he is listening to a stray visitant from the hill of the ransomed, sweetly "harping on his harp." And as in "the Song of Songs," so in these hymns of the man who drunk deepest of all next to Solomon-we except not John-into the spirit of love, it is not the air of vulgarity, or of mysticism that repels, but that which the world shrinks from, is the awful sense of Emanuel's articulate, realized, living personality. No one can rise from the perusal of Rutherford's Letters without feeling that Christ is.

We hail, accordingly, this volume with no small delight, as symptomatic of a revival of that which alone is Christianitylove to the God-man. And we hope that when days of sifting, and gloom, and tribulation are ready to be meted out, it will be found that what the church cleaves to is, not truth only, which is dead, but Jesus, who is "alive for evermore," and that our strength shall be drawn rather from the springs of love, than the wells of argument. It is high time that the priesthood were going forward from the Outer Court, where stands no more than the metaphoric altar, and dwelling under the shadow of the Holiest of all, where is the Incarnate Lamb himself.

To those who are acquainted with these "Letters," it is superfluous to say, that though Christ be their sum and substance--the woof and warp of the piece-its texture and it shue, yet there is nothing monotonous in Rutherford's sameness, and in his enthusiasm no extravagance. Romaine's "Letters" come the nearest of any we know to those of the Anwoth pastor; but in comparison with the latter, the former are barren in the extreme. It is the same fire that burns in the bosom of each, and animates their words. But the venerable minister of St Anne's, Blackfriars, is all reiteration without variety, and transport devoid of genius. "The little fair man" of St Andrews leads us amid a paradise redolent with all sweet flowers, and the streams whereof flow over Pactolian sands. His "Letters" exhibit nothing elaborate, nor deep, nor formal, yet we know not the pages to which we could so readily turn for all that is animated in style, and sagacious in wisdom. Genius dictates every sentence, and the unction of the Holy One anoints every counsel. It is a man who speaks; but a man who has been caught up with Paul, and who can dip his pencil in the sunlight and the rainbow. Teeming brevity, felicitous allusion, glowing fancy, loaded aphorism, brilliant paradox, adroitest casuistry, transparent sincerity, spiritual grandeur, and boundless love, astonish us in succession; and now we admire his eagle flight, so direct and high-then we listen to his song, as the gush of the nightingale-and the glittering splendour of his genius is like the plumage of the Psalmist's dove, radiant as with "silver and yellow gold."

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How often do we hear it complained by the children of faith, that they have no breathing-time here amid vexation and vicissitude, for the contemplation of what is eternal, and in these peculiar days, when even the sunset streaks of glory are fading from the heavy clouds, most apt are they to sigh away their best opportunity in chagrin and alarm. But heaven is not so far from earth as men would believe; and even the trials of judgment may carry a soul high as the chariot of Elias. Was it not amid the civil wars of the Commonwealth, and with the tumult of the camp around him, that Baxter sketched and began, if he did not also well-nigh finish, the heavenliest of all his writings, his "Saint's Everlasting Rest," as if Joshua had already crossed the Jordan, and cast down Jericho, and was for ever at rest" with all saints in the vales of the Promised Land? And how fared it with Bunyan when first the idea of his "Pilgrim" flashed upon his all but inspired soul? Every man had forsaken him; the world must shake him from its borders. None was ever more hated and oppressed than he. He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who will declare his generation? But it was even as he lay among the pots that he dreamed that dream which has awoke so many sleepers from the tomb, and been to their astonished souls like an apocalypse of heaven and hell. But in like manner, Rutherford's divinest hours were his hours in exile-his divinest work, the breathings of the outcast, not the researches of the professor. It was not at St Andrews amid his library, nor in London, when cheered with the fellowship of kindred spirits, but when under the ban of ecclesiastical intolerance, and the interdict of civil despotism at Aberdeen, that he wrote those "Letters," of which the incomparable Baxter could say, “ hold off the Bible, and the world has never seen the like."

Rutherford's "Letters" bear the love of Christ for their great characteristic. This was the passion of his soul-the principle of his life. Yet let it be remembered, as well worthy of notice, that this same man was not less alive to the importance of Theological TRUTH, nor less valiant in its defence. There are cases in which we can remark, that the personal affection which was cherished for Him who embodies all worth and loveliness, has enervated the character, or at least created a morbid delicacy of feeling, so that the disciple has recoiled from all vindication of his faith, and pined away even into a sickly mysticism. So we have seen it in the instance of Nicole, in times more remote, and recently, perhaps, in the case of Prince. The minister of Anwoth was a man of robuster nerve, and shrewder discernment; and the gentle correspondent of Marion M'Naught to-day, is, to-morrow, the stalwart antagonist of Arminius and Roder: de Ariaga,—of Erastus

and Hooker. Rutherford's love to Christ but stimulated his zeal for truth; and it must be admitted that he was as strenuous as a Controversialist, as he was impassioned as a Christian.

His works on abstract doctrine and Church polity are indeed by no means attractive, and exhibit, perhaps, more the exhaustive method of the barrister, than the grasp of a divinethe agility of the disputant, rather than the enlargement of a philosopher. Still no one can dip into them without acknowledging that they are the productions of one who never formed his views upon trivial grounds, and who breathed both love and reverence towards all truth as it had issued from the mind of God. He knew the Scriptures not only as a believer, but as a scholar profoundly versed in the languages wherein they were written, and he is indomitably faithful to all their findings. What God has spoken Rutherford re-echoes, but at the same time brings to its support the resources of the most subtle argumentation and boundless reading. Rutherford was a finished master of logic and a prodigy of learning. Let us open any of his works,-it matters not whether it be "Lex Rex," or "the Plea for Paul's Presbytery," or "Exercitationes Apologeticæ,"-and we find him at home with every father, or schoolman; and before we are half through with the work, we have learned and weighed the sentiments of more authors than our New College Library could supply. Indeed, when we read "the Letters," we are ready to say that man must have lived the life of a cloister. But when we take up "De Divina Providentia," or "Examen Arminianismi," our impression is, that he must have studied in the halls of the Bodleian, or the Vatican.

