illustration, it may suffice to compare his efforts at consolation with those of two other men of a different stamp. Take a letter from Oliver Cromwell to his brother-in-law, whose son had been killed at Marston Moor. "Sir, God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon-shot. It brake his leg. We were necessitated

to have it cut off, whereof he died. Sir, you know my own trials this way; but the Lord supported me with this, that the Lord took him into the happiness we all pant for, and live for. . . You have cause to bless the Lord. He is a glorious saint in heaven; wherein you ought exceedingly to rejoice." Here the sympathy is concrete and visible, but the tone is almost Roman in its repression. Take again, a letter from Fénélon to the Duc de Chevreuse. "Monsieur votre fils réussissait au milieu du monde empesté: c'est ce succès qui afflige, et c'est ce succès qui a fait trancher le fil de ses jours, par un conseil de miséricorde pour lui et pour les siens. Il faut adorer Dieu, et se taire." What an admirable delicacy and tenderness of touch, with just a shade of artifice! The cause for rejoicing, which Cromwell expresses with a soldier's bluntness, Fénélon barely suggests. Now take one of Rutherford's letters to a mother on the death of her child. "A going down star is not annihilated, but shall appear again. If he hath casten his bloom and flower, the bloom is fallen in heaven in Christ's lap; and as he was lent a while to time, so is he given now to eternity, which will take yourself; and the difference of your shipping and his to heaven and Christ's shore, the land of life, is only in some few years, which weareth every day shorter, and some short and soon-reckoned summers will give you a meeting with him. But what, with him? Nay, with better company-with the Chief and Leader of the heavenly troops, that are riding on white horses, that are triumphing in glory. . . . Let all your visitations speak all the letters of your Lord's summons. They cry, O vain world! O bitter sin! O short and uncertain time! O fair eternity, that is above sickness and death! O kingly and princely bridegroom! hasten glory's marriage, shorten time's short-spun and soonbroken thread, and conquer sin! O happy and blessed death, that golden bridge laid over by Christ my Lord, betwixt time's clay-banks and heaven's shore!" Rutherford, let it be noticed, first presents a vivid picture of those aspects of death which are most consolatory, and so far he is at one with Fénélon and Cromwell; but having done this, he goes further: he becomes

aggressor instead of suppliant, and commands, rather than entreats, the sufferer to share his own ecstatic vision. This gift of communicating a fervid enthusiasm is the secret of his style, as it appears in the letters; but it has powerful allies in the aptness of his comparisons, in an abundant flow of racy Scottish idiom, in the simplicity and vigour of his metaphors (which with two principal exceptions are mainly chosen from out-door country life), and in his ready mintage of golden sayings which can be withdrawn and enshrined. The exceptional metaphors that give an air of alternate extravagance and quaintness to nearly every page of the Letters are borrowed, somewhat incongruously, from the imagery of the Song of Solomon, and from the devious practice of old Scots Law. Those of the former class at times sound in modern ears painfully grotesque and irreverent, and blemish the artistic form of a correspondence otherwise, of its kind, unmatched in our literature. But similar allusions may be

found in the works of Crashaw and Baxter, to mention only two of Rutherford's contemporaries, and we must not forget that the seventeenth-century Puritan revelled in symbolical interpretation, and demanded an unrestrained expression of personal religious experience. The Letters, as a Puritan classic, deserve a place beside The Saint's Rest and The Pilgrim's Progress.

JAMES MILLER Dodds.

FLIGHT NO LAWFUL MEANS OF ESCAPE FOR

AN OPPRESSED PEOPLE

Now a private man may fly, and that is his second necessity, and violent re-offending is the third mean of self-preservation. But with leave, violent re-offending is necessary to a private man, when his second mean, to wit, flight, is not possible, and cannot attain the end, as in the case of David: if flight do not prevail, Goliah's sword and an host of armed men are lawful. So to a church and a community of Protestants, men, women, aged, sucking children, sick, and diseased, who are pressed either to be killed, or forsake religion and Jesus Christ, flight is not the second mean, nor a mean at all, because, (1) not possible, and therefore not a natural mean of preservation: for 1st, the aged, the sick, the sucking infants, and sound religion in the posterity cannot flee, flight here is physically and by nature's necessity unpossible, and therefore no lawful mean. 2nd, if Christ have a promise that the ends of the earth (Ps. ii. 8) and the isles shall be His possession (Isa. xlix. 1), I see not how natural defence can put us to flee, even all Protestants, and their seed, and the weak and sick, whom we are obliged to defend as ourselves, both by the law of nature and grace. I read that seven wicked nations and idolatrous were cast out of their land to give place to the Church of God, to dwell there; but show me a warrant in nature's law and in God's word that three kingdoms of Protestants, their seed, aged, sick, sucking children, should flee out of England, Scotland, Ireland, and leave religion and the land to a king and to papists, prelates and bloody Irish, and atheists: and therefore to a church and community having God's right and man's law to the land, violent re-offending is their second mean (next to supplications and declarations, etc.), and flight is not required of them, as of a private man. Yea, flight is not necessarily required of a private man, but where it is a possible mean of self-preservation,

