Till Lady Boyd's lost diary is recovered to us let us gather a few things
about this remarkable woman out of the letters and reminiscences of such
men as Livingstone and Rutherford and her namesake, Principal Boyd of
Trochrig. Rutherford, especially, was, next to her midnight page, her
ladyship's confidential and bosom friend. 'Now Madam,' he writes in a
letter from Aberdeen, 'for your ladyship's own case.' And then he
addresses himself in his finest style to console his correspondent,
regarding some of the deepest and most painful incidents of her rare and
genuine Christian experience. 'Yes,' he says, 'be sorry at corruption,
and be not secure about yourself as long as any of it is there.'
Corruption, in this connection, is a figure of speech. It is a kind of
technical term much in vogue with spiritual writers of the profounder
kind. It expresses to those unhappy persons who have the thing in
themselves, and who are also familiar with the Scriptural and
experimental use of the word--to them it expresses with fearful truth and
power the sinfulness of their own hearts, as that sinfulness abides and
breaks out continually. Now, how could Lady Boyd, being the woman she
was, but be sorry and inconsolably sorry to find all that in her own
heart every day? No wonder that she and her son never referred to what
she had written and he had read in his mother's lockfast book that never-
to-be-forgotten night.

'Be sorry at corruption, and be not secure.' How could she be secure
when she saw and felt every day that deadly disease eating at her own
heart? She could not be secure for an hour; she would have been anything
but the grave and prudent woman she was--she would have been mad--had she
for a single moment felt secure with such a corrupt heart. You must all
have read a dreadful story that went the round of the newspapers the
other day. A prairie hunter came upon a shanty near Winnipeg, and
found--of all things in the world!--a human foot lying on the ground