hat 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
outside the door. Inside was a young English settler bleeding to death,
and almost insane. He had lost himself in the prairie-blizzard till his
feet were frozen to mortification, and in his desperation he had taken a
carving-knife and had hacked off his most corrupt foot and had thrown it
out of doors. And then, while the terrified hunter was getting help, the
despairing man cut off the other corrupt foot also. I hope that brave
young Englishman will live till some Winnipeg minister tells him of a yet
more terrible corruption than ever took hold of a frozen foot, and of a
knife that cuts far deeper than the shanty carver, and consoles him in
death with the assurance that it was of him that Jesus Christ spoke in
the Gospel long ago, when He said that it is better to enter into life
halt and maimed, rather than having two feet to be cast into everlasting
fire. There was no knife in Ardross Castle that would reach down to Lady
Boyd's corrupt heart; had there been, she would have first cleansed her
own heart with it, and would then have shown her son how to cleanse his.
But, as Rutherford says, she also had come now to that 'nick' in religion
to cut off a right hand and a right foot so as to keep Christ and the
life everlasting, and so had her eldest son, Lord Boyd. As Bishop
Martensen also says, 'Many a time we cannot avoid feeling a deep sorrow
for ourselves because of the bottomless depth of corruption which lies
hidden in our heart--which sorrow, rightly felt and rightly exercised, is
a weighty basis of sanctification.'

To an able woman building on such a weighty basis as that on which Lady
Boyd had for long been building, Rutherford was quite safe to lay weighty
and unusual comforts on her mind and on her heart. 'Christ has a use for
all your corruptions,' he says to her, to her surprise and to her
comfort. 'Beata culpa