Letters in Two Parts, Part 1 · LETTER 207
To the …aird of CARLETOUN. (207)
Worthy Six.
GRace, mercy and peace be to you: I received your letter & am heartily glad that our Lord hath begun to work for the apparent delivery of this poor oppressed Kirk: O that salvation would come for Zion! I am for the present hanging by hope, waiting what my Lord will doe with me, & if it will please my sweet Master to send me amongst you again, & keep out a hireling from my poor people & flock: It were my heaven till I come home, even to spend this li…e in gathering in some to Christ. I have still great heaviness for my silence & my forced standing idle in the market, when this land hath such a plentifull thick harvest; but I know, his judgements who hath done it, pass fi…ding out: I have no nowledge to take up the Lord in all his strange wayes … p…ssages of deep & unsearchable providences, for the Lord is b…fore me & I am so be-misted that I cannot follow him: He is behinde me and following at the heels and I am not aware of him, he is above me, but his glory so … my twilight of short knowledge▪ that I cannot look up to him: He is upon my right hand, and I see him no: He is upon my left hand and within me and goeth and com…th, & his going & coming are a dr…a… to me: He is round about me & comp…th …l my going… a…d still I have him to eek: He is every way higher & d…eper & broad…r then the shallow & ebbe hand-breadth of my sho…t & d… light can take up, & therefore I would my heart could be silent & sit down in the learnedly-ignorant wondering at that Lord, whom m n & Ang…ls ca…not comprehend. I know, the noon-day-light of the highest Angels, who see him face to face, seeth not the borders of his infiniteness: They apprehend God near hand, but they cannot comprehend him: And therefore it is my happiness to look afar off and to come near to the Lord's back parts, & to light my dark candle at his brightness, & to have leave to sit & content my self with a traveller's light, without the clear vision of an enjoyer. I would seek no more till I were in my countrey, but a little watering & sprinkling of a withered soul, with some half out breakings & half-outlookings of the beam and small ravi…hing smiles of the fairest face of a revealed & beleeved on Godhead: A little of God would make my soul bank-full. O that I had but Christ's odde off fallings, that he would let but the meanest of his love-rayes & love-beams fall from him, so, as I might gather & carry them with me! I would not be ill to please with Christ and vailed visions of Christ, neither would I be dainty in seeing and enjoying of him▪ A kiss of Christ blowen over his shoulder, the parings and crumbs of glory that fall under his table in heaven, a shower like a thin May-mist of his love, would make me green and sappy & joyfull, till the summer-sun of an eternall glory break up. O that I had any thing of Christ! O that I had a sip or half a drop out of the hollow of Christ's hand, of the sweetness & excellency of that lovely One! O that my Lord Jesus would …ue upon me, & give me but the meanest almes of felt & beleeved salvation! O how little were it for that infinite sea, that infinite fountain of love & joy, to fill as many thousand thousand little vessels the like of me, as there are minutes of hours since the creation of God! I finde it true that a poor soul finding half a smell of the Godhead of Christ, hath desires paining & wounding the poor heart so, with longings to be up at him, that make it sometimes think, were it not better never to have felt any thing of Christ then thus to lie dying twenty deaths under these felt wounds for the want of him? O where is he! O fairest! Where dwellest thou? O never enough admired Godhead! how can clay win up to thee? How can creatures of yesterday be able to enjoy thee? O what pain is it, that time & sin should be as so many thousand miles betwixt a loved & longed-for Lord & a dwining & love-sick soul, who would rather then all the world have lodging with Christ! O let this bit love of ours, this inch & half span-length of heavenly longging, meet with thy infinite love! O if the little I have were swallowed up with the infiniteness of that excellency which is in Christ! O that we little ones were in at the greatest Lord Jesus! our wants should soon be swallowed up with his fulness. Grace, grace be with you.
Aberd. May. 1. 1637. Yours in his sweet Lord Iesus. S. R.