minister, and I hope he read her letter and gave his students her name in
his pastoral theology class. 'Lady Boyd on the broad road of perdition!'
some of his students would exclaim. 'Why, Lady Boyd is the most saintly
woman in all the country.' And that would only give the learned
Principal an opportunity to open up to his class, as he was so well
fitted to do, that saying of Rutherford to Lady Kenmure: that 'sense of
sin is a sib friend to a spiritual man,' till some, no doubt, went out of
that class and preached, as Thomas Boston did, to 'terrify the godly.'
Such results, no doubt, came to many from Lady Boyd's letter to the
Principal as to the preaching she needed and must at any cost have: not
philosophy, nor eloquence, but a voice like a trumpet to tell her of her
sin.

Rutherford was in London attending the sittings of the Westminster
Assembly when his dear friend Lady Boyd died in her daughter's house at
Ardross. The whole Scottish Parliament, then sitting at St. Andrews,
rose out of respect and attended her funeral. Rutherford could not be
present, but he wrote a characteristically comforting letter to Lady
Ardross, which has been preserved to us. He reminded her that all her
mother's sorrows were comforted now, and all her corruptions healed, and
all her much service of Christ and His Church in Scotland far more than
recompensed.

Children of God, take comfort, for so it will soon be with you also. Your
salvation, far off as it looks to you, is far nearer than when you
believed. You will carry your corruptions with you to your grave; 'they
lay with you,' as Rutherford said to Lady Boyd, 'in your mother's womb,'
and the nearer you come to your grave the stronger and the more loathsome
will you feel your corruptions to be; but what about that, if only they
chase you the closer up to God, and make what is beyond the grave the