Ccxxxviii.—To The Lady Gaitgirth.
CCXXXVIII.—To the LADY GAITGIRTH.
(CHRIST AN EXAMPLE IN BEARING CROSSES—THE EXTENT TO WHICH CHILDREN SHOULD BE LOVED—WHY SAINTS DIE.)
MUCH HONOURED AND CHRISTIAN LADY,—Grace, mercy, and peace be to you.—I long to hear how it goeth with you and your children.
I exhort you not to lose breath, nor to faint in your journey. The way is not so long to your home as it was; it will wear to one step or an inch at length, and ye shall come ere long to be within your arm-length of the glorious crown. Your Lord Jesus did sweat and pant ere He got up that mount; He was at "Father, save Me!" with it. It was He who said, "I am poured out like water; all My bones are out of joint." Christ was as if they had broken Him upon the wheel: My heart is like wax, it is melted in the midst of my bowels." My strength is dried up like a potsherd" (Ps. xxii. 14, 15). I am sure ye love the way the better that His holy feet trod it before you. Crosses have a smell of crossed and pained Christ. I believe that your Lord will not leave you to die your lone in the way. I know that ye have sad hours, when the Comforter is hid under a vail, and when ye inquire for Him, and find but a toom nest. This, I grant, is but a cold good-day," when the seeker misseth Him whom the soul loveth; but even His unkindness is kind, His absence lovely, His mask a sweet sight, till God send Christ Himself, in His own sweet presence. Make His sweet comforts your own, and be not strange and shame-faced with Christ. Homely dealing is best for Him; it is His liking. When your winter storms are over, the summer of your Lord shall come. Your sadness is with child of joy; He will do you good in the latter end.
Take no heavier lift of your children than your Lord alloweth. Give them room beside your heart, but not in the yolk of your heart, where Christ should be; for then they are your idols, not your bairns. If your Lord take any of them home to His house, before the storm come on, take it well. The owner of the orchard may take down two or three apples off his own trees before midsummer, and ere they get the harvest-sun: and it would not be seemly that his servant, the gardener, should chide him for it. Let our Lord pluck His own fruit at any season He pleaseth. They are not lost to you; but are laid up so well as that they are coffered in heaven, where our Lord's best jewels lie. They are all free goods that are there; death can have no law to arrest anything that is within the walls of the New Jerusalem.
All the saints, because of sin, are like old rusty horologues, that must be taken down, and the wheels scoured and mended, and set up again in better case than before. Sin hath rusted both soul and body: our dear Lord by death taketh us down to scour the wheels of both, and to purge us perfectly from the root and remainder of sin; and we shall be set up in better case than before. Then pluck up your heart; heaven is yours! and that is a word which few can say.
Now, the great Shepherd of the sheep, and the very God of peace, confirm and establish you, to the day of the appearance of Christ our Lord. Yours, in his sweet Lord Jesus,
ABERDEEN, SEPT. 7, 1637. S. R.
CCXXXIX.—To MR. MATTHEW MOWAT. [Letter CXX.] (WHAT AM I?—LONGING TO ACT FOR CHRIST—UNBELIEF—
LOVE IN THE HIDING OF CHRIST'S FACE—CHRIST'S REPROACH.)
REVEREND AND DEAR BROTHER,—I am refreshed with your letters. I would take all well at my Lord's hands that He hath done, if I knew that I could do my Lord any service in my suffering; suppose my Lord would make a stop-hole of me, to fill a hole in the wall of His house, or a pinning in Zion's new work. For any place of trust in my Lord's house, as steward, or chamberlain, or the like, surely I think myself (my very dear brother, I speak not by any proud figure or trope) unworthy of it; nay, I am not worthy to stand behind the door. If my head, and feet, and body were half out, half in, in Christ s house, so that I saw the fair face of the Lord of the house, it would still my greening and love-sick desires. When I hear that the men of God are at work, and speaking in the name of our Lord Jesus, I think myself but an outcast, or outlaw, chased from the city to lie on the hills, and live amongst the rocks and out-fields. Oh that I might but stand in Christ's out-house, or hold a candle in any low vault of His house! But I know this is but the vapours that arise out of a quarrelous and unbelieving heart to darken the wisdom of God; and your fault is just mine, that I cannot believe my Lord s bare and naked word. I must either have an apple to play me with, and shake hands with Christ, and have seal, caution, and witness to His word, or else I count myself loose; howbeit, I have the word and faith of a King! Oh, I am made of unbelief, and cannot swim but where my feet may touch the ground! Alas! Christ under my temptations is presented to me as lying waters,1 as a dyvour and a cozener! We can make such a Christ as temptations, casting us into a night-dream, do feign and devise; and temptations represent Christ ever unlike Himself, and we, in our folly, listen to the tempter.
If I could minister one saving word to any, how glad would my soul be! But I myself, which is the greatest evil, often mistake the cross of Christ. For I know, if we had wisdom, and knew well that ease slayeth us fools, we would desire a market where we might barter or niffer our lazy ease with a profitable cross; howbeit there be an outcast natural betwixt our desires and tribulation. But some give a dear price, and gold, for physic which they love not, and buy sickness, howbeit they wish rather to have been whole than to be sick. But surely, brother, ye shall have my advice (howbeit, alas! I cannot follow it myself), not to contend with the honest and faithful Lord of the house; for, go He or come He, He is aye gracious in His departure. There are grace, and mercy, and loving-kindness upon Christ s back parts; and when He goeth away, the proportion of His face, the image of that fair Sun that stayeth in eyes, senses, and heart, after He is gone, leaveth a mass of love behind it in the heart. The sound of His knock at the door of His Beloved, after He is gone and passed, leaveth a share of joy and sorrow both. So we have something to feed upon till He return: and He is more loved in His departure, and after He is gone, than before, as the day in the declining of the sun, and towards the evening, is often most desired.
And as for Christ's cross, I never received evil of it, but what was of mine own making: when I miscooked Christ s physic, no marvel that it hurt me. For since it was on Christ's back, it hath always a sweet smell, and these 1600
years it keepeth the smell of Christ. Nay, it is older than that too; for it is a long time since Abel first handselled the cross, and had it laid upon his shoulder; and down from him, all alongst to this very day, all the saints have known what it is. I am glad that Christ Jesus hath such a relation to this cross, and that it is called "the cross of our Lord Jesus" (Gal. vi. 14), His reproach (Heb. xiii. 13), as if Christ would claim it as His proper goods, and so it cometh into the reckoning among Christ's own property. If it were simple evil, as sin is, Christ, who is not the author nor owner of sin, would not own it.
I wonder at the enemies of Christ (in whom malice hath run away with wit, and will is up, and wit down), that they would essay to lift up the Stone laid in Zion. Surely it is not laid in such sinking ground as that they can raise it, or remove it; for when we are in their belly, and they have swallowed us down, they will be sick, and spue us out again. I know that Zion and her Husband cannot both sleep at once; I believe that our Lord once again will water with His dew the withered hill of Mount Zion in Scotland, and come down, and make a new marriage again, as He did long since. Remember our Covenant.
Your excuse for your advice to me is needless. Alas! many sit beside light, as sick folks beside meat, and cannot make use of it. Grace be with you. Your brother in Christ,
ABERDEEN, SEPT. 7, 1637. S. R.