Life & Mortality Quote by Samuel Rutherford

Rutherford makes salvation sound less like a hymn and more like a high-risk real-estate deal on hostile terrain. The image is transactional - buy the field, sell all - but the point is to unsettle anyone tempted to treat grace as a casual inheritance. He borrows the gospel parable of the pearl to insist that the treasure is real and costly, and that the cost isn’t merely symbolic piety but a total reordering of desire. If you want the pearl, you don’t window-shop; you liquidate.

The line that bites is the warning about “security.” Rutherford isn’t talking about physical safety; he’s targeting spiritual complacency, the soft anesthesia of thinking you’re fine because you’re respectable, orthodox, or simply untroubled. “Many are lying dead by the way” turns the Christian journey into a mountain path littered with corpses - not of the rebellious, but of the comfortable. That’s a Puritan signature move: terror aimed at the half-convinced, the dutiful churchgoer, the person who confuses familiarity with fidelity.

Context matters. Rutherford wrote amid the convulsions of 17th-century Scotland and England - covenant controversies, civil war politics, and a Protestant culture obsessed with signs of genuine conversion. His rhetoric is pastoral but also disciplinary: it builds urgency, creates an enemy (false assurance), and frames the Christian life as an ascent requiring vigilance. The subtext is blunt: the greatest threat to your soul isn’t scandal; it’s ease.