To Jonet Kennedy — Letter 91
Mistress.
Grace, mercy and peace be to you. You are not a little obliged to his rich grace who has separated you for himself and for the promised inheritance with the saints in light, from this condemned and guilty world. Hold fast Christ, contend for him; it is a lawful struggle to go to holding and drawing for Christ, and it is not possible to keep Christ peaceably — having once gotten him — except the devil were dead. It must be your resolution to set your face against Satan's northern tempests and storms for salvation. Nature would have heaven come sleeping to us in our beds; we would all buy Christ, so long as we might make the price ourselves. But Christ is worth more blood and lives than either you or I have to give him. When we shall come home and enter to the possession of our Brother's fair kingdom, and when our heads shall find the weight of the eternal crown of glory, and when we shall look back to pains and sufferings, then shall we see life and sorrow to be less than one step or stride from a prison to glory, and that our little inch of time-suffering is not worthy of our first night's welcome home to heaven. O what then will be the weight of every one of Christ's kisses! O how weighty and of what worth shall every one of Christ's love-smiles be! O when once he shall thrust a wearied traveler's head between his blessed breasts, the poor soul shall think one kiss of Christ has fully paid home forty or fifty years of wet feet and all its sore hearts and light sufferings it had in following after Christ! O three times blinded souls whose hearts are charmed and bewitched with dreams, shadows, feckless things, night-vanities and night-fancies of a miserable life of sin! Shame on us who sit still fettered with the love and liking of the loan of a piece of dead clay. O poor fools who are beguiled with painted things and this world's fair weather and smooth promises and rotten worm-eaten hopes! May not the devil laugh to see us give out our souls and receive in return but corrupt and counterfeit pleasures of sin? O for a sight of eternity's glory and a little tasting of the Lamb's marriage-supper! Half a draught or a drop of the wine of consolations that is up in our banqueting house, out of Christ's own hand, would make our stomachs loathe the brown bread and the sour drink of a miserable life. O how far are we bereft of wisdom, to chase and hunt and run until our souls are out of breath after a condemned happiness of our own making! And do we not sit far in our own light, to make it a matter of children's play to squander and drink over Paradise and the heaven that Christ did sweat for — even for a blast of smoke and for Esau's morning breakfast? O that we were out of ourselves and dead to this world, and this world dead and crucified to us. Then we should be quite out of love and conceit with any masked and painted lover whatever. Then Christ would win and conquer to himself a lodging in the inmost depth of our heart. Then Christ should be our night-song and our morning-song. Then the very noise and sound of our Beloved's feet when he comes, and his first knock or rap at the door, should be as the news of two heavens to us. O that our eyes and our soul's smelling should go after a blasted and sun-burned flower — even this plastered fair-outside world — and then we have neither eye nor smell for the flower of Jesse, for that plant of renown, for Christ the choicest, the fairest, the sweetest rose that ever God planted! O let some of us die to feel the smell of him, and let my part of this rotten world be forfeited and sold for evermore, providing I may anchor my tottering soul upon Christ! I know it is sometimes asked of the soul, 'Lord, what will you have for Christ?' But O Lord, can you be bought or bribed with any gift for Christ? O Lord, can Christ be sold — or rather, may not a poor needy sinner have him for nothing? If I can get no more, O let me be pained to all eternity with longing for him. The joy of hungering for Christ should be my heaven for evermore. Alas, that I cannot draw souls and Christ together. But I desire the coming of his kingdom, and that Christ — as I assuredly hope he shall — would come upon withered Scotland as rain upon the new-mown grass. O let the King come! O let his kingdom come! O let their eyes rot in their eye-holes who will not receive him home again to reign and rule in Scotland! Grace, grace be with you.
Aberdeen, 1637. Yours in his sweet Lord Jesus, S. R.
