'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,
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