’My very worthy and dear brother:  Courage, dear brother:  it is all in love, all works together for the best.  You must be hewn and hammered and drest and prepared before you can be a Leiving-ston fit for His building.  And if He is minded to make you meet to help others, you must look for another manner of strokes than you have yet felt, . . . but when you are laid low, and are vile in your own eyes, then He will raise you up and refresh you with some blinks of His favourable countenance, that you may be able to comfort others with those consolations wherewith you have been comforted of Him. . . .  Since God has put His work in your weak hands, look not for long ease here:  you must feel the full weight of your calling:  a weak man with a strong God.  The pain is but a moment, the pleasure is everlasting, . . . cross upon cross:  the end of one with me is but the beginning of another:  but guiltiness in me and in mine is my greatest cross.’  And after midnight one Sabbath she writes again to Livingstone:  ’You cannot but say that the Lord was with you to-day; therefore, not only be content, but bless His name who put His word in your heart and in your mouth, and has overcome you with mercy when you deserved nothing but wrath, and has not only forgiven your many sins, but has saved you from breaking out, as it may be better men have done; but He has covered you and restrained you; has loved you freely and has made His saints to love you; who will guide you also with His counsel, and afterwards receive you to His glory.’

It was from his silent prison in Aberdeen that Samuel Rutherford wrote to Lady Culross the letter in which this sentence stands:  ’I see that grace groweth best in winter.’  Rutherford had had but a short and unsettled summer among the birds at Anwoth.  His wife and his two children had been taken from him there, and now that which he loved more than wife or child had been taken from him too—­his pulpit and pastoral work for Jesus Christ.  He felt his banishment all the more keenly that he was the first of the evangelical ministers of Scotland to be so silenced.  He will have plenty of companions in tribulation soon, if that will be any comfort to him; but, as it is, he confesses to Lady Culross that it was a peculiar pang to him to be ‘the first in the kingdom put to utter silence.’  The bitterness of banishment has been sung in immortal strains by Dante, whose grace under banishment also grew to a fruitfulness we still partake of to this day:—­

            ’Thou shall leave each thing
   Beloved most dearly:  this is the first shaft
   Shot from the bow of exile.  Thou shall prove
   How salt the savour is of other’s bread,
   How hard the passage to descend and climb
   By other’s stairs.  But that shall gall thee most
   Will be the worthless and vile company
   With whom thou must be thrown into these straits.’

But all this, to use a figure familiar among the Puritans of that day, only made Rutherford’s true life return, like sap in winter, into its proper root, till we read in his later Aberdeen letters a rapture and a richness that his remain-at-home correspondents are fain to tone down.