RIGHT HONOURABLE,--Grace, mercy, and peace be to your Lordship.--I rejoice exceedingly to hear that your Lordship hath a good mind to Christ, and His now borne-down truth. My very dear Lord, go on, in the strength of the Lord, to carry your honours and worldly glory to the New Jerusalem. For this cause your Lordship received these of the Lord. This is a sure way for the establishment of your house, if ye be of those who are willing, in your place, to build Zion's old waste places in Scotland. Your Lordship wanteth not God's and man's law both, now to come to the streets for Christ: and suppose the bastard laws of man were against you, it is an honest and zealous[371] error, if here you slip against a point or punctilio of standing policy. When your foot slippeth in such known ground, as is the royal prerogative of our high and most truly dread Sovereign (who hath many crowns on His head), and the liberties of His house, He will hold you up. Blessed shall they be who take Babel's little ones, and dash their heads against the stones. I wish your Lordship may have a share of that blessing, with other worthy nobles in our land.
[371] Arising from zeal.
It is true that it is now accounted wisdom for men to be partners in pulling up the stakes, and loosing the cords, of the tent of Christ. But I am persuaded, that that wisdom is cried down in heaven, and shall never pass for true wisdom with the Lord, whose word crieth shame upon wit against Christ and truth; and, accordingly, it shall prove shame and confusion of face in the end. Our Lord hath given your Lordship light of a better stamp, and learning also, wherein ye are not behind the disputer and the scribe. Oh what a blessed thing is it to see nobility, learning, and sanctification, all concur in one! For these ye owe yourself to Christ and His kingdom. God hath bewildered and bemisted the wit and the learning of the scribes and disputers of this time; they look asquint to the Bible. This blinding and bemisting world blindfoldeth men's light, that they are afraid to see straight out before them; nay, their very light playeth the knave, or worse, to truth. Your Lordship knoweth that, within a little while, policy against truth shall blush, and the works of men shall be burned up, even their spider's-web who spin out many hundred ells and webs of indifference in the Lord's worship; more than ever Moses, who would have[372] a hoof material (Exod. x. 26), and Daniel, who would have a look out at a window a matter of life and death, than ever, I say, these men of God dreamed of. Alas! that men dare to shape, carve, cut, and clip our King's princely testament in length and breadth, and in all dimensions, answerable to the conception of such policy, as a head-of-wit thinketh a safe and trim way of serving God! How have men forgotten the Lord, that they dare to go against even that truth which once they preached themselves, howbeit their sermons now be as thin sown as strawberries in a wood or wilderness! Certainly the sweetest and safest course is, for this short time of the afternoon of this old and declining world, to stand for Jesus. He hath said it, and it is our part to believe it, that ere it be long, "Time shall be no more, and the heaven shall wax old, as a garment." Do we not see it already an old holie and threadbare garment. Doth not cripple and lame nature tell us, that the Lord will fold up the old garment, and lay it aside; and that the heavens shall be folded together as a scroll, and this pesthouse shall be burnt with fire, and that both plenishing and walls shall melt with fervent heat? For at the Lord's coming, He will do with this earth, as men do with a leper-house; He will burn the walls with fire, and the plenishing of the house also (2 Pet. iii. 10, 12). My very dear Lord, how will ye rejoice in that day, to have Christ, angels, heaven, and your own conscience to smile upon you? I am persuaded that one sick night, through the terrors of the Almighty, would make men, whose conscience hath such a wide throat that an image like a cathedral church, would go down it, have other thoughts of Christ and His worship, than now they please themselves with. The scarcity of faith in the earth saith, "We are hard upon the last nick of time:" blessed are those who keep their garments clean against the Bridegroom's coming. There shall be spotted clothes, and many defiled garments, at His last Coming; and, therefore, few found worthy to walk with Him in white.
[372] Would reckon.