'Think it not easy.'--_Rutherford_.
What a lasting interest Samuel Rutherford's pastoral pen has given to the
hoary old castle of Cardoness! Those nine so heart-winning letters that
Rutherford wrote from Aberdeen to Cardoness Castle will still keep the
memory of that old tower green long after its last stone has crumbled
into dust. Readers of Rutherford's letters will long visit Cardoness
Castle, and will musingly recall old John Gordon and Lady Cardoness, his
wife, who both worked out each their own salvation in that old fortress,
and found it a task far from easy. For nine faithful years Rutherford
had been the anxious pastor of Cardoness Castle, and then, after he was
banished from his pulpit and his parish, he only ministered to the Castle
the more powerfully and prevailingly with his pen. After reading the
Cardoness correspondence, we do not wonder to find the stout old
chieftain heading the hard-fought battles which the people of Anwoth made
both against Edinburgh and St. Andrews, when those cities and colleges
attempted to take away their minister.
Rough old Cardoness had a warm place in his heart for Samuel Rutherford.
The tough old pagan did not know how much he loved the little fair man
with the high-set voice and the unearthly smile till he had lost him; and
if force of arms could have kept Rutherford in Anwoth, Cardoness would
soon have buckled on his sword. He was ashamed to be seen reading the
letters that came to the Castle from Aberdeen; he denied having read them
even after he had them all by heart. The wild old laird was nearer the
Kingdom of Heaven than any one knew; even his Christian lady did not know
all that Rutherford knew, and it was a frank sentence of Rutherford's in
an Aberdeen letter that took lifelong hold of the old laird, and did more
for his conversion and all that followed it than all Rutherford's sermons
and all his other letters. 'I find true religion to be a hard task; I
find heaven hard to be won,' wrote Rutherford to the old man; and that
did more for his hard and late salvation than all the sermons he had ever
heard. 'A hard task, a hard task!' the serving-men and the serving-women
often overheard their old master muttering, as he alighted from the hunt
and as he came home from his monthly visit to Edinburgh. 'A hard task!'
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.
Rutherford had not been silent to old Cardoness about this matter in
conversation, and he was not silent in his letters. 'You are now upon
the very borders of the other life. I told you, when I was with you, the
whole counsel of God in this matter, and I tell it you again. Awake to
righteousness. Do not lay the burden of your house on other people; do
not compel honest people to pay your old debts. Commit to memory 1 Sam.
xii. 3, and ride out among your tenantry, my dear people, repeating, as
you pass their stables and their cattle-stalls, "Behold, I am old and
grey-headed; behold, here I am: whose ox have I taken? Whose ass have I
taken? Whom have I defrauded? Whom have I oppressed?" I charge you to
write to me here at once, and be plain with me, and tell me whether your
salvation is sure. I hope for the best; but I know that your reckonings
with the righteous Judge are both many and deep.' That was a hard task
to set to a tyrannical old landlord who had been used to call no man
master, or God either, to take such commands from a poor banished
minister! But Cardoness did it. He mastered his rising pride and
resentment and did it; and though he found it a hard task to go through
with his reductions at next rent-day, yet he did it. Such boldness in
the Day of Judgment will a good conscience give a man, as when old
Cardoness actually stood up before the parishioners in the kirk of Anwoth
and read to them, after the elders had conducted the exercises, a letter
he had received last week from their silenced minister. It is one of
Rutherford's longest and most passionate letters. Take a sentence or two
out of it: 'My soul longeth exceedingly to hear whether there be any work
of Christ in the parish that will bide the trial of fire and water. I
think of my people in my sleep. You know how that, out of love to your
souls, and out of the desire I had to make an honest account of you, I
often testified my dislike of your ways, both in private and in public.
Examine yourselves. I never knew so well what sin is as since I came to
Aberdeen, though I was preaching about it every day to you. It would be
life to me if you would read this letter to my people, and if they would
profit by it. And now I write to thee, whoever thou art, O poor broken-
hearted believer of the free salvation. Let Christ's atoning blood be on
thy guilty soul. Christ has His heaven ready for thee, and He will make
good His word before long. The blessing of a poor prisoner be upon you.'
Salvation was all this time proving itself to be a hard and ever harder
task to John Gordon, with his proud neck, with his past life to read,
with his debts and bonds and increasing expenditure, and with old age
heavy upon him and death at his door. And Lady Cardoness was not finding
her salvation to be easy either in all these untoward circumstances.
'Think it not easy,' wrote Rutherford to her. And to make her salvation
sure, and to lead her to help her burdened husband with his hard task,
Rutherford made bold to touch, though always tenderly and scripturally,
upon the family cross. Their burdened and crowded estate lay between the
whole Cardoness family and their salvation. Rutherford had seen that
from the first day he arrived in Anwoth, and Cardoness and its
difficulties lay heavy upon his heart in his prison in Aberdeen. And he
could not write consolations and comforts and promises to Lady Cardoness
till he had told her the truth again as he had told her husband. 'The
kingdom of God and His righteousness is the one thing needful for you and
for Cardoness and for your children,' wrote Rutherford. 'Houses, lands,
credit, honour may all be lost if heaven is won. See that Cardoness and
you buy the field where the pearl is. Sell all and buy that field. I
beseech you to make conscience of your ways. Deal kindly with your
tenants. I have written my mind at length to your husband, and my
counsel to you is that, when his passion overcometh him, a soft answer
will turn away wrath. God casteth your husband often in my mind; I
cannot forget him.'
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
deliberate and bitter tears over. There are debts and many other
disorders that have to be put right; there are those under us--tenants
and servants and poor relations--whose cases have to be dealt with
considerately, justly, kindly, affectionately. There are things in those
we love best--in a father, in a mother, in a husband, in a wife--that we
have to be patient and forbearing with, and to command ourselves in the
presence of Salvation was not easy in Cardoness Castle, with such a
master, and such a mistress, and such children, and such tenants, and
with such debts and straits of all kinds; and Cardoness Castle is
repeated over and over again in hundreds of Edinburgh houses to-night.