also say to us, Give me a day soon again of your good hearers?  As a matter of fact, our good preaching friends do say that to us.  And why not?  Fine hearers, deep hearers, thoroughly well-prepared hearers, hearers of genius are almost as scarce as fine, deep, thoroughly well-prepared preachers and preachers of genius.  And who shall blame Rutherford for liking to see Marion M’Naught coming into the church on a Sabbath morning as well as she liked to see him coming into the pulpit?  ‘I go to Anwoth so often,’ she said, ’because, though other ministers show me the majesty of God and the plague of my own heart, Mr. Samuel does both these things, but he also shows me, as no other minister ever does, the loveliness of Christ.’  It is as great a mistake to think that all our Christian people are able to take in a sermon on the loveliness of Christ as it is that all ordained men can preach such a sermon.  There are diversities of gifts among hearers as well as among preachers; and when the gifts of the pulpit meet the corresponding graces in the pew, you need not wonder that they recognise and delight in one another.  Jesus Christ was Rutherford’s favourite subject in the pulpit, and thus it was that he was Marion M’Naught’s favourite preacher, as she, again, was his favourite hearer in the church and his favourite correspondent in the Letters.  To how many in this house to-night could a preacher say that he wished them all to be ‘over head and ears in love to Christ’?  What preacher could say a thing like that in truth and soberness?  And how many could hear it?  Only a preacher of the holy passion of Rutherford, and only a hearer of the intellect and heart and rare experience of Marion M’Naught.  ’O the fair face of the man Jesus Christ!’ he cries out.  And again:  ’O time, time, why dost thou move so slowly!  Come hither, O love of Christ!  What astonishment will be mine when I first see that fairest and most lovely face!  It would be heaven to me just to look through a hole of heaven’s door to see Christ’s countenance!’ No wonder that the congregations were few, and the correspondents who could make anything of a man of such a ‘fanatic humour’ as that!  But, then, no wonder, on the other hand, that, when two fanatics so full of that humour as Samuel Rutherford and Marion M’Naught met, they corresponded ever after with one another in their own enraptured language night and day.

IV.  LADY KENMURE

   ’Build your nest, Madam, upon no tree here, for God hath sold this
   whole forest to death.’—­Rutherford.