Christ: Altogether Lovely!

Samuel Rutherford wrote:

If there were ten thousand thousand millions of worlds, and as many heavens full of men and angels, Christ would [be more than able] 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? 

This soul of ours has love, and cannot but love some fair one. And, O, what a fair One, what an only One, what an excellent, lovely, ravishing One is Jesus!   

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 colors, all tastes, all joys, all sweetness, all loveliness in one. O, what a fair and excellent thing that would 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. 

O, but Christ is heaven's wonder and earth's wonder! What marvel that His bride saith, "He is altogether lovely?" (Song. 5:16) O, that [sinful] souls [would] come and fetch all their love to this fair One! 

O, if I could invite and persuade thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand of Adam's sons, to flock about my Lord Jesus, and to come and take their fill of love! O, pity forevermore that there should be such a one as Christ Jesus, so boundless, so bottomless, and so incomparable in infinite excellency and sweetness, and so few to take Him. 

O, O, you poor dry and dead souls, why will you not come here with your empty vessels, and your empty souls to this huge, and fair, and deep, and sweet well of life and fill all your empty vessels. 

O, that Christ should be so large in sweetness and worth, and we so narrow, lacking, so weak, and so void of all happiness, and yet men will not take Him. They lose their love miserably, who will not bestow it upon this lovely One.

Samuel Rutherford, "Letter XXIX – To the Lady Kilconquilair" in The Letters of Rev. Samuel Rutherford, Ed. Andrew Bonar (London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, 1891), 95. This letter was written from Aberdeen on August 8, 1637.

HT: Tolle Lege