Vol 16 - TO MY LORD BOYD.

TO MY LORD BOYD.
My very honorable and good LORD;
GRACE, mercy, and peace, be to your Lordship! Join, join (as ye do) with CHRIST; he is worth more to you and your posterity, than this world's Mayflowers, its withering riches and honor, that shall go away as smoke, and shall in one half hour, after the blast of the Archangel's trumpet, he in white ashes. Let me beseech your Lordship to draw aside the lap of time's curtain, and look in through that window to great and endless eternity, and consider, if a worldly price (supposing that this little round clay globe, the dying idol of the fools of this world, were all your own) can be given, for one smile of CHRIST'S countenance, in that day, when so many joints and knees of thousand thousands shall stand before CHRIST, trembling, and making their prayers to hills and mountains to " fall upon them, and hide them from the face of the LAMB." O how many would sell Lordships and kingdoms on that day, to buy CHRIST! But, oh! the market shall, be closed and ended ere then. Your Lordship has now a blessed venture of winning " the Prince of the Kings of the earth." Fear not worms of clay, the moth shall eat them as a garment; let the LORD be your fear; he is with you, and shall fight for you. Thus shall ye cause " the blessing of those who are ready to perish to come upon you." The LAMB and his armies are with you, and the kingdoms of the earth are the LORD's. I am persuaded, there is not another Gospel than that which ye now contend for. I dare hazard my heaven and salvation upon it, that this is the only saving way to glory. Grace, grace be with your Lordship!
Your Lordship's, at all obedience in CHRIST,
Aberdeen, 1637.
S. R.
TO.ROBERT GORDON, BAILLIE OF AIR.
WORTHY SIR,
'GRACE, mercy, and peace, be to you! I long to hear from you. I know that submissive waiting for the LORD shall at length ripen the joy and deliverance of his own. What is the dry and miscarrying hope of all them who are not in CHRIST, but confusion and wind O how miserably are the children of this world beguiled, whose wine cometh home to them water, and their gold brass! And what wonder is it, that hopes built upon sand should fall It were good for us all to abandon the forlorn and blasted hope which we have had in the creature; and let us henceforth come and " drink water out of our own well," even " the fountain of living waters," and build ourselves and our hope upon/ CHRIST our Rock. Alas, that natural love to this borrowed home, in which we were born, should have the largest share of our heart! Our poor, lean, and empty dreams of confidence in something besides GOD, travel no further than up and down the creatures.; Go]) may say of us, (Amos 6:13,) " Ye rejoice in a thing of nought." Surely we spin our spider's web with pain; and build our rotten tottering house upon a lie; and falsehood, and vanity. O when shall. we learn to have thoughts higher than the sun and moon; and teach our joy, hope, confidence, and our soul's desires, to look up to our best country, and to look down on the clay tents, set up for a night's lodging or two in this uncouth land, and laugh at our childish conceptions and imaginations, that would suck joy out of creatures! It were our happiness for evermore, if GOD would cast a pest, a leprosy, upon our part of this fair world, so that clay might no longer deceive us! O that GOD, may burn and blast our hope here, rather than our hope should live to burn us! Alas, the wrong side of Christ, his suffering side, his wounds, his wants, his wrongs, the oppressions of men done to him, are turned towards men's eyes; and they see not the best and fairest side of CHRIST, his amiable face and his beauty, which men and angels wonder at. Sir, lend your thoughts to these things, and learn to contemn this world. See him who is invisible; draw aside the curtain; and look in to a kingdom " undefiled, that fades not away, reserved for you in heaven:" this is worthy of your pains, and worthy of your soul's sweating, and laboring, and seeking after, by night and by day. Fire will fly over the earth, and all that is in it, even destruction from the ALMIGHTY. Fie, fie upon that hope, that shall be dried up by the root! Fie upon the drunken nightbargains, and the drunken and mad covenants, that sinners make with death and hell! When men's souls are mad and drunken with the love of this life, they think to make a nest for their hopes, and take quarters of hell and death, that they shall have ease, long life, and peace; and in the morning, when the last trumpet shall awake them, then they rue the day. It is time, high time for you, to think upon death and your accounts, and to remember where ye’ will be before the year of our LORD) 170O. I hope ye are thinking upon this. Pull at your soul, and draw it aside from the company that it is with, and whisper into it news of eternity, death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Grace, grace be with you!
Yours in his LORD JESUS,
S.R.