For a moment, as guests scrambled madly for the safety of the shore, the faces and bonnets of the laird’s family were glimpsed in the icy, tumbled water. But when they looked back from the snowy brink the loch was empty, save for the shattered grey ice and the remnants of the feast.
The entire estate fell to the single surviving daughter – one of those so contemptuously dismissed by the laird. Several years later, when the girl had grown into an attractive young woman, she married a man named McCulloh. Thus it was that the splendid castle and rich lands of Cardoness came into the hands of that great Galloway family.
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While writing this article I was delighted to discover two sermons delivered in 1894 by Alexander Whyte in Edinburgh, Scotland. These sermons refer to the puritan preacher Samuel Rutherford who ministered to the castle's owners, John Gordon and his wife Lady Cardoness, in the mid 1600's. They are well worth reading and give us another glimpse into the history of Cardoness Castle.
LADY CARDONESS
A Sermon by Alexander Whyte
'Think it not easy'—Samuel 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 life-long 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.
