The View from Castle Rock

enter in, and will not be able.

    Luke xiii, 24.

    Will’s sightings would certainly not stand well with the Kirk, and during the first part of the eighteenth century the Kirk was particularly powerful in the parish of Ettrick.
    Its minister at that time was the preacher named Thomas Boston, who is remembered now-if he is remembered at all-as the author of a book called
Human Nature in its Fourfold State,
which was said to stand next to the Bible on the shelf of every pious home in Scotland. And every Presbyterian home in Scotland was meant to be a pious home. Constant investigation of private life and tortured reshapings of the faith went on to take care of that. There was no balm of ritual, no elegance of ceremony. Prayer was not only formal but personal, agonized. The readiness of the soul for eternal life was always in doubt and danger.
    Thomas Boston kept this drama going without a break, for himself and for his parishioners. In his autobiography he speaks of his own recurring miseries, his dry spells, his sense of unworthiness and dullness even in the act of preaching the Gospel, or while praying in his study. He pleads for grace. He bares his breast to Heaven-at least symbolically-in his desperation. He would surely lacerate himself with thorned whips if such behavior would not be Popish, would not in fact constitute a further sin.
    Sometimes God hears him, sometimes not. His craving for God can never leave him, but he can never count on its being satisfied. He can rise up filled with the Spirit and enter marathons of preaching, he presides at solemn festivals of Communion in which he knows himself to be the Vessel of God and witnesses the transformation of many souls. But he is careful not to take the credit himself. He knows that he is all too capable of the Sin of Pride, and knows too how swiftly Grace may be withdrawn from him.
    He strives, he falls. Darkness again.

    Meanwhile the roof of the manse is leaking, the walls are damp, the chimney smokes, his wife and his children and he himself are often sick with fevers. They have septic throats and rheumatic aches. Some of his children die. The very first baby is born with what sounds to me like spina bifida and she dies soon after birth. His wife is distraught, and though he does his best to comfort her he feels bound also to reprimand her for complaining against God’s Will. He has to reproach himself later for lifting up the coffin lid to get one last glimpse of the face of his own favorite, a little boy of three. How wicked of him, how weak, to love this sinful scrap of flesh and to question in any way his Lord’s wisdom in taking him. There must be further wrestlings, self-castigation, and bouts of prayer. Wrestlings not only with his dullness of spirit but with a majority of his fellow ministers, for he becomes deeply interested in a treatise called
The Marrow of Modern Divinity.
He is accused of being a marrow-man, in danger of going over to antinomianism. Antinomianism proceeds logically from the doctrine of predestination and asks a simple, direct question-why, if you are from the beginning one of the elect, should you not be able to get away with anything you like?
    But wait.
Wait.
As to being one of the elect, who can ever be so sure?
    And the problem for Boston must surely not be about getting away with anything, but about the compulsion, the honorable compulsion, to follow where certain lines of reasoning lead.
    Just in time, however, he falls back from error. He retreats. He is safe.
    His wife, in the midst of births and deaths and care of the remaining children and troubles with the roof and the continual cold rain, is overcome by some nervous disorder. She is unable to get out of her bed. Her faith is strong, but vitiated, as he says, on one essential point. He does not say what this point is. He prays with her. How he manages in the house we do not know. His wife, once the beautiful Catherine Brown, seems to stay in bed for years, except for the one touching respite when all the family is laid low by some passing infection. Then she rises from her bed and cares for them, tirelessly and tenderly, with the strength and optimism she showed in her youth, when Boston first fell in love with her. Everyone recovers, and when next heard from she is back in bed. She is well on in years but still alive when the minister himself is dying, and we can hope that she will get up then and go to live in a dry house with some agreeable relations in a