Samuel Rutherford and Some of His Correspondents — John Shaqi
Samuel Rutherford and Some of His CorrespondentsWhyte, Alexander
Religion
Samuel Rutherford and Some of His Correspondents
Whyte, Alexander
Church of Scotland -- Clergy -- Biography; Rutherford, Samuel, 1600?-1661; Rutherford, Samuel, 1600?-1661 -- Correspondence
How ever a woman like Jane Campbell came to marry a man like John Gordon
will remain a mystery. It was not that he was a man of no mind; he was a
man of no worth or interest of any kind. He was a rake and a
lick-spittle, the very last man in Scotland for Jane Campbell to throw
herself away upon. And she was too clever and too good a woman not to
make a speedy and a heart-breaking discovery of the fatal mistake she had
committed. Poor Jane Campbell soon wakened up to the discovery that she
had exchanged the name and the family of a brave and noble house for the
name and the house of a poltroon. No wonder that Rutherford's letters to
her are so often headed: 'To Lady Kenmure, under illness and depression
of mind.' Could you have kept quite well had you been a Campbell with
John Gordon for a husband? Think of having to nurse your humbug of a
husband through a shammed illness. Think of having to take a hand in
sending in a sham doctor's certificate because your husband was too much
of a time-server to go to Edinburgh to give his vote for a persecuted
church. Think of having to wear the title and decoration your husband
had purchased for you at the cost of his truth and honour and manhood.
Lady Kenmure needed Samuel Rutherford's very best letters to help to keep
her in bare life all the time the county dames were green with envy at
the dear-bought honours. And Kenmure himself had to be brought to his
death-bed before he became a husband worthy of his wife. We still read
in his _Last Speeches_ how God made Lord Gordon's sins to find him out,
and with what firmness and with what tenderness Rutherford handled the
soul of the dying man till all his cowardice, title-hunting, and truth-
betraying life came back to his death-bed with a sharper sting in them
than even his grossest sins. Whoredom and wine after all are but the
lusts of a man, whereas time-serving and truth-selling are the lusts of a
devil. 'Dig deeper,' said Rutherford to the dying courtier, and Kenmure
did dig deeper, till he came down to the seals and the titles and the
ribbons for which he had sold his soul. But he that confesses and
forsakes his sins even at the eleventh hour shall always find mercy, and
so it was with Lord Kenmure.
'Between the stirrup and the ground
Mercy I sought and mercy found.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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