Letters in Two Parts, Part 1 · LETTER 135
To ROBERT GORDON. Bailiffe of Ayr. (135)
Worthy Sir.
GRace, mercy & peace be to you: I long to hear from you. Our Lord is with his afflicted Kirk, so that this burning bush is not consumed to ashes. I know submissive on-waiting for the Lord shall at length ripen the joy & deliverance of his own, who are truly blessed on-waiters: What is the dry & miscarrying hope of all them who are not in Christ, but confusion & wind? O how pitifully and miserably are the children of this world beguiled, whose wine cometh home to them water, & their gold brass & tin! And what wonder that hopes builded upon sand, should fall & sink? It were good for us all to abandon the forlorn & blasted & withered hope we have had in the creature, & let us henceforth come & drink water out of our own well, even the fountain of living waters, & build our selves & our hope upon Christ our rock: But alas that naturall love that we have to this borrowed home that we were born in, and that this clay-city, the vain earth, should have the largest share of of our heart! Our poor lean and empty dreams of confidence in some-thing beside God are no further travelled then up & down the naughty & feckless creatures. God may say of us, as he said, Amos 6: 13. Ye rejoyce in a thing of noug…t. Surely we spin our spider's web with pain, and build our rotten and tottering house upon a lye and falshood and vanity. O when will we learn to have thoughts higher then the sun and moon, and learn our joy, hope, confidence and our soul's desires to look up to our best countrey, and to look down to clay tents set up for a night's lodging or two, in this unknown land, & laugh at our childish conceptions & imaginations that suck our joy out of creatures, woe, sorrow, losses & grief. O sweetest Lord Jesus! O fairest Godhead! O flower of man & angels, why are we such strangers to, & far-off beholders of thy glory? O it were our happiness for evermore, that God would cast a pest, a botch, a leprosie upon our part of this great whore, a fair and well busked World, that clay might no longer deceive us! but O that God may burn and blast our Hope hereaway, rather then our Hope should live to burn us! Alas the wrong side of Christ [to speak so] his blackside, his suffering side, his wounds, his bare coat, his wants, his wrongs, the oppressions of men done to him, are turned towards mens eyes & they see not the best & fairest side of Christ, nor see they his amiable face and his beauty, that man and angels wonder at. Sir, lend your thoughts to th…se things, & learn to contemn this world, & to turn your eyes and heart away from beholding the masked beauty of all things under Time's law and doom: See him who is invisible and his invisible things, draw by the curtain and look in with liking and longing to a Kingdom undefiled that fadeth not away, reserved for you in the heaven: This is worthy of your pains and worthy of your soul's sweating and labouring & seeking after night and day: Fire will flee over the earth and all that is in it, even destruction from the Almighty: Fy, fy upon that hope that shall be dryed up by the root! Fy upon the drunken night-bargains, And the drunken and mad covenant that sinners make with death and hell after cups, and when mens souls are mad and drunken with the love of this lawless life! They think to make a nest for their hopes, and take quarters and conditions of hell and death, that they shall have ease, long life, peace, & in the morning when the last trumpet shall awake them, then they rue the block. It is time & high time for you to think upon death and your accounts, and to remember what ye are, where ye will be before the year of our Lord 1700. I hope ye are thinking upon this: pull upon your soul and draw it aside from the company that it is with, and round & whisper in to it newes of eternity, death, judgement, heaven and hell. Grace, grace be with you.
Aberd. 1637. Yours in his sweet Lord Iesus. S. R.