'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
'extraordinary outletting of the Spirit' that was experienced in those
days over the whole of the west of Scotland, but which fell in perfect
Pentecostal power on both sides of the Stewarton Water. 'I preached
often to them in the time of the College vacation,' says Robert Blair,
'residing at the house of that famous saint, the Lady Robertland, and I
had much conference with the people, and profited more by them than I
think they did by me; though ignorant people and proud and secure livers
called them "the daft people of Stewarton."' The Stewarton sickness was
as like as possible, both in its manifestations and in its results, to
the Irish Revival of 1859, in which, when it came over and awakened
Scotland, the Duchess of Gordon, another lady of the Covenant, acted much
the same part in the North that Lady Robertland acted in her day in the
West. Many of our ministers still living can say of Huntly Lodge, 'I
resided often there, and preached to the people, profiting more by them
than they could have done by me.'
_Outgate_ is an old and an almost obsolete word, but it is a word of
great expressiveness and point. It bears on the face of it what it
means. An outgate is just a _gate out_, a way of redemption, deliverance
and escape. And her _rare_ outgates does not imply that Lady
Robertland's outgates were few, but that they were extraordinary, seldom
matched, and above all expectation and praise. Lady Robertland's
outgates were not rare in the sense of coming seldom and being few; for,
the fact is, they filled her remarkable life full; but they were rare in
the sense that she, like the Psalmist in Mr. James Guthrie's psalm, was a
wonder unto many, and most of all unto herself. But a gate out, and
especially such a gate as the Lady Robertland so often came out at, needs
a key, needs many keys, and many keys of no common kind, and it needs a
janitor also, or rather a redeemer and a deliverer of a kind
corresponding to the kind of gate and the kind of confinement on which
the gate shuts and opens. And when Lady Robertland thought of her rare
outgates--and she thought more about them than about anything else that
ever happened to her--and as often as she could get an ear and a heart
into which to tell them, she always pictured to her audience and to
herself the majestic Figure of the first chapter of the Revelation. She
often spoke of her rare outgates to David Dickson, and Robert Blair, and
John Livingstone, and to her own Stewarton minister, Mr. Castlelaw, whose
name written in water on earth is written in letters of gold in heaven.
'Not much of a preacher himself, he encouraged his people to attend Mr.
Dickson's sermons, and he often employed Mr. Blair to preach at
Stewarton, and accompanied him back and forward, singing psalms all the
way.' Her ladyship often told saintly Mr. Castlelaw of her rare
outgates, and always so spoke to him of the Amen, who has the keys of
hell and of death, that he never could read that chapter all his days
without praising God that he had had the Lady Robertland and her rare
outgates in his sin-sick parish.
But it is time to turn to some of those special and rare outgates that
the Amen with the keys gave to His favoured handmaiden, the Lady
Robertland; and the first kind of outgate, on account of which she was
always such an astonishment to herself, was what she would call her
outgate from providential disabilities, entanglements, and
embarrassments. She was wont to say to William Guthrie, who best
understood her witty words and her wonderful history, that the wicked
fairies had handicapped her infant feet in her very cradle. She could
use a freedom of speech with Guthrie, and he with her, such as neither of
them could use with Livingstone or with Rutherford. Rutherford could not
laugh when his heart was breaking, as Lady Robertland and the witty
minister of Fenwick were often overheard laughing. 'Yes, but your
Ladyship has won the race with all your weights,' Guthrie would laugh and
say. 'One of my many races,' she would answer, with half a smile and
half a sigh; 'but I have a long race, many long races, still before me.
It seemed _conclamatum est_ with me,' she would then say, quoting a well-
known expression of Samuel 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 I
have sinned, O Preserver of mankind, Thou hast waled and selected out for
me a joyful sorrow--an honest, spiritual, glorious sorrow. Oh, what am
I, such a rotten mass of sin, to be counted worthy of the most honourable
rod in my Father's house, even the golden rod wherewith the Lord the Heir
was Himself stricken. Thou wast a God that forgavest them, though Thou
tookest vengeance of their inventions.' Rutherford also was forgiven,
and the only vengeance that God took of his inventions, the
irregularities of his youth, was taken in the form of a 'waled cross.' 'I
might have been proclaimed on the crown of the causey,' says Rutherford,
'but He has so waled my cross and His vengeance that I am suffering not
for my sin but for His name.' What a life hid with Christ in God he must
live, who, like Rutherford, takes all his trials on earth as a transmuted
and substituted cross for his sins: and who is able to take all his
deserved and demanded chastisements in the shape of inward and spiritual
and sanctifying pain. O sweet vengeance of grace on our sinful
inventions! O most intimate and most awful of all our secrets, the
secrets of a love-waled, love-substituted cross! O rare outgate from the
scorn of the causeway to the smelting-house of 'Him who hath His fire in
Zion!'
