have little of Christ in this prison, little but desires.  All my present stock of Christ is some hunger for Him; I cannot say but that I am rich in that.  But, blessed be my Lord, who taketh me as I am.  Christ had only one summer in His year, and shall we insist on two?  My love to your father.  And, for yourself, if you would be a deep divine, I recommend you to sanctification.’  What with his father and his mother, his books, his acquaintance with Rutherford and Hume, and, best of all, his acquaintance with his own evil heart, young John Meine must have been a somewhat deep divine already, else Rutherford would not have cast such pearls of experience down before him.

A divine, according to our division of labour, is a man who has chosen as his life-work to study the things of God; the things, that is, of God in Christ, in Scripture, in the Church, and in the heart and life of man.  John and James and Peter and Andrew ceased to be fishermen, and became divines when Christ said to them ‘Follow me.’  And after seventy years of sanctification the second son of Zebedee had at last attained to divinity enough to receive the Revelation, to write it out, and to be called by the early Church John the Divine.

But what is this process of sanctification that makes a young man already a deep divine?  What is sanctification?  Rutherford had a deep hand in drawing up the well-known definition, and, therefore, we may take it as not far from the truth:  ’Sanctification is the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness.’  That, or something like that, was the recipe that Samuel Rutherford sent south to John Meine, student of divinity, with the assurance that, if he followed it close enough and long enough, it would result in making him a deep divine.  I wonder if he took the recipe; I wonder if he kept to it; I wonder how he pictured to himself the image of God; I wonder, nay, I know, how he felt as he submitted his whole man—­body, soul, and spirit—­to the renewing of the Holy Ghost.  And did he begin and continue to die more and more unto sin, till he died altogether to this sinful world, and live more and more unto righteousness, till he went to live with Knox, and Rutherford, and Hume, and his father and mother in the Land of Life?

‘Did he begin with regeneration?’ Dr. John Duncan, of the New College, asked his daughter, one Sabbath when she had come home from church full of praise of a sermon she had just heard on sanctification.  Dr. Duncan was perhaps the deepest divine this century has seen in Edinburgh; and his divinity took its depth from the same study and the same exercise that Rutherford recommended to John Meine.  Dr. Duncan was a great scholar, but it was not his scholarship that made him such a singularly deep divine.  He was a profound philosopher also; but neither was it his philosophy.