Samuel Rutherford, a seventeenth-century Scottish pastor and theologian, wrote the following to a woman when her young daughter died: “Remember what age your daughter was, and that just so long was your lease of her … your lease [has] run out, and you can no more justly quarrel against your great Superior for taking His own, at His just termday, than a poor farmer can complain that his master taketh a portion of his own land to himself when his lease is expired.”