Samuel Rutherford

"Last words: "I bless the Lord that he gave me counsel.""

"Like a fool as I was , I suffered my sun to be high in the heavens and near afternoon before I ever took the gate by the end."

"I see grace growth best in winter"

"ye and I might meet with joy up in the rainbow"

"I hang by a thread, but it is (if I may so speak) of Christ's spinning"

"I had but one joy, the apple of the eye of my delights , to preach Christ my Lord"

"The bloom fell off my branches and joy did cast off its flower"

"The good Husbandman may pluck His rose & gather in His lily."

"The night will close the door & fasten my anchor within the veil and I shall go away to sleep."

"Grace will ever speak for itself and be fruitful in well-doing; the sanctified cross is a fruitful tree."

"Ye have lost a child — nay, she is not lost to you, who is found to Christ; she is not sent away, but only sent before; like unto a star, which going out of our sight, doth not die and vanish, but shineth in another hemisphere."

"Let your children be as so many flowers, borrowed from God. If the flowers die or wither, thank God for a summer loan of them."

"Dearest wife, let us go on and faint not; something of ours is in heaven besides the flesh of our exalted Saviour, and we go on after our own."

"My desire is that my Lord would give me broader and deeper thoughts, to feed myself with wondering at His love."

"In our fluctuations of feeling, it is well to remember that Jesus admits no change in His affections; your heart is not the compass Jesus saileth by."

"Every day we may see some new thing in Christ. His love hath neither brim nor bottom."

"I find my Lord Jesus cometh not in the precise way that I lay wait for Him. He hath a manner of His own. Oh, how high are His ways above my ways"

"Take Christ in with you under your yoke, and let patience have her perfect work."

"There is nothing that will make you a Christian indeed, but a taste of the sweetness of Christ."

"Christ, in that place He hath put you, hath intrusted you with a dear pledge, which is His own glory, and hath armed you with His sword to keep the pledge, and make a good account of it to God."

"Christ seeketh your help in your place; give Him your hand."

"You must take a house beside the Physician. It will be a miracle if ye be the first sick that Christ hath put away uncured."

"Welcome, welcome, cross of Christ, if Christ be with it."

"How soon would faith freeze without a cross!"

"Build your nest upon no tree here, for ye see that God hath sold the forest to death."

"Be not cast down. If ye saw Him who is standing on the shore, holding out His arms to welcome you to land, ye would wade, not only through a sea of wrongs, but through hell itself to be with Him."

"When ye are come to the other side of the water, and have set down your foot on the shore ot glorious eternity, and look back again to the waters and to your wearisome journey, and shall see in that clear glass of endless glory, nearer to the bottom of God's wisdom, ye shall then be forced to say, " If God had done otherwise with me than He hath done, I had never come to the enjoyment of this crown of glory.""

"It is no small comfort that God hath written some Scriptures to you which He hath not to others. Read these, and think God is like a friend who sendeth a letter to a whole house and family, but who speaketh in His letter to some by name that are dearest to Him in the house."

"There is nothing left to us but to see how we may be approved of Him, and how we may roll the weight of our weak souls in well-doing upon Him, who is God omnipotent."

"It is certain that this is not only good which the Almighty has done, but that it is best; He hath reckoned all your steps to heaven."

"I know that as night and shadows are good for flowers, and moonlight and dews are better than a continual sun, so is Christ's absence of special use, and that it hath some nourishing virtue in it, and giveth sap to humility, and putteth an edge on hunger, and furnisheth a fair field for faith to put forth itself."

"Grow as a palm-tree on God's Mount Zion; howbeit shaken with winds, yet the root is fast."

"I pray God that I may never find my will again. Oh, that Christ would subject my will to His, and trample it under His feet."

"It is in some respect greater love in Jesus to sanctify than to justify, for He maketh us most like Himself, in His own essential portraiture and image in sanctifying us."

"If ye never had a sick night and a pained soul for sin, ye have not yet lighted upon Christ."

"Make not Christ a liar in distrusting His promise."

"A power ethical, politic, or moral, to oppress, is not from God, and is not a power, but a licentious deviation of a power; and is no more from God, but from sinful nature and the old serpent."

"If you should see a man shut up in a closed room, idoizing a set of lamps and rejoicing in their light, and you wished to make him truly happy, you would begin by blowing out all his lamps; and then throw open the shutters to let in the light of heaven."

"But no sooner did the restoration of Charles II. take place, than the face of affairs began to change, and after his fore-mentioned book lex rex was burnt at the cross of Edinburgh, and at the gates of the new college of St Andrews, where he was professor of divinity, the parliament in 1661, were to have an indictment laid before them against him, and such was their humanity (that when every body knew he was a-dying) that they caused summon him to appear before them at Edinburgh, to answer to a charge of high treason... It is commonly said, that when the summons came he spoke out of his bed and said, Tell them I have got summons already before a superior judge and judicatory, and I behove to answer my first summons, and ere your day come I will be where few kings and great folks come. When they returned and told he was a-dying, the parliament put to a vote, Whether or not to let him die in the college. It carried, Put him out, only a few dissenting. My lord Burleigh said, Ye have voted that honest man out of the college, but ye cannot vote him out of heaven. Some said, He would never win there, hell was too good for him. Burleigh said, I wish I were as sure of heaven as he is, I would think myself happy to get a grip of his sleeve to hawl me in."

"He had a most sharp pierceing witt, and fruitfall invention and solid judgement. He used ordinarly to rise be three a clock in the morning; he spent all his time either in prayer, or reading, or writting, or in visiting families in private, or in publick employments of his ministrie or profession. While he was at Anwoth, he was the instrument of much good among a poor ignorant people, many of which he brought to the knowledge and practise of religion, and was a great strengthener of all the Christians in that countrey."

"[A]t ye entrie of ye said Maister Samuell, our soules were under that miserable extreame femine of ye word, that we had onlie ye puir help of an sermone everie second Sabboth, by reasone of ane most inconvenient unione with uther twa kirkis."