Came across this remarkable extract of Samuel Rutherford in full flow about the loveliness of Christ. In his book on Trinitarian Spirituality and John Owen Brian Kay points out that ‘the loveliness of Christ’ is a Puritan cliche – and certainly Rutherford reckoned exaggeration was impossible in eulogising the ‘Altogether Lovely One’:
I dare say that angels’
pens, angel’s tongues, nay, as many worlds of angels as there are drops of
water in all the seas and fountains, and rivers of the earth cannot paint Him
out to you. I think His sweetness has swelled upon me to the greatness of two heavens.
O for a soul as wide as the utmost circle of the highest heaven to contain His
love! And yet I could hold but little of it. O what a sight, to be up in
heaven, in that fair orchard of the New Paradise, and to see, and smell, and
touch, and kiss that fair field-flower, that evergreen tree of life! His bare
shadow would be enough for me; a sight of Him would be the guarantee of heaven
to me."If there were ten thousand thousand millions of worlds, and as many
heavens, full of men and angels, Christ would not be pinched to supply all our
wants, and to fill us all. Christ is a well of life; but who knows how deep it
is to the bottom? Put the beauty of ten thousand thousand worlds of paradises,
like the Garden of Eden, in one; put all trees, all flowers, all smells, all
colours, all tastes, all joys, all loveliness, all sweetness in one. O what a
fair and excellent thing would that be? And yet it would be less to that fair
and dearest well-beloved Christ than one drop of rain to the whole seas,
rivers, lakes, and fountains of ten thousand earths.
Just now and then it’s good to be ambushed by unadulterated spiritual fervour, to encounter an ardent soul in full rapturous flow. The contrast between such spiritually triggered rhetoric and our own contemporary uncertainty about religious affections and emotional experience can be a telling critique of modern forms of Christian spirituality, focused more on personal fulfilment than that praise of Christ that takes us out of ourselves. Rutherford was a man of extremes – ferociously polemical and pastorally intense; a man of contrasts in an age of conflict, whose inner tensions of spiritual theology and political vision remained unreconciled. It is from such flawed human personality that some of the best Christian writing has been distilled – Rutherford, Richard Rolle, Bernard of Clairvaux, Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, Kierkegaard.
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