record that for the whole of nine years in Antwoch, Rutherford worked a 16-hour day and wished he could work longer.

[11:36] And he worked this 16-hour day in the interest of God's glory and his people's son. People said it became proverbial for Rutherford was always praying, always preaching, always studying, always visiting.

[11:58] The house where he lived has long since gone, though it was still remembered some years ago when, as I say, I made my visit. It must have been witness of many strong crying prayers.

[12:13] The Galloway area or the southwestern area of Scotland had always been a center, a strong center of reformed faith.

[12:27] So the Moodwood Brotherhood was not entirely alone. There were neighboring parish ministers brothers of kindred spirit. Not only that, there were families of the nobility as well as shepherds and their boys who feared God, worshipped him both in private and in public.

[12:51] And these all alike, whether Rutherford had a warm welcome. it said that he was remembered as a little hair man.

[13:07] It said that his elocution lacked perfection and his voice had an unnatural tendency to a certain shrillness at times in the movement, especially when he became uplifted and elevated as he often did with his glorious themes.

[13:27] And Robert Woodrow, one of the, if not the greatest of all the church historians of Scotland, speaks of Rutherford as one of the most moving and affectionate preachers in his time, or perhaps in any age of the church.

[13:46] His sermons were radiant with Christ. Christ incarnate, Christ suffering, Christ dying, Christ rising, Christ ascending, Christ reigning, and Christ in all his saving relationships with his people.

[14:06] His favourite pulpit theme, according to the traditions that lingered in the area, his favourite pulpit theme was the unsearchable love of Christ.

[14:18] Although there were many who did, and some who had cause to remember, that he could and did handle practical subjects and sins with an unsparing patience.

[14:35] He was, as I've already said, a man of prayer. A man woke, he was accustomed to rise at three in the morning. The first half of his ordinary working day, I'm speaking about the weekdays, of course.

[14:51] The first half of the weekday was prayer and study, and the second half was visiting, catechising families, and personal intercourse with his people, whether Christian or not Christian.

[15:05] the nature of the parish system, you understand, was, whether it still is, is beside the point, but the nature of the parish system, as understood in those days, was, that all the souls in the parish were the spiritual charge of the minister, so that whether they were the lords or not the lords, he felt an earnest, anxious, concern for them.

[15:32] And both, as I've indicated, was a very scattered parish, hill of country. And where the shepherds and the shepherd boys lived, the minister had to go.

[15:48] So he demanded a great many journeys, always on foot, wending his way over the firm and heather hills. These letters speak of how those walks instructed him in the handiwork of God in nature, and how he had precious times in communing with God when none but the curlews and the peewits were to be heard in the heavens, and the sound of his own feet rustling through the heaven.

[16:19] Well, God was pleased to bless this man's minister. In the midst not of ideal or happy personal circumstances, in the midst, indeed, of personal affliction.

[16:39] He hadn't been there a year or two before his first child died. After five years, he buried his wife and his second child. When other parishes were without a minister, people trudged for miles over the hills to worship at Anwar.

[17:02] And what was found was that there was an awakening of the already gracious people in the parish. church. And then, hard on the heels of that, as is so often the case, there came the convicting and the converting sin.

[17:24] So, illustrating the truth of the scripture, principle that judgment must begin at the house of God. It is thus, almost without exception, that awakenings and revivals have come in the course of church history.

[17:43] There was, of course, a resistance to truth from some. There were for the pastor all those sadnesses and problems that a pastor, a true pastor, still has to have.

[17:55] Yet nothing turned to his side from his call and from his felt sense of being, as used to be said in those days, married.

[18:08] to his people. An incident sometimes still recalled, sometimes told out of context and not always with the following implication, an incident of Rutherford's Ann Woke ministry concerns the godly and learned Archbishop Usher, who was at that time the climate of Poor Island.

[18:36] He was travelling on one occasion from London to Stranra on his way to Ireland. And he found himself on the turnpike not far from Ann Woke on a Saturday afternoon.

[18:54] Ann Woke's work, Ann Woke's minister, minister, and the pouring forth of the Spirit of God on his church and people in Ann Woke, was something that was near as that had reached even London.

[19:10] an Archbishop of Usher, although a prelate, was a man of God, who put truth before any form of church government.

[19:25] In point of fact, when Usher was in London, as he often was on business, he didn't worship at St. Paul's or the Abbey. He worshipped under the ministry of the Puritan Dr. Thomas Manton in St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden.

