What a power for good is in Samuel Rutherford's pen! At a few touches it
carries us across Scotland to the mouth of the Fleet, and back two
hundred and fifty years, and summons up Cardoness Castle, and peoples the
hoary old keep again with John Gordon and his wife and children. We see
the castle; we see the rack-rented farms lying around the rock on which
the castle stands; we see Anwoth manse and pulpit empty and silenced; and
then we see Rutherford dreaming about Cardoness as he sleeps in his far-
off prison. The stout old laird rises before our eyes with more than his
proper share of human nature--a mass of sinful manhood, strong in will,
hot in temper, burdened with debt--debt in Edinburgh, and a deeper and
darker debt elsewhere. The old lion lay, taken in a net of trouble, and
the more he struggled the more entangled he became. And then her
ladyship, a religious woman; yes, really a religious woman, only, like so
many religious women, more religious than moral; more emotional than
practically helpful in everyday life. All who have only heard of Samuel
Rutherford and his letters will feel sure that he was just the effusive
minister, and that his letters were just the soft stuff, to foster a
piety that came out in feminine moods and emotions rather than in well-
kept accounts and a well-managed kitchen and nursery. But we who have
read Rutherford know better than that. Lady Cardoness is told, in
kindest and sweetest but most unmistakable language, that she has to work
out a not easy salvation in Cardoness Castle, and that, if her husband
fails in his hard task, no small part of his blood will lie at her door.

But as we stand and look at Cardoness Castle, with its hard tasks for
eternal life, a divine voice says to ourselves, Work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling; and at that voice the old keep fades
from our eyes, and our own house in modern Edinburgh rises up before us.
Here, too, are old men with hard tasks between them and their salvation--a
past life to read, to repent of, to redress, to reform, to weep