Samuel Rutherford's Letters from Exile

In the years before the great upheavals of Scotland, there was a minister whose words could reach further than any pulpit. His name was Samuel Rutherford, and he served a small parish at Anwoth, on the green and lonely coast of Galloway. He was a scholar of rare power, the kind of man whose books would be argued over for centuries. But he was first and always a shepherd. He loved his people the way a father loves children he cannot stop worrying over. He rose early and slept little, and it was said of him that he was always praying, always preaching, always visiting, always writing. And then, in the prime of that ministry, the doors of Anwoth were shut against him.

The trouble was doctrine. Rutherford would not bend his convictions to the king's church, and so the authorities silenced him and sent him into exile. They confined him to the town of Aberdeen, far in the north, and there they forbade him to preach. Imagine it. A man whose whole life was the giving of himself to others, kept from the one work he was made for. He called Aberdeen his palace and his prison in the same breath. He was cut off from his flock, from his pulpit, from the faces he loved. The ordinary work of shepherding was taken clean out of his hands.

So he reached for a pen.

From that confinement, Rutherford began to write letters. Letter after letter, sent out across Scotland to the people he could no longer stand before. He wrote to grieving mothers and frightened parishioners, to fellow ministers and trembling souls. He wrote not the cold news of a distant man, but the warmth of a heart that would not let go. He poured out longing for his congregation. He poured out doctrine, and comfort, and correction, and above all an aching, joyful love for Christ. Where his feet could not walk, his words travelled. Where his voice was forbidden, the ink spoke. The prison that was meant to silence the shepherd only scattered his voice across a whole nation.

The letters are remembered for one thing more than any other. In the middle of his own loss, Rutherford could not stop speaking of the sweetness of Jesus. He found in the confinement of Aberdeen a nearness to Christ he had not known in freedom. The man who had lost his pulpit had not lost his Lord, and that, he insisted, was riches enough. The walls held his body. They could not touch the thing he treasured most.

The years that followed were not gentle. Scotland's struggles over church and crown swept on, and Rutherford was caught in them to the end. By the close of his life the authorities summoned him to answer charges that might have cost him his head. But he was already dying, and to that final summons he gave one of the great answers in the history of the church. He sent word that he had received a summons from a higher Judge and Court, and that he must answer the first call before he could answer theirs. He died in 1661, beyond the reach of any earthly trial.

What endured was not the locked church at Anwoth, nor the long exile in the north. It was a thick book of letters, written by a man who was denied almost everything except the love that drove him to write. For three hundred years and more, believers have opened those pages and found a pastor still at work, still longing, still pointing past himself to the One he could not stop praising. The court of Aberdeen took his pulpit. It could not take his pen. And through that pen, the shepherd of Anwoth is preaching still.