he was often heard muttering, but no one to the day of his death ever
knew all that his muttering meant.

'Read over your past life often,' Rutherford wrote to the old man. And
Cardoness found that to be one of the hardest tasks he had ever tried. He
had not forgotten his past life; there were things that came up out of
his past continually that compelled him to remember it. But what
Rutherford meant was that his old parishioner should willingly,
deliberately and repeatedly open the stained and torn leaves of his past
life and read it all over in the light of his old age, approaching death,
and late-awakened conscience. Rutherford wished Cardoness to sit down as
Matthew Henry says the captives sat down by the rivers of Babylon, and
weep 'deliberate tears.' There were pages in his past life that it was
the very pains of hell to old Cardoness to read; but he performed the
hard task, and thus was brought much nearer salvation than even his old
pastor knew. 'It will take a long lance to go to the bottom of your
heart, my friend,' wrote Rutherford, faithfully, and, at the same time,
most respectfully, to the old man. 'Human nature is lofty and
head-strong in you, and it will cost you far more suffering to be
mortified and sanctified than it costs the ordinary run of men.' And,
instead of that plain speech offending or angering the old laird, it had
the very opposite effect; it softened him, and humbled him, and
encouraged him, and gave him new strength for the hard task on which he
was day and night employed.

Cardoness was a small property, heavily bonded, and some of the leaves
that were hardest to read in the diary of Gordon's early manhood told the
bitter history of some added bonds. Sin would need to be sweet, for it
is very dear. And then had come years of rack-renting of his tenants;
the virtuous tenantry had to pay dearly for the vices of their lord.