er with fault-finding, as he used to do, but
with repentance and faith under any and every ministry. How he will
examine himself every day; or, rather, how every day will examine,
accuse, expose and condemn him; and how meekly he will accept the
exposures and the condemnations! That man will not need you to preach to
him about the sanctifying of the Sabbath, or about waiting on this and
that means of grace. He will grow with or without the means of grace,
but he will be of all men the most diligent in his devotion to them. He
will almost get beyond the Word and within the Sacrament, so close up
will his corruptions drive him to Christ and to God. Till, having
provided for that man so much grace and so much growth in grace, God will
soon have to give him glory, if only to satisfy him and pacify him and
lift him out of the winter of his discontent. And then, 'Thy sun shall
no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw herself; for the Lord
shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be
ended.'

VII. LADY BOYD

'Be sorry at corruption.'--_Rutherford_.

Out of various published and unpublished writings of her day we are able
to gather an interesting and impressive picture of Lady Boyd's life and
character. But there was a carefully written volume of manuscript, that
I much fear she must have burned when on her death-bed, that would have
been invaluable to us to-night. Lady Boyd kept a careful diary for many
years of her later life, and it was not a diary of court scandal or of
social gossip or even of family affairs, it was a memoir of herself that
would have satisfied even John Foster, for in it she tried with all
fidelity to 'discriminate the successive states of her mind, and so to
trace the progress of her character, a progress that gives its chief
importance to human life.' Lady Boyd's diary would, to a certainty, have
pleased the austere Essayist, for she was a woman after his own heart,
'grave, diligent, prudent, a rare pattern of Christianity.'

Thomas Hamilton, Lady Boyd's father, was an excellent scholar and a very
able man. He rose from being a simple advocate at the Scottish Bar to be
Lord President of the Court of Session, after which, for his great
services, he was created Earl of Haddington. Christina, his eldest
daughter, inherited no small part of her father's talents and strength of
character. By the time we know her she has been some ten years a widow