5.  ‘Fear your light, my lord,’ wrote Rutherford to Lord Craighall from Aberdeen; ‘stand in awe of your light.’  But the poor Kilmacolm people did not need that sharp rebuke, for they had written to Rutherford at their own instance to consult him in their terror of conscience about this very matter, till Rutherford had to exhaust his vocabulary of comfort in trying to pacify his correspondents just in this sufficiently disquieting matter of light in the mind with great darkness in the heart and the life.  Our light in this world, he tells them, is a broad and shining field, whereas our life of obedience is at best but a short and straggling furrow.  Only in heaven shall the broad and basking fields of light and truth be covered from end to end with the songs of the rejoicing reapers.  And Rutherford is very bold in this matter, because he knows he has the truth about it.  A perfect life, he says, up to our ever-increasing light, is impossible to us here, if only because our light always increases with every new progress in duty.  The field of light expands to a new length and breadth every time the plough passes through it.  And, knowing well to whom he writes on this subject, Rutherford goes on to say that there is a sorrow for sin, and for shortcoming in service, that is as acceptable with God in the evangelical covenant as would be the very service itself.  But, then, it must be what Rutherford calls ‘honest sorrow after a sincere aim.’  And let no man easily allow himself to take shelter under that, lest it turn out to him like taking shelter in a thunderstorm under a lightning rod.  For what an aim must that be, and then, what a sorrow, that is as good in the sight of God as a full obedience is itself.  At the same time, ’A sincere aim, and then an honest sorrow, both of the right quality and quantity, taken together with Christ’s intercession, must be our best life before God till we be over in the other country where the law of God will get a perfect soul in which to fulfil itself.  Your complaint on this head is already booked in the New Testament (Rom. vii. 18).’

6.  ’The less sense of liberty and sweetness, the more true spirituality in the service of God,’ is Rutherford’s reply to their next perplexity.  Ought we to go on with our work and with our worship when our hearts are dry and when we have no delight in what we do?  That is just the time to persevere, replies their evangelical guide, for it is in the absence of all sense of liberty and sweetness that our duties prove themselves to be truly spiritual.  A sweet service has often its sweetness from an altogether other source than the spiritual world.  Let a man be engaged in divine service, or in any other religious work, and let him have sensible support and success in it; let him have liberty and enjoyment in the performance of it; and, especially, let him have the praise of men after it, and he will easily be deceived into thinking that he has had God’s