XX.  JAMES BAUTIE, STUDENT OF DIVINITY

   ’You crave my mind.’—­Rutherford.

As a rule the difficulties of a divinity student are not at all the difficulties of the best of his future people.  A divinity student’s difficulties are usually academic and speculative, whereas the difficulties of the best people in his coming congregation will be difficulties of the most intensely real and practical kind.  And thus it is that we so often hear lately-ordained ministers confessing that they have come to the end of their resources and experiences, and have nothing either fresh or certain left to preach to the people about.  Just as, on the other hand, so many congregations complain that they look up to the pulpit from Sabbath to Sabbath and are not fed.  It is not much to be wondered at that a raw college youth cannot all at once feed and guide and extricate an old saint; or that a minister, whose deepest difficulties hitherto have been mostly of the debating society kind, should not be able to afford much help to those of his people who are wading through the deep and drowning waters of the spiritual life.  And whether something could not be done by the institution of chairs of genuine pastoral and experimental theology for the help of our students and the good of our people is surely a question that well deserves the earnest attention of all the evangelical churches.  Meantime we are to be introduced to a divinity student of the middle of the seventeenth century who was early and deeply exercised in those intensely real problems of the soul which occupied such a large place both in the best religious literature and in the best pulpit work of that intensely earnest day.  James Bautie, or Beattie, as we shall here call him on Dr. Bonar’s suggestion, was a candidate for the ministry such that the ripest and most deeply exercised saints in Scotland might well have rejoiced to have had such an able and saintly youth for their preacher on the Sabbath-day as well as for their pastor all the week.  As James Beattie’s college days drew on to an end he became more and more exercised about his mental deficiencies, and still more about his spiritual unfitness to be anybody’s minister.  Beattie had, to begin with, this always infallible mark of an able man—­an increasing sense of his own inability:  and he had, along with that, this equally infallible mark of a spiritually-minded man—­an overwhelming sense of his utter lack of anything like a spiritual mind.  No man but a very able man could have written the letter that Beattie wrote about himself to Samuel Rutherford; and Rutherford’s letter back to Beattie will not be a bad test of a divinity student whether he has enough of the true divinity student mind in him to read that letter, to understand it, and to translate it.  Beattie had an excellent intellect, and his excellent intellect had not been laid out at college on those windy fields that so puff up a beginner in knowledge and in life; his whole