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
As to the merchandise of the poor man's market,--that embraces everything
that any man can possibly need or find any use for either in this world
or in the next. Absolutely everything is found in the poor man's
market--everything, from God Himself, the most precious of all things,
down to the sinner himself, the most vile and worthless of all things.
The whole world, and all the worlds, are continually thrown into this
market, both by the seller and by the purchaser. The seller holds
nothing back from this market, and the purchaser comes to this market for
everything. Even what he already possesses; even what he bought and paid
for but yesterday; even what everybody else would call absolutely the
poor man's own, he throws it all back again upon God every day, and thus
holds all he has as his instant purchase of the great Merchantman. The
poor man's market is as far as possible from being a Vanity Fair, but the
catalogues and the sale-lists of that fair may be taken as a specimen of
the things that change hands continually in the poor man's market also.
For here also are sold such merchandise as houses, lands, trades, places,
honours, preferments, pleasures and delights of all sorts; wives,
husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, gold,
silver, and what not. All these things God sells to poor men every day;
and for all these things, as often as they need any of them, His poor men
come to His market for them. And, as has been said, even after they have
got possession of any or all of these things, as if the market had an
absolute fascination for them, like gamblers who cannot stay away from
the wheel, they are back again, buying and selling what, but yesterday,
they took home with them as the best bargain they had ever made. Yes,
the things that, once possessed, either by inheritance or by purchase or
by gift, you would think they would die rather than part with--a
patrimony in ancient lands and houses, a possession they had toiled and
prayed and waited for all their days, Christ on His cross, their own
child in his cradle--absolutely everything they possess, or would die to
possess, they part with again, just that they may have the excitement,
the debate, the delight, the security, and the liberty of purchasing it
all over again every day in the poor man's market.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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