4.  Remember, also, wrote Rutherford, to look up the Scriptures and read and lay to heart the lessons of Esau’s life and Judas’s, of the life of Balaam, and Saul, and Pharaoh, and Simon Magus, and Caiaphas, and Ahab, and Jehu, and Herod, and the man in Matthew viii. 19, and the apostates in Hebrews vi.  For all these were at best but watered brass and reprobate silver.  ‘One day,’ writes Mrs. William Veitch of Dumfries in her autobiography, ’having been at prayer, and coming into the room where one was reading a letter of Mr. Rutherford’s directed to one John Gordon of Rusco—­giving an account of how far one might go and yet prove a hypocrite and miss heaven—­it occasioned great exercise in me.’  Dr. Andrew Bonar is no doubt entirely right when he says that this letter, now open before us, must have been the heart-searching letter that caused that God-fearing woman, fresh from her knees, so great exercise.  Let us share her great exercise, and in due time we shall share her great salvation.  Not otherwise.

5.  ‘And remember,’ he proceeds, ’what your besetting sin may cost you in the end.  I beseech you therefore and obtest you in the Lord, to make conscience of all rash and passionate oaths, of raging and avenging anger, of night-drinking, of bad company, of Sabbath-breaking, of hurting any under you by word or deed, of hurting your very enemies.  Except you receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, you cannot enter it.  That is a word that should make your great spirit fall.’  ’If men allow themselves in malice and envy,’ writes Thomas Shepard, a contemporary of Rutherford’s, ’or in wanton thoughts, that will condemn them, even though their corruptions do not break out in any scandalous way.  Such thoughts are quite sufficient evidence of a rotten heart.  If a man allows himself in malice or in envy, though he thinks he does it not, yet he is a hypocrite; if in his heart he allows it he cannot be a saint of God.  If there be one evil way, though there have been many reformations, the man is an ungodly man.  One way of sin is exception enough against any man’s salvation.  A small shot will kill a man as well as a large bullet, a small leak let alone will sink a ship, and a small, and especially a secret and spiritual sin, will cost a man his soul.’

6.  ‘Remember, also, your shortening sand-glass.’  On the day when John Gordon was born a sand-glass with his name written upon it was filled, and from that moment it began to run down before God in heaven.  For how long it was filled God who filled it alone knew.  Whether it was filled to run out in an hour, or to run till Gordon was cut down in mid-time of his days, or till he had attained to his threescore years and ten, or whether it was to run on to the labour and sorrow of four-score years, not even his guardian angel knew, but God only.  And then beside that sand-glass a leaf, taken out of the seven-sealed book, was laid open, on the top of which was found