Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 7.djvu/82

218 flock, and instructing them, in a progress from house to house. "They were the cause and objects," he informs us, "of his tears, care, fear, and daily prayers. He laboured among them early and late ; and my witness," he declares to them, "is above, that your heaven would be two heavens to me, and the salvation of you all, as two salvations to me." Nor were his labours confined to Anwoth. " He was," says Livingstone, "a great strengthener of all the Christians in that country, who had been the fruits of the ministry of Mr John Welsh, the time he had been at Kirkcudbright;" and the whole country, we are told by Mr M'Ward, accounted themselves his particular flock.

In the month of June, 1630, Mr Rutherford was bereaved of his wife, after an illness of upwards of thirteen months, when they had been yet scarcely five years married. Her disease seems to have been attended with severe pain, and he appears to have been much affected by her sufferings. "My wife," he observes in one of his letters, "is still in exceeding great torment, night and day. Pray for us, for my life was never so wearisome to me. God hath filled me with gall and wormwood; but I believe (which holds up my head above the water) it is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth." Her death seems to have greatly distressed him, and, though he nowhere in his correspondence ventures to introduce the subject directly, he frequently alludes to it in terms of the deepest tenderness. He was himself afflicted, at the time of his wife's dearh, with a fever which lasted for thirteen weeks, and which left him at last in a state of such debility, that it was long before he could perform the duties of his calling. At this period his widowed mother lived with him, and for a time probably managed his family affairs. She too, however, died before he left Anwoth in 1636. In the month of September, 1634, Mr Rutherford lost his great patron, John Gordon, who had been created in the previous year viscount of Kenmure, and a storm was now brooding over him which was soon to drive him from his station at Anwoth. He even went the length of allowing them their own choice of any man, if they would avoid Rutherford, who intreated them to try the Lord if they had warrant of him to seek no man in the world but one only when there are choice of good men to he had. The see of Galloway in the mean time became vacant by the death of Lamb, who was succeeded by SydserfF, bishop of Brechin, an Arminian, and a man of the most intolerant disposition. This appointment gave a new turn to affairs in that quarter. A person of sentiments altogether opposite to those of the people of Kirkcudbright, was forced upon them, while their old and valuable pastor was forbidden the exercise of any part of his office. Nor did Rutherford escape. He had been summoned before the high commissioners in the year 1630, at the instance of a profligate person in his parish. Sydserff, bishop of Galloway, had erected a high commission court within his own diocese, before which Rutherford was called, and deprived of his office in 1636. This sentence was immediately confirmed by the high commission at Edinburgh, and he was sentenced before the 20th of August to confine himself within the town of Aberdeen till it should be the king's pleasure to relieve him. The crimes charged against him were, preaching against the Articles of Perth, and writing against the Arminians. The time allowed him did not permit of his visiting his friends or his flock at Anwoth; but he paid a visit to David Dickson at Irvine, whence he wrote, "being on his journey to Christ's palace at Aberdeen." He arrived at his place of confinement within the time specified; being accompanied by a deputation from his parish of Anwoth. His reception in this great stronghold of Scottish episcopacy was not very gratifying. The learned doctors, as the clergy of Aberdeen were called par excellence, hastened to let him feel their superiority, and to display the loyally of their faith by confuting the principles