[19:43] So you see where his son of this lie. But being near to Ann Woke on a Saturday afternoon, he thought he would seek the ministrations of this man of God.

[19:58] Still rather than the young, of course, of whose piety and eloquence he had heard him. But he decided, he decided, not to go in the open way, he decided to disguise himself as a wayfarer, and to beg a night's lodging at the Ann Woke Mass, which he did, and he was admitted.

[20:28] It was the custom of Rutherford's wife, his first wife, when her husband was busy on Saturday evening, completing his preparation for the pulpit for the Lord's Day, it was Mrs.

[20:45] Rutherford's custom to gather the family, the servants, and anybody else who happened to be in the house, or near the house, in the kitchen, and to catechise them, to ask them simple questions and answers about the Bible, the faith, the gospel.

[21:01] So to learn something of where they stood, what they knew, and in a quiet way, to be able to hold her husband with this information.

[21:16] And so it was that the archbishop, in the guise of a wayfaring, possibly, apparently a beggar, a wayfaring man, was in this little motley company in the kitchen of Anwell's man's conversation.

[21:37] The lady of the man's applied her questions as usual, and felt she would like, and had the right, to test the knowledge of the wayfarer who had been admitted to the hospitality of her.

[21:51] So she applied him with the question, how many commandments are there? To which he answered eleven. Well, in due course, his ignorance was reported to the minister of Anwell's.

[22:11] Night came, they went to bed. Rutherford rose early, as his habit was, as I've already said, rose early on the Sabbath morning, and he went out into a grove of trees nearby where he had found a place of solitude, of quietness, isolation, and stillness.

[22:35] There, he went to wait on God. And on this particular Sabbath morning when he arrived, indeed, before he arrived, he heard the sound of a voice.

[22:49] night, and as he approached, he discovered that there was someone else there already engaged in humbers, with the most high.

[23:02] It was, indeed, the stranger within his own gates. And as Rutherford stood, hidden and listened, he was struck with the evident grace of character and the evident spiritual knowledge and depth of knowledge in his guest.

[23:23] Something, he thought, that was not quite compatible with the appearance, of the dress, of the wayfaring man. He waited till the frame was finished, and then he expressed to his guest the thought that he possibly was not the wayfaring man that he purported to be.

[23:50] And Archbishop, disguised being no longer possible, declared himself distroved his identity. And the two men communed together and prayed together.

[24:05] But the scene ended with Rutherford's urging Usher to preach in his book, in the Anwell Parish Church that day.

[24:17] And Usher agreed. And when Usher gave out of his text a new commandment, I give unto you that ye love one another, Rutherford whispered to his wife.

[24:34] There is the 11th commandment. There's another feature of the Anwell ministry that has to be mentioned, if only because it brought about the end of that particular period of his service.

[24:56] Rutherford was a great lover and preacher of the doctrines of grace. he was a Calvinist unashamed. And in the midst of all his absorbing duties, tramping over the hills, visiting, reading, writing, praying, studying, preaching, he had found time to publish a somewhat learned and controversial work against Arminians.

[25:27] It was written, as were so many of the treatises of that day, in Latin. It was published in Amsterdam. And being published and being sold in this country, it came eventually into the hands of those in both England and Scotland who had embraced Arminianism, which was the politically wise thing to do in the days of Archbishop Lord.

[25:57] the church of England, if you wanted to be made a bishop, if you wanted to get off the tree, all you discounted is dreadful Calvinism in the US Paris, no many of it.

[26:09] Well, there were a number of the British bishops as well as some ministers in Scotland who had accepted this. Well, this treatise came into their hands from the young minister of Anwar, which had provoked a great deal of official hostility towards the altar.

[26:31] In spite of the fact that the Scottish church was presbyterian, some bishops had been forced upon the church by the Lordian policy.

[26:45] There was what was called in Scotland the second episcopacy when they had what were known as tulcan bishops. And this made a great deal of trouble.

[27:02] And what happened was that a man who was known as the bishop of Galloway, a man named Sidson, summoned the minister of Anwar before him to ask if he had really written this book to dispouse the doctrines of grace and a trance and confounded and confuted Arminians.

[27:30] Well, the brother of course had no hesitation in saying that the book was his. Well, the result was that the bishop of Galloway summoned Rutherford before the court of high commission, charged him with nonconformity, and he was deposed from his pastoral office, forbidden to officiate, that is, to minister or preach anywhere in Scotland, banished to Aberdeen, there to be confined during the king's presence.

