sad misfortune to make a
very bad marriage in the morning of her days; and, partly as the result
of all that, and partly because of her peculiar mental constitution, her
whole life was drenched with a deep melancholy. But, as we are told in
John Howie and elsewhere, all these evils and misfortunes were made to
work together for good to her through the special grace of God, and
through the wise and wistful care of her lifelong friend and minister and
correspondent, Samuel Rutherford. Lady Jane Campbell had very remarkable
gifts of mind. We would have expected that from her distinguished
pedigree; and we have abundant proof of that in Rutherford's sheaf of
letters to her. His dedication of that most remarkable piece, _The Trial
and Triumph of Faith_, is sufficient of itself to show how highly
Rutherford esteemed Lady Kenmure, both as to her head and her heart. Till
our theological students have been led to study _The Trial and Triumph of
Faith: Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself_--which, to my mind,
is by far the best of Rutherford's works--_The Covenant of Grace_ and
_The Influences of Grace_, they will have no conception of the
intellectual rank of Samuel Rutherford himself, or of the intelligence
and the attainments of his hearers and readers and correspondents. Thomas
Goodwin was always telling the theological students of Oxford in those
days to thicken their too thin homilies with more doctrine: Rutherford's
very thinnest books are almost too thick, both with theology and with
thought.

How ever a woman like Jane Campbell came to marry a man like John Gordon
will remain a mystery. It was not that he was a man of no mind; he was a
man of no worth or interest of any kind. He was a rake and a
lick-spittle, the very last man in Scotland for Jane Campbell to throw
herself away upon. And she was too clever and too good a woman not to
make a speedy and a heart-breaking discovery of the fatal mistake she had
committed. Poor Jane Campbell soon wakened up to the discovery that she
had exchanged the name and the family of a brave and noble house for the
name and the house of a poltroon. No wonder that Rutherford's letters to
her are so often headed: 'To Lady Kenmure, under illness and depression
of mind.' Could you have kept quite well had you been a Campbell with
John Gordon for a husband? Think of having to nurse your humbug of a
husband through a shammed illness. Think of having to take a hand in
sendi