To Elizabeth Kennedy — Letter 90

Mistress.

Grace, mercy and peace be to you. I have long had a purpose of writing to you, but I have been hindered. I heartily desire that you would mind your journey and consider what direction your soul is setting its face. For all come not home at night who suppose they have set their face heaven-ward; it is a woeful thing to die and miss heaven and to lose house-room with Christ at night. It is an evil journey where travelers are benighted in the fields. I persuade myself that thousands shall be deceived and ashamed of their hope, because they cast their anchor in sinking sands and must lose it. Until now I did not know the pain, labor and difficulty there is in winning home; nor did I understand so well before this what that means: 'The righteous shall scarcely be saved.' O how many a poor professor's candle is blown out and never lighted again! I see ordinary profession, and to be ranked among the children of God, and to have a name among men, is now thought good enough to carry professors to heaven. But certainly a name is but a name and will never abide a blast of God's storm. I counsel you not to give your soul or Christ rest, nor your eyes sleep, until you have gotten something that will abide the fire and stand out the storm. I am sure if my one foot were in heaven and then he would say, 'Fend for yourself, I will hold my grip of you no longer,' I should go no further but presently fall down in as many pieces of dead nature. They are happy for evermore who are over head and ears in the love of Christ and know no sickness but love-sickness for Christ, and feel no pain but the pain of an absent and hidden Beloved. We run our souls out of breath and tire them in chasing and galloping after our own night-dreams — such are the wanderings of our miscarrying hearts — to get some created good thing in this life and on this side of death. We would fain construct a heaven to ourselves on this side of the water, but sorrow, want, changes, crosses and sin are both warp and woof in that ill-spun web. O how sweet and dear are those thoughts that are still upon the things which are above! And how happy are they who are longing to have little sand in their glass and to have time's thread cut, and can cry to Christ, 'Lord Jesus, come over and fetch this weary passenger!' I wish our thoughts were more frequently than they are on our country. O but heaven casts a sweet smell afar off, to those who have spiritual smelling! God has made many fair flowers, but the fairest of them all is heaven, and the flower of all flowers is Christ. O why do we not fly up to that lovely One? Alas, that there is such scarcity of love and lovers of Christ among us all. Shame, shame upon us who love fair things — fair gold, fair houses, fair lands, fair pleasures, fair honors and fair persons — and do not pine and melt away with love for Christ. O would to God I had more love for his sake. O for as much love as would lie between me and heaven for his sake. O for as much love as would go round about the earth and over the heaven — yes, the heaven of heavens and ten thousand worlds — that I might let all out upon fair, fair, only fair Christ! But alas I have nothing for him, yet he has much for me; it is no gain to Christ that he receives my little feeble hand-breadth of love. If men would have something to do with their hearts and their thoughts — which are always rolling up and down like men with oars in a boat after sinful vanities — they may find great and sweet employment to their thoughts upon Christ. If these frothy, fluctuating and restless hearts of ours would come all about Christ and look into his love, to bottomless love, to the depth of mercy, to the unsearchable riches of his grace, to inquire after and search into the beauty of God in Christ, they would be swallowed up in the depth and height and length and breadth of his goodness. O if men would draw the curtains and look into the inner side of the ark and behold how the fullness of the Godhead dwells in him bodily! O who would not say, 'Let me die, let me die ten times to see a sight of him!' Ten thousand deaths were no great price to give for him. I am sure sick and fainting love would raise the market and double the price for him. But alas, if men and angels were sold at the dearest price, they would not all buy a night's love or a twenty-four-hours' sight of Christ! O how happy are they who get Christ for nothing! God send me no more for my part of Paradise but Christ; and surely I were rich enough and as well heaven-ed as the best of them, if Christ were my heaven. I can write no better thing to you than to desire you — if ever you laid Christ in a reckoning — to take him up and count over again and weigh him again and again. And after this, have no other to court your love and woo your soul's delight but Christ. He will be found worthy of all your love, though it should swell upon you from the earth to the uppermost circle of the heaven of heavens. To our Lord Jesus and his love I commend you.

Aberdeen, 1637. Yours in his sweet Lord Jesus, S. R.