at the eleventh hour shall always find mercy, and so it was with Lord Kenmure.

‘Between the stirrup and the ground
Mercy I sought and mercy found.’

We do not grudge Viscount Kenmure all the grace

he got from God; we shall need as much grace and more ourselves; but we do somewhat grudge such a man a place of honour among the Scots worthies.  We are tempted to throw down the book and to demand what right John Gordon has to stand beside such men as Patrick Hamilton, and John Knox, and John Wishart, and Archibald Campbell, and Hugh M’Kail, and Richard Cameron, and Alexander Shields?  But Lochgoin answers us that God sometimes accepts the late will for the whole timeous deed, and the bravery and loyalty of the wife for the meanness and poltroonery of the husband.  ‘Have you a present sense of God’s love?’  ‘I have, I have,’ said the dying Viscount.  As Rutherford continued in prayer, Kenmure was observed to smile and look upwards.  About sunset Lord Kenmure died, at the same instant that Rutherford said Amen to his prayer.  The Last and Heavenly Speeches is a rare pamphlet that will well repay its price to him who will seek it out and read it.

This was the correspondent, then, to whom Samuel Rutherford wrote such counsels and encouragements as these: ‘Therefore, madam, herein have comfort, that He who seeth perfectly through all your evils, and who knoweth the frame and constitution of your nature, and what is most healthful for your soul, holdeth every cup of affliction to your head with his own gracious hand.  Never believe that your tender-hearted Saviour will mix your cup with one drachm-weight of poison.  Drink, then, with the patience of the saints: wrestle, fight, go forward, watch, fear, believe, pray, and then you have all the infallible symptoms of one of the elect of Christ

within you’ (Letter iii.).  On the death of her infant daughter, Rutherford writes to the elect lady: ‘She is only sent on before, like unto a star, which, going out of our sight, doth not die and vanish, but still shineth in another hemisphere.  What she wanted of time she hath gotten of eternity, and you have now some plenishing up in heaven.  Build your nest upon no tree here, for God hath sold the whole forest to death’ (Letter iv.).  ‘Madam, when you are come to the other side of the water and have set down your foot on the shore of glorious eternity, and look back to the water and to your wearisome journey, and shall see in that clear glass of endless glory nearer to the bottom of God’s wisdom, you shall then be forced to say, “If God had done otherwise with me than He hath done, I had never come to the enjoying of this crown of glory”’ (Letter xl).  ‘Madam, tire not, weary not; for I dare find you the Son of God caution that when you are got up thither and have cast your eyes to view the golden city and the fair and never-withering Tree of Life that beareth twelve manner of fruits every month, you shall then say, “Four-and-twenty hours’ abode in this place is worth threescore and ten years’ sorrow upon earth”’ (Letter xix.).  ‘Your ladyship goeth on laughing and putting on a good countenance before the world, and yet you carry heaviness about with you.  You do well, madam, not to make them witnesses of your grief who cannot be curers of it’ (Letter xx.).  ‘Those who can take the crabbed tree of the cross handsomely upon their backs and fasten it on cannily shall find it such a burden as its wings are to a bird or its sails to a ship’ (Letter lxix.).  ‘I thought it had been an easy thing

to be a Christian, and that to seek God had been at the next door; but, oh, the windings, the turnings, the ups and downs He hath led me through!’ (Letter civ.)  ‘I may be a book-man and yet be an idiot and a stark fool in Christ’s way!  The Bible beguiled the Pharisees, and so may I be misled’ (Letter cvi.).  ‘I find you complaining of yourself, and it becometh a sinner so to do.  I am not against you in that.  The more sense the more life.  The more sense of sin the less sin’ (Letter cvi.).  ‘Seeing my sins and the sins of my youth deserved strokes, how am I obliged to my Lord who hath given me a waled and chosen cross!  Since I must have chains, He would put golden chains on me, watered over with many consolations.  Seeing I must have sorrow (for I have sinned, O Preserver of men!), He hath waled out for me joyful sorrow—honest, spiritual, glorious sorrow’ (Letter ccvi.).  There are hundreds of passages as good as these scattered up and down the forty-seven letters we have had preserved to us out of the large and intimate correspondence that passed between Samuel Rutherford and Lady Kenmure.

V.  LADY CARDONESS

‘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