[28:03] and he told that Rutherford's first reaction of hearing the sentence was one of joy that he was counted worthy to suffer shame for Christ's name.

[28:19] There is no quarrel, he said, more honest or more honourable than to suffer for the truth. That honour my kind Lord hath now bestowed upon me even to suffer for my royal and princely king Jesus.

[28:39] I go to my king's palace at Aberdeen, tongue, pen, and wit cannot express my joy. For something less, a little less than two years then, 16, 16, 16, 38, Rutherford was in Aberdeen, in those days a most isolated and cold and backward and indeed crude city in the north of Scotland.

[29:13] But he was the ref of his flock, he was often lonely, and for this reason that period in Aberdeen was the main, the principal letter writing period of his life.

[29:29] If you read his letters you will find that there are more dated Aberdeen, 16, 36, 7, and 8 than from any other place at any other period.

[29:40] so much of his people love him, that when he made the journey north, almost 200 miles, a great many of them accompanied him, as Paul's friends did on a certain occasion.

[29:57] life. We're told that they also wept for their separation from a pastor so holy, learned, and modest.

[30:08] This northern city was chosen for rather of its management for two reasons. One was that it was so far distant from his own parish that there would be no possibility of his slipping away to his own people easily, for of them coming to him in any number or for any length of time.

[30:34] The other reason was that Aberdeen and its area was the stronghold of Armenians in Scotland at that time.

[30:47] It was stronger there than anywhere else. Indeed, the far north highlands of Scotland and the Aberdeen area, they were the periods to be last influenced by the Reformation, which may very well account for this act.

[31:04] The ministers in the city, men of much learning, were all opposed to Aberdeen. The professors of divinity and associated kindred subjects in the university were equally opposed to him.

[31:17] He was not placed in bonds, but he was permitted to live in a little house in a kind of house arrest. He had a kind of a rod.

[31:31] about 20 years ago when I went to Aberdeen, I tried to find a house that found in fact that I was only a few months too late.

[31:42] It had been pulled down shortly before. It was a pain to Rutherford as he moved along the streets to see and hear people point him out and whisper to each other, that's the vanished minister.

[31:59] Not long after he arrived in Aberdeen, the doctors of the divine of the city challenged them to a dispute, to a debate on Arminianism.

[32:13] This of course was common level in those days. They thought that their dignity and their skill would very quickly discredit the lonely little fair man in the south.

[32:34] In point of fact, by the third encounter, Rutherford's skill as a controversialist caused them all such a loss of faith that they cancelled all future engagements and never afterwards they gave him a wide berth.

[32:53] the greatest pain of Rutherford's Aberdeen period was the inability to preach.

[33:08] He had been forbidden to preach. And he wrestled with the question in his soul why God had allowed his enemies to seal his lips.

[33:22] He had a great many lingering thoughts for his pastorless people back at Anwar. And he had many a lamentation for what he called his dumb Sabbaths.

[33:37] Sabbaths when he could not open his mouth. He prayed for his blessed Christ. Fair Anwar thine soul may how dear thou art to me was often his thought.

[33:53] His personal spiritual exercises at this time were deep indeed. They are very often expressed in the letters. Listen to him.

[34:06] Oh, he says that Christ would come home to me and bring summer with him, that I might preach his beauty and glory as once I did, that my branches might be watered with the dew of God and my joy in his work might grow green again and bud and send out a flower.

[34:30] Again he complains, I had but one eye and I put it out. My one joy next to the flower of my joys Christ was to preach my sweetest sweetest master from the glory of his kingdom and it seemed no cruelty to them to put out the poor man's one eye.

[34:55] Here's the deepest intensity and longing of the banished minister. Oh, he says, Oh, if I might but speak to three or four herd boys of my worthy master, I would be satisfied to be the meanest and most obscure of all the ministers in Scotland.

[35:21] I would be prepared to live, he said, in any place, in any of Christ's bases and houses. Well, there was no public ministry in Aberdeen, but there were private conversations here and there.

[35:40] one of his letters written from Aberdeen, he says, There are some blossomings of Christ's keepers in this town and the smoke is rising and the ministers are raging, but I like a rumbling and roaring devil best.

[36:02] Of course, those who kept his company were threatened, penalized. there was talk of banishing him still further to a case next door to be off the islands. Though this didn't mature.

[36:20] Brotherhood was like Bunyan and Baxter. When an open ministry was impossible, they turned to writing. And a commentary on Hosea and another on Isaiah was at least partly written while this dear man was in Aberdeen.

