The first thing that strikes me in reading Rutherford’s letters to young Earlston and to several other young men of that day is the extraordinary frankness and self-forgetfulness of the writer.  He takes his young correspondents into his confidence in a remarkable way.  He opens up his whole heart to them.  He goes back with a startling boldness and unreserve and plainness of speech on his own youth, and he lays himself alongside of his youthful correspondents in a way that only a strong man and a humble could afford to do.  Let young men read Rutherford’s letters to young William Gordon of Earlston, and to young John Gordon of Cardoness, and to young Lord Boyd, and such like, and they will be surprised to find that even Samuel Rutherford was once a young man exactly like themselves, and that he never forgot the days of his youth nor the trials and temptations and transgressions of those perilous days.  Let them read his Letters, and they will see that Rutherford could not only write home to the deepest experiences of Lady Boyd and Lady Kenmure and Marion M’Naught, but that he was quite as much at home with their sons and daughters also.

Rutherford told young Earlston how terribly he had ’ravelled his own hesp’ in the days of his youth, and he tells another of his correspondents that after eighteen years he was not sure he had even yet got his ravelled hesp put wholly right.  Young Edinburgh gentlemen who have been born with the silver spoon in their mouth will not understand what a ravelled hesp is.  But those who have been brought up at the pirn-wheel in Thrums, and in suchlike handloom towns, have the advantage of some of their fellow-worshippers to-night.  They do not need to turn to Dr. Bonar’s Glossary or to Jamieson’s Scottish Dictionary to find out what a ravelled hesp is.  They well remember the stern yoke of their youth when they were sent supperless to bed because they had ravelled their hesp, and all the old times rush back on them as Rutherford confesses to Earlston how recklessly he ravelled his hesp when he was a student in Edinburgh, and how, twenty times a day, he still ravels it after he is Christ’s prisoner in Aberdeen.

When the hesp is ravelled the pirn is badly filled, and then the shuttle is choked and arrested in the middle of its flight, the web is broken and knotted and uneven, and the weaver is dismissed, or, at best, he is fined in half his wages.  And so, said Rutherford, is it with the weaver and the web of life, when a man’s life-hesp is ravelled in the morning of his days.  I stood not long ago at the grave’s mouth of a dear and intimate friend of mine who had fatally ravelled both his own hesp and that of other people, till we had to get the grave-diggers to take a cord and help us to bury him.  Horace said that in his day most men fled the empty cask; and all but two or three fled my poor friend’s ravelled hesp.  He had recovered the lost thread before he died, but his tangled life was past unravelling