ote such
counsels and encouragements as these: 'Therefore, madam, herein have
comfort, that He who seeth perfectly through all your evils, and who
knoweth the frame and constitution of your nature, and what is most
healthful for your soul, holdeth every cup of affliction to your head
with his own gracious hand. Never believe that your tender-hearted
Saviour will mix your cup with one drachm-weight of poison. Drink, then,
with the patience of the saints: wrestle, fight, go forward, watch, fear,
believe, pray, and then you have all the infallible symptoms of one of
the elect of Christ within you' (_Letter_ III.). On the death of her
infant daughter, Rutherford writes to the elect lady: 'She is only sent
on before, like unto a star, which, going out of our sight, doth not die
and vanish, but still shineth in another hemisphere. What she wanted of
time she hath gotten of eternity, and you have now some plenishing up in
heaven. Build your nest upon no tree here, for God hath sold the whole
forest to death' (_Letter_ IV.). 'Madam, when you are come to the other
side of the water and have set down your foot on the shore of glorious
eternity, and look back to the water and to your wearisome journey, and
shall see in that clear glass of endless glory nearer to the bottom of
God's wisdom, you shall then be forced to say, "If God had done otherwise
with me than He hath done, I had never come to the enjoying of this crown
of glory"' (_Letter_ XL). 'Madam, tire not, weary not; for I dare find
you the Son of God caution that when you are got up thither and have cast
your eyes to view the golden city and the fair and never-withering Tree
of Life that beareth twelve manner of fruits every month, you shall then
say, "Four-and-twenty hours' abode in this place is worth threescore and
ten years' sorrow upon earth"' (_Letter_ XIX.). 'Your ladyship goeth on
laughing and putting on a good countenance before the world, and yet you
carry heaviness about with you. You do well, madam, not to make them
witnesses of your grief who cannot be curers of it' (_Letter_ XX.).
'Those who can take the crabbed tree of the cross handsomely upon their
backs and fasten it on cannily shall find it such a burden as its wings
are to a bird or its sails to a ship' (_Letter_ LXIX.). 'I thought it
had been an easy thing to be a Christian, and that to seek God had been
at the next door; but, oh, the windings, the turnings, the ups and downs
He hath led me th