'The sorrows of death compassed me,' sings the Psalmist, and 'the pains
of hell gat hold upon me; I found trouble and sorrow.' What, you may
well ask, were those pains of hell that gat such hold of David while yet
he was a living and unreprobated man? Was it not too strong language to
use about any earthly experience, however terrible, to call it the pains
of hell? Ask that man whose sin has found him out what he thinks the
pains of hell were in David's case, and he will tell you that
remorse--unsoftened, unsweetened, unquenchable remorse--is hell; at any
rate, it is hell upon earth; and till he confessed his sin it was David's
hell. Sin taken up and laid by God's hand on the sinner's conscience,
that makes that sinner's conscience hell. And, then, do we not read that
Jehovah laid on our Surety the sin of us all till He was three hours in
hell for us, and came out of it, as Rutherford says, with the keys of
hell at His proud girdle? And it is with those captured keys that He now
unlocks the true hell-gate in every guilty sinner's conscience.
'He comes the prisoners to relieve
In Satan's bondage held;
The gates of brass before Him burst,
The iron fetters yield.
. . . . . .
We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains He had to bear,
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.
There was no other good enough
To pay the price of sin;
He only could unlock the gate
Of heaven, and let us in.'
'Myself am hell,' cried out Satan, in his agony of pride and rage and
remorse.
'Divines and dying men may talk of hell,
But in my heart her several torments dwell.'
So you say of yourself, as you well may, after such a life as yours has
been. The Judge of all the earth would not be a just judge unless hell
were already kindled in your heart. But He who is a just God is also a
Saviour, and He has with His own hand hung the key of hell and of your
self-made bed in it at the girdle of Jesus Christ. Go to Him to-night,
and tell Him that you are in hell. Tell Him that, like David, and very
much, so far as you can understand, for David's sins, you, too, are in
the pains of very hell. Cast yourself, like John in the Revelation, at
His feet, and see if He does not say to you what He said through Nathan
to David, and what He said Himself to John, and what He said to Lady
Robertland, and what He said to Samuel Rutherford. Cast yourself at His
feet, and see if you do not get at His hands as rare an outgate and as
wonderfully waled a cross as the very best of them got.
Then all the rest of your life on this prison-house of an earth will be a
history in you and to you of all kinds of rare outgates. For, once He
who has the keys has taken your case in hand, He will not let either rust
or dust gather on His keys till He has opened every door for you and set
you free from every snare. There are many evil affections, evil habits,
and evil practices that are still closely padlocked both on your outward
and your inward life that you must be wholly delivered from. And He who
has all the keys of your body and your soul too at His girdle, will not
consider that you have got your full outgate, or that He has at all
discharged His duty by you, till, as Rutherford says, your sinful habits
and practices are all loosened off from your life and are driven back
into the inner world of your inclinations; and then, after that, He will
only take up still more skilful and still more intricate keys wherewith
to turn the locks of delight, desire, and inclination. O blessed keys of
hell and of death, of habit and inclination and evil affection! O
blessed people who are under such a Redeemer from sin and death and hell!
O truly famous saint, the Lady Robertland, who got so many and so rare
outgates from the Amen with the keys! Who shall give me an outgate from
this body? cries the great apostle, not chafing in his chains for death,
but for the true life that lies beyond death. Paul, with all his intense
love of life and service--nay, because of that intense love--felt
sometimes that this present life at its very best was but a life of
relaxed imprisonment rather than of true liberty. Paul was, as we say, a
kind of first-class misdemeanant, as Samuel Rutherford also was in his
prison-palace in Aberdeen, and the Lady Robertland in Stewarton House;
they had a liberty that was not to be despised; they had light and air
and exercise; they were not in chains in the dungeon; they had pen and
ink; they had books and papers, and their friends might on occasion visit
them. They might have better food also if they paid for it; and, best of
all, they could, till their full release came, beguile and occupy the
time in work for Christ and His Church. But still they were present in
this body of sin and death, and absent from the Lord, and they pined,
and, I fear, sinfully murmured sometimes, for the last and the greatest
and the best outgate of all. 'As for myself,' writes Rutherford, 'I
think that if a poor, weak, dying sheep seeks for an old dyke, and the
lee-side of a hill in a storm, I surely may be allowed to long for
heaven. I see little in this life but sin, and the sour fruits of sin;
and oh! what a burden and what a bitterness is sin! What a miserable
bondage it is to be at the nod of such a master as Sin! But He who hath
the keys hath sworn that our sin shall not loose the covenant bond, and
therefore I wait in hope and in patience till His time shall come to take
off all my fetters and make a hole in this cage of death that the
imprisoned bird may find its long-promised liberty.'
'I would not live alway, thus fettered with sin,
Temptation without and corruption within;
In a moment of strength, if I sever the chain,
Scarce the victory is mine ere I'm captive again;
E'en the rapture of pardon is mingled with fears,
And the cup of thanksgiving with penitent tears;
The festival trump calls for jubilant songs,
But my spirit her own _miserere_ prolongs.
'Who, who would live always away from his God!
Away from yon heaven, that blissful abode
Where the rivers of pleasures flow o'er the bright plains,
And the noon-tide of glory eternally reigns;
Where the saints of all ages in harmony meet,
Their Saviour and brethren transported to greet;
While the songs of salvation exultingly roll,
And the love of the Lord is the bliss of the soul.'