Every line of life has its own language, its own peculiar vocabulary, that none but its experts, and those who have been brought up to it, know.  Go up to the Parliament House and you will hear the advocates and judges talking to one another in a professional speech that the learned layman no more than the ignorant can understand.  Our doctors, again, have a shorthand symbolism that only themselves and the chemists understand.  And so it is with every business and profession; each several trade strikes out a language for itself.  And so does divinity, and, especially, experimental divinity, of which Rutherford’s letters are full.  We not only need a glossary for the obsolete Scotch, but we need the most simple and everyday expressions of the things of the soul explained to us till once we begin to speak and to write those expressions ourselves.  There are judges and advocates and doctors and specialists of all kinds among us who will only be able to make a far-off guess at the meaning of my text, just as I could only make a far-off guess at some of their trade texts.  This technical term, ‘apprehension,’ does not once occur in the Bible, and only once or twice in Shakespeare.  ‘Our death is most in apprehension,’ says that master of expression; and, again, he says that ‘we cannot outfly our apprehensions.’  And Milton has it once in Samson, who says:—­

   ’Thoughts, my tormentors, armed with deadly stings,
   Mangle my apprehensive tenderest parts.’

But, indeed, we all have the thing in us, though we may never have put its proper name upon it.  We all know what a forecast of evil is—­a secret fear that evil is coming upon us.  It lays hold of our heart, or of our conscience, as the case may be, and will not let go its hold.  And then the heart and the conscience run out continually and lay hold of the future evil and carry it home to our terrified bosoms.  We apprehend the coming evil, and feel it long before it comes.  We die, like the coward, many times before our death.

Now, Rutherford just takes that well-known word and applies it to his fears and his sinkings of heart about his past sins, and about the unsettled wages of his sins.  His conscience makes him a coward, till he thinks every bush an officer.  But then he reasons and remonstrates with himself in his deep and intimate letter to Gillespie, and says that these his doubts, and terrors, and apprehensions are not canonical.  He is writing to a divine and a scholar, as well as to an experienced Christian man, and he uses words that such scholars and such Christian men quite well understand and like to make use of.  The canon that he here refers to is the Holy Scriptures; they are the rule of our faith, and they are also the rule of God’s faithfulness.  What God has said to us in His word, that we must believe and hold by; that, and not our deserts or our apprehensions, must rule and govern our faith and our trust, just as God’s word will be the rule and standard