Vol 16 - TO JOHN STEWART, PROVOST OF AYR.

TO JOHN STEWART, PROVOST OF AYR.
Much honored, and dearest in CHRIST;
GRACE, mercy, and peace, from GOD our FATHER, and from our LORD JESUS CHRIST, be upon you! My closed mouth, my dumb sabbaths, and the memory of my communion with CHRIST, in many fair, faire days in Anwoth, (whereas now my Master getteth no service of my tongue,) have almost broken my faith in two halves; yet, in my deepest apprehensions of his anger, I see through a cloud that I am wrong. The LORD) is equal in all his ways; but my guiltiness often overmastereth my believing. I have not been well known; for, except as to open outbreakings, I want nothing of what JUDAS and CAIN had;—only He has been pleased to prevent me in mercy, and to cast me into a fever of love for himself; and' besides he has visited my soul, and watered it with his comforts. But yet I have not that real and felt possession which I would have; I know CHRIST pitieth me in this. The great men, my friends, are dried up, like winterbrooks of water: all say, " No dealing for that man; his best way will be, to be gone out of the kingdom:" So I see they tire of me. But, believe me, I am most gladly content that CHRIST breaketh all my idols in pieces; it has put a new edge upon my blunted love to CHRIST; I see he is jealous of my love, and will have all to himself. In a word, the following things' are my burthen.—l. I am not in the vineyard as others are: it may be, because CHRIST thinketh me a withered tree; but Got, forbid!— 2. Woe, woe, woe is coming upon my harlot mother, this apostate Kirk. The time is coming, when we shall wish for doves' wings, to any and hide us. Oh for the desolation of this land!
3. I see my Master, CHRIST, going alone, as it were mourning in sackcloth. His fainting friends fear that JESUS shall lose the field but he must carry the day.
4. My guiltiness and the sins of my youth are come up against me, and they would come in as deserving causes of GOD’s justice; but I pray GOD, for CHRIST'S sake, that he will never give them that room. 5. Woe is me, that I cannot get the glorious Prince of the Kings of the earth set on high! Sir, ye may help me and pity me in this, and bow your knee, and bless his name, and desire others to do it, that he has been pleased in my sufferings to make atheists, papists, and enemies about me, say, GOD is with this prisoner." Let hell, and the powers of hell, (I care not,) be let loose against me to do their worst, so that CHRIST, and my FATHER and his FATHER, may be magnified in my sufferings.—", write to. me; and commend me to your wife. Mercy be her portion! Grace be with you!
Yours in his LORD JESUS,
S.R.