Of itself, this explicit and conclusive instance disposes of the shallow sophistry that would persuade us that Biblical erudition will not equip, but encumber our students, and is in the close vicinity of heresy and rationalism. Rutherford was a living man, yet not less the expert critic and intrepid controversialist. He was well versed in all the subtleties of metaphysics, and at home in any department of exegesis-a Greek and Hebrew scholar of high rank-yet who ever walked more closely with God? It is feeble and unfounded, then, to imagine that Hermeneuties and Heresy are cousins-german, if not twins, and that to be erudite is to be unsound. Time enough to call a halt in the direction of criticism and scholarship when "much learning" has done for our youth what Festus had conceived it had done for Paul; but surely it is needless to apprehend that the vessel must founder at sea when she is scarcely floated out of dock. Happily we of this land have not only an ancestral faith to regulate and check us, but as citizens and pastor, the ministers of Christ have so much where

VOL. XXI. NO. III.

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with to fill their hands, that it is utterly preposterous to believe that erudition will develope, in our case, the same phases as in Germany, where every man is free only to think, but forbidden to act. Hitherto exegesis has been ancillary to truth in Britain, and we must calculate our own future from our own past, and not suffer ourselves to be driven from the highway of knowledge, because we have met thereon with men no better than "inspired idiots.” Some men have allowed the love of Christ to be so absorbing and exclusive, that their end is mysticism, such as Guion, and Xavier, and Pusey, and Finney,-others have allowed their apprehension of truth to evaporate in a clear argument, or a loud protest on its behalf, as was the case to a great extent with Baxter, if not Howe also. On the other hand, Rutherford was as active a churchman, as he was a distinguished disputant, and in all the spheres of Presbyterian influence, as minister of a parish, as professor of theology, as member of a church court, and as commissioner to the Westminster Assembly of Divines, he strove to make known the truth as he had been taught it, and gain it acceptance with all men. And this gave completeness to his character and work. Had he rested at the contemplation of Christ, and spent his life as a recluse, he would have simply been a luxurious mystic like Fenelon. Had he done no more than superadd the investigation of truth, and the pursuits of scholarship to his emotional delight in the unseen Saviour, he would have been a compromised politician, and timorous hermit like Leighton. But Rutherford, beginning in love as the root, and holding too "the form of sound words," devoted himself, as Knox had done before him, to the dissemination of the truth, and deemed it but a little thing were he right himself, unless he might succeed in bringing others to the same fold.

To sum up Rutherford was a believer in the highest acceptation of the term-a controversialist of eminent principle and power-and a politician whose public course gave body and impulse to the truths he advocated. And thus we look upon him as a full-orbed character, and hold him forth as a bright example.

He had his defects and blemishes, both as an author and as a man-for so must it ever be with all save the Lamb himself, whose follower he was. His writings, in a few places, may exhibit statements involving error, as Baxter has pointed out, and one cannot deny that he advocated persecution, as must be known to all who are acquainted with the works of Jeremy Taylor. As a theologian, however, taking him all in all, his faith is the faith of reformers, and martyrs, and apostles. As a politician, his speculations are worthy of Milton himself. As a pastor, we know not one whose bowels so yearned over souls as he

did. As a professor, he evinced stores of erudition, boundless and most varied. And as a spiritual guide, we look upon his "Letters" as bearing no small resemblance to the Psalms of David. Had they been formed into measure, and attuned to music, Rutherford would have been the minstrel of Christian experience.

ART. VII.-1. Revivals of the Eighteenth Century, with Sermons, by Whitefield.

2. Sketches of the Life and Labours of Whitefield. Johnstone, Edinburgh, 1848. (Cheap Publication Series of Free Church of Scotland.)

"Then said the Interpreter, Come in; I will show thee that which will be profitable to thee. So he commanded his man to light a candle, and bid Christian follow him; so he had him into a private room, and bid his man open a door, the which when he had done, Christian saw the picture of a very grave person hung up against the wall, and this was the fashion of it, It had eyes lifted up to heaven, the best of books in his hand, the law of truth was written upon its lips, the world was behind its back; it stood as if it pleaded with men, and a crown of gold did hang over its head.'

Such is the picture-sketched by a master's hand-of a true minister of the sanctuary. "I have showed thee this picture,' said the Interpreter to the pilgrim, "because the man whose picture this is, is the only man whom the Lord of the place whither thou art going hath authorised to be thy guide in all difficult places thou mayest meet with in the way."

The sketch is not an imaginary one: it is taken from the life. The original is to be seen in the prison at Bedford—in the dungeon at Philippi-in the upper room on Pentecost-and (to pass by, for the present, other like scenes) on that hill near Bristol, where, about a century ago, there stood, day after day, pleading with a congregation of not fewer than twenty thousand outcast colliers, whose black cheeks began at last to be furrowed by the white gutters made by their tears, the eminently Christ-like man, whose life and labours are brought before us in the volumes which stand at the head of this article.

It is not our purpose to enter on the intensely interesting field traversed by these volumes. The field, as the titles indicate, is that marked revival of God's work, which, amidst the general barrenness which overtook the professing church during last century, "turned," in various parts, "the wilderness into a standing water, and dry ground into water-springs." It is well that such