[36:45] But alas, it hasn't survived. It was never alive. Now, during this period of a little under two years, while Rutherford was in Aberdeen, there was taking place in the southern and the much more important, politically important, part of Scotland, Edinburgh and Glasgow and the Lowlands, there was taking place a great movement for a return to the faith of Knox, the faith of the Reformation.

[37:21] There was, in other words, a grand swell of resistance to the reintroduction of liturgy and forms and doctrines and teachings that were tending to pervert the Reformed religion, under the influence of the king, Charles I, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord, Archbishop Lord, who was one of the king's prime advisors.

[37:46] Archbishop Lord had devised as new a special liturgy for the churches in Scotland.

[37:59] Yes, the Presbyterian churches. It was more rubbish than the English prayer book at the time. He was intending to force an alien liturgy on the Scottish church, and there was a celebrated occasion when the dean of Edinburgh was reading this liturgy one Sabbath in St. Giles, the high church of Edinburgh in 1637, and by so doing, so infuriated, a poor God-fearing servant woman, who was traditionally known as Jenny Geddes, though there probably wasn't her name, and she picked up her stool, remember the poor had no seats in the churches, at least in the large churches of those days, they brought their own, she picked up her stool and threw it at the dean with a shrill cry, Ross, how dare you say mass at my luck, fortunately the stool missed, but what the poor woman felt, was felt equally by no one, and by scholars, and by ministers, and people in many parts of the

[39:17] Scotland, and all this then took shape the next year, 1638, in the drawing up of the National Covenant of Scotland, in which there was a binding together of all these varied types and categories of people to defend the Reborn faith, to resist all roadward innovation, and to stand for the simple free grace gospel of God in Jesus Christ.

[39:50] This National Covenant was reduced to writing, there were of course quite a number of copies of it, distributed to different centers for it to be signed, but the one that everybody knows about of course is the one that was signed in the old Kirk, the old Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh, and this of course was the prominent case, there were noblemen who signed it, like Johnston of Worceton himself afterwards to become a martyr of Christ, William and James Guthrie, and Samuel Rutherford came forward to sign the covenant and publicly commit themselves to the gospel and against crelacy and publicly.

[40:42] In point of fact, Aberdeen was the only city, the only part of the country where this covenant was refused. Rutherford had made his escape from Aberdeen.

[40:54] He had returned to Anwar at this critical judgment, and from Anwar he came to Edinburgh and along with these others, he entered into this covenant.

[41:10] to the delight of his people, who had refused all other ministerial nominees in his absence, he had returned to them. And also, he had the good will of the General Assembly of the Scottish Church, which now purged itself of the unscrupulous intruders, and immediately sought to reform the Church throughout the original reformation.

[41:43] This is what was known and what is known to history in Scotland as the Second Reformation. The First Reformation of 1560, you see, had declined after the beginning of the 17th century.

[41:58] It got to the low end in 1637, but here was, as it were, a new beginning. Here was a commanding, a bonding, a move to return to the original reformed principle.

[42:13] And it was natural that the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland should look out her most able, her most godly, her most suitable men to make wider use of their grace and gifts in the service of the Church.

[42:31] and so it was that the eye of the General Assembly fell on Daniel Rutherford. And it was natural that the post of wider influence should be sought for him.

[42:46] And it came later on in the year 1638, when he was deputed to be the Professor of Theology in the University of St. Andrews.

[42:57] His people had amost received the news with dismay, rather than himself received it with regret.

[43:09] He even prayed that he might die rather than be separated by any other cause from his beloved people to whom he had now just been reunited.

[43:22] But in the end it was realized that the contribution of such a man to the whole cause of Christ in Scotland would be multiplying manifold if he went to a sphere of much wider influence.

[43:42] So he went to St. Andrews. His character, his teaching, reformed the whole college. He made one stipulation when he accepted the appointment and that was that he should have no down sabbaths.

[44:02] That whatever other duties he had to do, he was to be free to preach his blessed Christ. And so he found in Robert Clare, who was the already in school parish minister of St.

[44:18] Andrews, a common hearted colleague, and he became associate or assistant to Robert Clare in the parish churches of Bathurst. There's another story sometimes told involving Rutherford that belongs to this period of his life.

[44:38] It's taken from the journal of an English merchant who had been travelling in Scotland and who made in his journal an entry that runs like this.

[44:52] First, he said, I went to a perfect which is Gershaw. There, he said, I heard a brave and solemn man. That was David Dick's author of Great Commentary on the Psalms and other groups.

