man, but he was no worse to read Lady Boyd’s demand for a true minister, and I hope he read her letter and gave his students her name in his pastoral theology class.  ‘Lady Boyd on the broad road of perdition!’ some of his students would exclaim.  ’Why, Lady Boyd is the most saintly woman in all the country.’  And that would only give the learned Principal an opportunity to open up to his class, as he was so well fitted to do, that saying of Rutherford to Lady Kenmure:  that ’sense of sin is a sib friend to a spiritual man,’ till some, no doubt, went out of that class and preached, as Thomas Boston did, to ‘terrify the godly.’  Such results, no doubt, came to many from Lady Boyd’s letter to the Principal as to the preaching she needed and must at any cost have:  not philosophy, nor eloquence, but a voice like a trumpet to tell her of her sin.

Rutherford was in London attending the sittings of the Westminster Assembly when his dear friend Lady Boyd died in her daughter’s house at Ardross.  The whole Scottish Parliament, then sitting at St. Andrews, rose out of respect and attended her funeral.  Rutherford could not be present, but he wrote a characteristically comforting letter to Lady Ardross, which has been preserved to us.  He reminded her that all her mother’s sorrows were comforted now, and all her corruptions healed, and all her much service of Christ and His Church in Scotland far more than recompensed.

Children of God, take comfort, for so it will soon be with you also.  Your salvation, far off as it looks to you, is far nearer than when you believed.  You will carry your corruptions with you to your grave; ’they lay with you,’ as Rutherford said to Lady Boyd, ‘in your mother’s womb,’ and the nearer you come to your grave the stronger and the more loathsome will you feel your corruptions to be; but what about that, if only they chase you the closer up to God, and make what is beyond the grave the more sure and the more sweet to your heart.  Lady Boyd is not sorry for her corruptions now.  She is now in that blessed land where the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick.  Take comfort, O sure child of God, with the most corrupt heart in all the world; for it is for you and for the like of you that that inheritance is prepared and kept, that inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.  Take comfort, for they that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.

VIII.  LADY ROBERTLAND

   ’That famous saint, the Lady Robertland, and the rare outgates she so
   often got.’—­Livingstone’s Characteristics.