more sure and the more sweet to your heart. Lady Boyd is not sorry for
her corruptions now. She is now in that blessed land where the
inhabitant shall not say, I am sick. Take comfort, O sure child of God,
with the most corrupt heart in all the world; for it is for you and for
the like of you that that inheritance is prepared and kept, that
inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away. Take
comfort, for they that be whole need not a physician, but they that are
sick.




VIII. LADY ROBERTLAND


'That famous saint, the Lady Robertland, and the rare outgates she so
often got.'--Livingstone's _Characteristics_.

The Lady Robertland ranks in the Rutherford sisterhood with Lady Kenmure,
Lady Culross, Lady Boyd, Lady Cardoness, Lady Earlston, Marion M'Naught
and Grizel Fullarton. Lady Robertland, 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