[45:08] Well, I heard a brave and solemn man who showed me all the blackness of my own heart. Then, he said, I went to St. Andrews where I heard a sweet, majestic looking man.

[45:24] That was Robert Blair. And he showed me the majesty of God. After him, I heard a little hair man.

[45:39] Robert and he says the traveler, he showed me the love of Christ. Well, in the College of St. Andrews, Robert taught theology, the Hebrew language, and church history.

[45:57] Before his arrival, the Divinity School in the University of St. Andrews had been, in the words of one of the Scottish historians, the very nursery of all superstition in worship and of error in doctrine and the sink of all profanity in conversation among the students.

[46:19] When he had been there a year or two, the testimony of one of his students was this, God did so singularly second his indefatigable pains, both in teaching and in preaching, that the university forthwith became a Lebanon, out of which were taken cedars for building the house of the Lord through the whole land.

[46:48] History, of course, has shown again and again, that those who teach prospective ministers of the divine word have an immense influence for good or ill on the whole church, and not only on their own generation, but on the generation to come.

[47:11] Well, it is easy to see then how Rutherford's influence was an incalculable blessing and benefit of the cause of God in stock throughout the whole of the latter part of the 17th century.

[47:26] No longer had he his grove of trees and his firm clad hills to wander over in his communion and meditation with God, but if you know St.

[47:37] Andrews, you can imagine him walking along the cliff tops over the fields that are now the golf course, passing by the site of the scene where earlier martyrs for Christ, George Wishart and Patrick Hamilton, had been burned at the stake.

[47:56] You can see him passing the ruins of the castle, a castle which had been greatly connected to John Knox in the First Reformation. You can see him walking among the ruins of the old cathedral where the cul-dees in their early Christian simplicity had worshipped the throne of the living God.

[48:23] Rutherford, as I said, lost his first wife while he was ministering at Ambrose. A few months after he settled in St. Ambrose, he married a second time, after being a widower for ten years.

[48:39] And his second wife outlived. what hints may be gleaned from his letters to speak of her as a person of spiritual caliber, altogether spiritual, altogether skewtable to such an husband.

[48:57] And in this Harry's very thing, brotherhood went on. The pastor's heart and the bent and inclination of a true teacher among his students and people for some four or five years.

[49:16] But another change was in the audit. The times were troublous. The attempts both in England and in Scotland to restore something like the real reformed religion were not going unresistable.

[49:35] Parliament in England, the celebrated long Parliament of Charles I, resisted the king's ecclesiastical policy.

[49:52] It set up a grand committee to reform the church. England at last awoke to what Scotland had discovered several years before.

[50:05] and a committee of divines was to be called, which was to reform the church so that it would be, and I quote, more agreeable to God's word, and to bring the church of England into a mere conformity with the church of Scotland and other reformed churches abroad.

[50:30] And so what has come to be known as the Westminster Assembly came to be. An assembly of 121 English divines and several lay assessors and which met regularly at Westminster Abbey over a period of about four years, 1643 or so.

[50:56] the church of Scotland had been recognised that the church of Scotland was far, far, far more reformed than the church of England.

[51:06] The church of Scotland was asked to send permissioners to this assembly. And the general assembly of the church of Scotland sent four ministers and two elders.

[51:19] Desiring to send the best she had, she sent among others, Alexander Henderson and George Gillespie and Robert Bailey, she sent also Samuel Robert.

[51:33] The Scottish contingent travelled, we are told, by ship from Leith to London. And Robert Bailey, who wrote letters home to his wife almost every week while the assembly was sitting, said, when we were brought in, that is, to the Jerusalem chamber in Westminster Avenue, Dr.

[51:52] Twiss, the chairman of the presiding officer, had a long harangue for our wealth, after so long and hazardous voyage by sea and land in so unseasoned a time of the year.

[52:12] And so the earth-file minister, fair and wealth by the solway, took his place alongside the great English puritan divines, Owen and Goodwin, John White, the patriarch of Dorchester, Stephen Marshall, Edmund Callumy, Joseph Carroll, Thomas Case, Thomas Mantle, all of the great puritan divines.

[52:40] Suppose I am able to judge, said Richard Daxter, the Christian world since the days of the apostles had never a synod of more excellent divines than this.

[52:55] Whether, says another historian, whether we look at the extent or the ability of its neighbours, it stands first among Protestant councils.

[53:06] So Rutherford was a Londoner for four years. And you can imagine, even for the London of those days, the contrast between the hills of Galloway and the streets of London.

