the children. And after some generations of
true religion, inwardly and deeply exercising the Gordon
heart, it almost came as a second nature to our Gordon
to take to heart all that happened to him, and to
exercise his large and deep heart yet more thoroughly
with it. The affairs of the family, the affairs
of the estate, the affairs of the Church, his duties
as a landlord, a farmer, a heritor, and a factor,
and the persecutions and sufferings that all these
things brought upon him, some of which we know—all
that found its way into Earlston’s wide and
deep and still unsanctified heart. And then,
there is a law and a provision in the life of grace
that all those men come to discover who live before
God as Earlston lived, a provision that secures to
such men’s souls a depth, and an inwardness,
and an increasing exercise that carries them on to
reaches of inward sanctification that the ruck and
run of so-called Christians know nothing about, and
are incapable of knowing.
Such men as Earlston, while the daily rush of outward
things is let in deeply into their hearts, are not
restricted to these things for the fulness of their
inward exercise; their own hearts, though there were
no outward world at all, would sufficiently exercise
them to all the gifts and graces and attainments of
the profoundest spiritual life. For one thing,
when once Earlston had begun to keep watch over his
own heart in the matter of its motives—it
was David Dickson, one fast-day at Irvine, on 1 Sam.
ii., who first taught Gordon to watch his motives—from
that day Rutherford and Livingstone, and all his family,
and all his fellow-elders saw a change in their friend
that almost frightened them. There was after
that such a far-off tone in his letters, and such a
far-off look in his eyes, and such a far-off sound
in his voice as they all felt must have come from
some great, and, to them, mysterious advance in his
spiritual life; but he never told even his son William
what it was that had of late so softened and quieted
his proud and stormy heart. But, all the time,
it was his motives. The baseness of his motives
even when he did what it was but his duty and his
praise to do, that quite killed Earlston every day.
The loathsomeness of a heart that hid such motives
in its unguessed depths made him often weep in the
woods which his grandfather had sanctified by his
Bible readings a century before. Rutherford saw
with the glance of genius what was going on in his
friend’s heart, when, in one letter, not referring
to himself at all, Earlston suddenly said, ’If
Lucifer himself would but look deep enough and long
enough into his own heart, the sight of it would make
him a little child.’ ‘Did not I
say,’ burst out Rutherford, as he read, ’that
Alexander Gordon would lead the ring in Galloway?’
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