we have said that it was good
for us to be sore afflicted; but not even the assurance that we have
children in heaven has, all at once, set our affections there, or made us
meet for entrance there. We feel it like a heavy blow on the heart, it
makes us reel as if we had been struck in the face, to come upon a
passage like this in a not-long-after letter to little Barbara Gordon's
father: 'Ask yourself when next setting out to a night's drinking: What
if my doom came to-night? What if I were given over to God's sergeants
to-night, to the devil and to the second death?' And with the same post
Rutherford wrote to William Dalgleish telling him that if young Cardoness
came to see him he was to do his very best to direct and guide him in his
new religious life. But Rutherford could not roll the care of young
Cardoness over upon any other minister's shoulders; and thus it is that
we have the long practical and powerful letter from which the text is
taken: 'Put off a sin or a piece of a sin every day.'

Old Cardoness had been a passionate man all his days; he was an old man
before he began to curb his passionate heart; and long after he was
really a man of God, the devil easily carried him captive with his
besetting sin. He bit his tongue till it bled as often as he recollected
the shameful day when he swore at his minister in the rack-renting
dispute. And he never rode past Kirkdale Church without sinning again as
he plunged the rowels into his mare's unoffending sides. Cardoness did
not read Dante, else he would have said to himself that his anger often
filled his heart with hell's dunnest gloom. The old Castle was never
well lighted; but, with a father and a son in it like Cardoness and his
heir, it was sometimes like the Stygian pool itself. Rutherford had need
to write to her ladyship to have a soft answer always ready between such
a father and such a son. If you have the Inferno at hand, and will read
what it says about the Fifth Circle, you will see what went on sometimes
in that debt-drained and exasperated house. Rutherford was far away from
Cardoness Castle, but he had memory enough and imagination enough to see
what went on there as often as fresh provocation arose; and therefore he
writes to young Gordon to put off a piece of his fiery anger every day.
'Let no complaining tenants, let no insulting letter, let no stupid or
disobedient servant, let no sudden outburst of your father, let no
peevish complaint