The precariousness of our best friendships, the brittle substance out of which they are all composed and constructed, and the daily accidents and injuries to which they are all exposed—­all this is the daily distress of all true and loving hearts.  What a little thing will sometimes embitter and poison what promised to be a loyal and lifelong friendship!  A passing misunderstanding about some matter that will soon be as dead to us both as the Resolutions and Protestations of Rutherford’s day now are to all men; an accidental oversight; our simple indolence in letting an absent friendship go too much out of repair for want of a call, or a written message, or a timeous gift:  a thing that only a too-scrupulous mind would go the length of calling sin, will yet poison an old friendship and embitter it beyond all our power again to sweeten it.  And, then, how party spirit poisons our best enjoyments as it did Rutherford’s.  How all our minds are poisoned against all the writers and the speakers, the statesmen and the journalists of the opposite camp, and even against the theologians and preachers of the opposite church.  And, then, inside our own camp and church how new and still more malignant kinds of poison begin to distil out of our incurably wicked hearts to eat out the heart of our own nearest and dearest friendships.  Envy, for one thing, which no preacher, not even Pascal or Newman, no moralist, no satirist, no cynic has yet dared to tell the half of the horrible truth about:  drip, drip, drip, its hell-sprung venom soaks secretly into the oldest, the dearest and the truest friendship.  Yes, let it be for once said, the viper-like venom of envy—­the most loyal, the most honourable, the most self-forgetting and self-obliterating friendship is never in this life for one moment proof against it.  We live by admiration; yes, but even where we admire our most and live our best this mildew still falls with its deadly damp.  What did you suppose Rutherford meant when he wrote as he did write about himself and about herself to that so capable and so saintly woman, Jean Brown?  Do you accuse Samuel Rutherford of unmeaning cant?  Was he mouthing big Bible words without any meaning?  Or, was he not drinking at that moment of the poison-filled cup of his own youthful, family, and friendship sins?  Nobody will persuade me that Rutherford was a canting hypocrite when he wrote those terrible and still unparaphrased words:  ’Sin, sin, this body of sin and corruption embittereth and poisoneth all our enjoyments.  Oh that I were home where I shall sin no more!’

Puritan was an English nickname rather than a Scottish, but our Scots Presbyterians were Puritans at bottom like their English brethren both in their statesmanship and in their churchmanship, as well as in their family and personal religion.  And they held the same protest as the English Puritans held against the way in which the scandalous corruptions of the secular court, and the equally scandalous corruptions of the