‘He ties terrible knots,’ she would say, ’just to have the pleasure of loosing them off from those He loves.  He lays nets and sets traps only that He may get a chance of healing broken bones and setting the terrified free.’  No wonder that Wodrow calls her ’a much-exercised woman,’ with such ingates and outgates, and with such miracles of an interposing Providence filling her childhood, her youth, her married and her widowed life.  The Analecta is full of remarkable providences, but Lady Robertland’s exercises and outgates are too wonderful even for the pages of that always wonderful and sometimes too awful book.

‘My Master hath outgates of His own which are beyond the wisdom of man,’ writes Rutherford, in her own language, to Lady Robertland from ’Christ’s prison in Aberdeen.’  Rutherford’s letters are full of more or less mysterious allusions to the rare outgates that God in Christ had given him also from the snares and traps into which he had fallen by the sins and follies of his unregenerate youth.  Whatever trouble came on Rutherford all his days—­the persecution of the bishop, his banishment to Aberdeen, the shutting of his mouth from preaching Christ, the loss of wife and child, and the poignant pains of sanctification—­he gathered them all up under the familiar figure of a waled and chosen cross.  ’Seeing that the sins of my youth deserved strokes, how am I obliged to my Lord, who, out of many possible crosses, hath given me this waled and chosen cross to suffer for the name of Jesus Christ.  Since I must have chains, He has put golden chains on me.  Seeing I must have sorrow, for I have sinned, O Preserver of mankind, Thou hast waled and selected out for me a joyful sorrow—­an honest, spiritual, glorious sorrow.  Oh, what am I, such a rotten mass of sin, to be counted worthy of the most honourable rod in my Father’s house, even the golden rod wherewith the Lord the Heir was Himself stricken.  Thou wast a God that forgavest them, though Thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.’  Rutherford also was forgiven, and the only vengeance that God took of his inventions, the irregularities of his youth, was taken in the form of a ‘waled cross.’  ’I might have been proclaimed on the crown of the causey,’ says Rutherford, ’but He has so waled my cross and His vengeance that I am suffering not for my sin but for His name.’  What a life hid with Christ in God he must live, who, like Rutherford, takes all his trials on earth as a transmuted and substituted cross for his sins:  and who is able to take all his deserved and demanded chastisements in the shape of inward and spiritual and sanctifying pain.  O sweet vengeance of grace on our sinful inventions!  O most intimate and most awful of all our secrets, the secrets of a love-waled, love-substituted cross!  O rare outgate from the scorn of the causeway to the smelting-house of ’Him who hath His fire in Zion!’