bertland, like so many of the other ladies
of the Covenant, was not only a woman of deep personal piety and great
patriotism, she was also, like Lady Kenmure, Lady Boyd, and Marion
M'Naught, a woman of remarkable powers of mind. For one thing, she had a
fascinating gift of conversation, and, like John Bunyan, it was her habit
to speak of spiritual things with wonderful power under the similitude
and parable of outward and worldly things. At the time of the famous
'Stewarton sickness' Lady Robertland was of immense service, both to the
ministers and to the people. Robert Fleming tells us that the profane
rabble of that time gave the nickname of the Stewarton sickness to that
'extraordinary outletting of the Spirit' that was experienced in those
days over the whole of the west of Scotland, but which fell in perfect
Pentecostal power on both sides of the Stewarton Water. 'I preached
often to them in the time of the College vacation,' says Robert Blair,
'residing at the house of that famous saint, the Lady Robertland, and I
had much conference with the people, and profited more by them than I
think they did by me; though ignorant people and proud and secure livers
called them "the daft people of Stewarton."' The Stewarton sickness was
as like as possible, both in its manifestations and in its results, to
the Irish Revival of 1859, in which, when it came over and awakened
Scotland, the Duchess of Gordon, another lady of the Covenant, acted much
the same part in the North that Lady Robertland acted in her day in the
West. Many of our ministers still living can say of Huntly Lodge, 'I
resided often there, and preached to the people, profiting more by them
than they could have done by me.'

_Outgate_ is an old and an almost obsolete word, but it is a word of
great expressiveness and point. It bears on the face of it what it
means. An outgate is just a _gate out_, a way of redemption, deliverance
and escape. And her _rare_ outgates does not imply that Lady
Robertland's outgates were few, but that they were extraordinary, seldom
matched, and above all expectation and praise. Lady Robertland's
outgates were not rare in the sense of coming seldom and being few; for,
the fact is, they filled her remarkable life full; but they were rare in
the sense that she, like the Psalmist in Mr. James Guthrie's psalm, was a
wonder unto many, and most of all unto herself. But a gate out, and
especially such a gate as the Lady Robertland