[53:27] What he did there is all part of the history of the Westminster Assembly, and I feel we will have to pass it over in comparative silence. But as you know, that Assembly introduced what has become known as the Westminster Confession of Faith, the shorter and larger Westminster Catechisms, the Westminster Directly of Church Government and Public Worship, all of which were turning back both the doctrine and the worship of the Church of the day to the Proformation Free Grace Willett of those documents.

[54:07] Whether people have agreed with them or otherwise, have undoubtedly had an immense effect on godly religion in both England and Scotland since the 17th century.

[54:23] Unlike some of the members of the Assembly who attended very irregularly, Rutherford attended every session except a few when he was sick and then he was sent away to Epsom for a little convalescence.

[54:37] He attended every session of the Assembly. How then it came about that he had time to publish four books during his four years in London is a bit of a mystery.

[54:52] With a rising three in the morning, perhaps he used some hours before others were away. These books were two kinds. Some were sermons on his paper retreat, Trial and Triumph of Faith, and another very lovely fact volume called Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself.

[55:15] These were sermons preached somewhere in others. Others were books of a controversial nature dealing with the relationship of church and state, issues that were very prominent in today.

[55:33] There's little surprise, of course, that we find Rutherford a little bit impatient at the length of time taken by the Westminster Assembly to do his work. Nobody imagined that it would go on for the work.

[55:45] Indeed, it lingered a little longer than that after Rutherford had left. More than once he implored permission of the General Assembly of the church in Stockton to allow him to return to his flock and his students of St.

[55:59] Andrews. We are so weary, he said, with our exceeding long absence that we humbly entreat from you a permission to return so soon she thinked it.

[56:14] But his appeals fell on deaf ears. He was doing his job too well to be spared. And the fact that his appeals fell on deaf ears was not least because his fellow commissioner Robert Bailey had also written home and that not for the first time.

[56:33] For the great parts that God had given him, Mr. Samuel's presence was very necessary. Well, Rutherford had known sorrow in Scotland and he was to know sorrow in England.

[56:51] Two of his children were buried. given him. I had two children, he said in the letter, and both are dead since I came hither.

[57:03] The supreme and absolute father of all things giveth not an account of any of his matters. Well, finally, he did return to St.

[57:16] Andrews. And the clerk of the Westminster Assembly wrote on behalf of the Assembly to the Scottish Assembly their appreciation of his work.

[57:28] Mr. Samuel Rutherford, this, signifying that he is presently to return to his particular station and employment among you, we can't but restore him with an ample testimony of his learning, godliness, faithfulness, and deliverance.

[57:48] And we humbly pray the father of spirits to increase the number of such burning and shining lights among you, and to return all the labour of love which you have shown to this afflicted church and kingdom, the disengled and the church of it, to return this labour of love a thousandfold into your own business.

[58:12] At least twice, Rutherford was called upon to preach before the house of Parliament, Westminster. The Scottish Church adopted the Westminster Standards as their confession, and hopefully they are still the confession of the church of Scotland.

[58:34] His practice, of course, no matter. It might be mentioned that the excellent particular Baptist confession, which was issued by the particular Baptists in this country in 1677, is based upon and in fact contains about 80 or 85% of the Westminster confession, so that indirectly, some of us are directly indebted to Samuel Rutherford in that respect.

[59:07] So we come for a moment or two to the last period of Protestant life, the last 12 or 13 years spent at St.

[59:20] Matthew's 1648 to 61. He was now the preeminent teacher in the Scottish Church, as well as the most impassioned preacher.

[59:38] Edinburgh University sought his services once again. His pain through his books had spread abroad into other parts of the world, and the great reformed universities of the Netherlands vied with each other to secure his services as a teacher.

[59:57] The authorities from the Netherlands came over on two occasions to St. Andrews to plead with him to go and teach in Holland. In the days, of course, when the high Calvinism of Biza and the Synod of Dort was very much under attack, but they had no success.

[60:19] The church in Scotland was in trouble again. And Rutherford rose about it. Should such a one as I flee, I had rather be in Scotland with angry Jesus Christ than in any Eden or garden in the earth.

[60:38] So he remained in St. Andrews. He was made principal of the university there, still teaching theology, still teaching Hebrew and church history, still finding a pulpit set to the old parish church and pouring forth his soul in eloquent testimony to the loveliness of Jesus Christ and still very much engaged now in all the controversies of today as they affected the church in Scotland, writing more and more books, involved with all the issues of the times, the detail of which we have passed.

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