,
and all her children are promising to turn out an honour to her name and
a blessing to her old age. And, under the Divine promise, we do not
wonder at that, when we see what sort of mother they had. For with all
sovereign and inscrutable exceptions the rule surely still holds, 'Train
up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart
from it.' All her days Lady Boyd was on the most intimate terms with the
most eminent ministers of the Church of Scotland. We find such men as
Robert Bruce, Robert Blair, John Livingstone, and Samuel Rutherford
continually referring to her in the loftiest terms. But it was not so
much her high rank, or her great ability, or her fearless devotion to the
Presbyterian and Evangelical cause that so drew those men around her; it
was rather the inwardness and the intensity of her personal religion. You
may be a determined upholder of a Church, of Presbytery against Prelacy,
of Protestantism against Popery, or even of Evangelical religion against
Erastianism and Moderatism, and yet know nothing of true religion in your
own heart. But men like Livingstone and Rutherford would never have
written of Lady Boyd as they did had she not been a rare pattern of
inward and spiritual Christianity.

I have spoken of Lady Boyd's diary. 'She used every night,' says
Livingstone, 'to write what had been the state of her soul all day, and
what she had observed of the Lord's doing.' When all her neighbours were
lying down without fear, her candle went not out till she had taken pen
and ink and had called herself to a strict account for the past day. Her
duties and her behaviour to her husband, to her children, to her
servants, and to her many dependants; the things that had tried her
temper, her humility, her patience, her power of self-denial; any
strength and wisdom she had attained to in the government of her tongue
and in shutting her ears from the hearing of evil; as, also, every
ordinary as well as extraordinary providence that had visited her that
day, and how she had been able to recognise it and accept it and take
good out of it. Thus the Lady Boyd prevented the night-watches. When
the women of her own rank sat down to write their promised letters of
gossip and scandal and amusement she sat down to write her diary. 'We
see many things, but we observe nothing,' said Rutherford in a letter to
Lady Kenmure. All around her God had been dealing all that day with Lady
Boyd'