violent and unjust invasion of a private man, which is unavoidable may be obviated with violent re-offending. Now the unjust invasion made on Scotland in 1640, for refusing the service-book, or rather the idolatry of the Mass, therein intended, was unavoidable, it was unpossible for the Protestants, their old and sick, their women and sucking children to flee over sea, or to have shipping betwixt the king's bringing an army on them at Dunslaw, and the prelates charging of the ministers to receive the mass-book. Althusius saith well, "Though private men may flee; but the estates if they flee, they do not their duty to commit a country, religion and all to a lion." Let not any object, we may not devise a way to fulfil the prophecy (Ps. ii. 8, 9, Isa. xlix. 1). It is true, if the way be our own sinful way; nor let any object, a colony went to New-England and fled the persecution. Answer, true, but if fleeing be the only mean after supplication, there was no more reason that one colony should go to New-England, than it is necessary and by a divine law obligatory, that the whole Protestants in the three kingdoms according to Royalists' doctrine, are to leave their native country and religion to one man and to popish idolators and atheists willing to worship idols with them; and whether then shall the Gospel be, which we are obliged to defend with our lives?

(From Lex, Rex.)

LETTER TO JEAN BROWN

MISTRESS-grace, mercy, and peace be to you. I am glad that ye go on at Christ's back in this dark and cloudy time. It were good to sell other things for Him; for when all these days are over, we shall find it our advantage that we have taken part with Christ. I confidently believe His enemies shall be His footstool, and that He shall make green flowers, dead, withered hay, when the honour and glory shall fall off them, like the bloom or flower of a green herb shaken with the wind. It were not wisdom for us to think that Christ and the Gospel will come and sit down at our fireside; nay, but we must go out of our warm houses and seek Christ and His Gospel. It is not the sunny side of Christ that we must look to, and we must not forsake Him for want of that; but must set our face against what may befall us in follow

ing on, till He and we be through the briars and bushes on the dry ground. Our soft nature would be borne through the troubles of this miserable life in Christ's arms. And it is His wisdom, who knoweth our mould, that His bairns go wet-shod and cold-footed to heaven. Oh how sweet a thing were it for us

to learn to make our burdens light by framing our hearts to the burden, and making our Lord's will a law! I find Christ and His cross not so ill to please, nor yet such troublesome guests as men call them. Nay, I think patience should make Christ's water good wine, and this dross good metal; and we have cause to wait on, for ere it be long our Master will be at us, and bring this whole world out before the sun and the daylight in their blacks and whites. Happy are they who are found watching. Our sand-glass is not so long as we need to weary: time will eat away, and root out our woes and sorrow: our heaven is in the bud, and growing up to an harvest, why then should we not follow on, seeing our span-length of time will come to an inch? Therefore, I commend Christ to you, as your last living and longest living Husband, and the staff of your old age: let Him have now the rest of your days; and think not much of a storm upon the ship that Christ saileth in; there shall no passenger fall overboard; but the crazed ship and the sea-sick passenger shall come to land safe. I am in as sweet communion with Christ as a poor sinner can be; and am only pained that He hath much beauty and fairness, and I little love; He great power and mercy, and I little faith; He much light, and I bleared eyes. O, that I saw him in the sweetness of His love, and in His marriage clothes, and were over head and ears in love with that Princely One, Christ Jesus my Lord! Alas, my riven dish and running-out vessel can hold little of Christ Jesus! I have joy in this, that I would not refuse death before I put Christ's lawful heritage in men's trysting; and what know I, if they would have pleased both Christ and me? Alas! that this land hath put Christ to open rouping, and to an "Any man more bids?" Blessed are they who would hold the crown on His head, and buy Christ's honour with their own losses. I rejoice to hear your son John is coming to visit Christ and taste of His love. I hope he shall not lose his pains, or rue of that choice. I had always (as I said often to you) a great love to dear Mr. John Brown, because I thought I saw Christ in him more than in his brethren; fain would I write to him, to stand by my sweet

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