el Rutherford's, which is, being interpreted,
It's all over and gone with me, 'but Providence, since the Amen took it
in hand, has a thousand and more keys wherewith to give poor creatures
like me our rare outgates.' There were few alive by that time who had
known Lady Robertland in her early days, and she seldom spoke of those
days; only, on the anniversary of her early marriage, she never forgot
her feelings when her life as a Fleming came to an end and her new life
as a Robertland began. There was a famous preacher of her day who
sometimes spoke familiarly of the 'keys of the cupboard, that the Master
carried at His girdle,' and she used sometimes to take up his homely
words and say that she had had all the sweetest morsels and most delicate
dainties of earth's cupboard taken out from under lock and key and put
into her mouth. 'He ties terrible knots,' she would say, 'just to have
the pleasure of loosing them off from those He loves. He lays nets and
sets traps only that He may get a chance of healing broken bones and
setting the terrified free.' No wonder that Wodrow calls her 'a much-
exercised woman,' with such ingates and outgates, and with such miracles
of an interposing Providence filling her childhood, her youth, her
married and her widowed life. The _Analecta_ is full of remarkable
providences, but Lady Robertland's exercises and outgates are too
wonderful even for the pages of that always wonderful and sometimes too
awful book.

'My Master hath outgates of His own which are beyond the wisdom of man,'
writes Rutherford, in her own language, to Lady Robertland from 'Christ's
prison in Aberdeen.' Rutherford's letters are full of more or less
mysterious allusions to the rare outgates that God in Christ had given
him also from the snares and traps into which he had fallen by the sins
and follies of his unregenerate youth. Whatever trouble came on
Rutherford all his days--the persecution of the bishop, his banishment to
Aberdeen, the shutting of his mouth from preaching Christ, the loss of
wife and child, and the poignant pains of sanctification--he gathered
them all up under the familiar figure of a waled and chosen cross.
'Seeing that the sins of my youth deserved strokes, how am I obliged to
my Lord, who, out of many possible crosses, hath given me this waled and
chosen cross to suffer for the name of Jesus Christ. Since I must have
chains, He has put golden chains on me. Seeing I must have sorrow, for