Like John Bunyan in Bedford jail, Samuel Rutherford did his best work while suffering imprisonment for the gospel. His opponents had meant to silence him; instead they extended his ministry across the centuries, because it was out of that period that most of his famous Letters came.

Addressed to high and low alike, they were so prized by those who received them that Robert McWard's first collection appeared in 1664, three years after Rutherford's death, and successive editions grew until Andrew Bonar's classic edition held 365. This Puritan Paperback draws a selection from that series of letters, which has few rivals in the literature of Christian devotion.