Brainerd, ’were attended with evangelical humiliation, that is to say, with a deep sense of his own despicableness and odiousness, his ignorance, pride, vileness, and pollution.  He looked on himself as the least and the meanest of all saints, yea, very often as the vilest and worst of mankind.’  But let Rutherford and Brainerd and Edwards pour out their blackest vocabulary upon sin, and still sin goes and will go without its proper name.  Only let those Christian noblemen and gentlemen to whom Rutherford wrote, labour in their own hearts all their days for some sound and lively and piercing sense of this unspeakably evil thing, and they will know, as Rutherford wrote to William Gordon, that they have got to some sound and lively sense of sin when they feel that there is no one on earth or in hell that has such a sinful heart as they have.  The nearer to heaven you get, the nearer will you feel to hell, said Rutherford to young Earlston, till, all at once, the door will open over you, and, or ever you are aware, you will be for ever with Christ and the blessed; as it indeed was with William Gordon at the end.  For as he was on his way to join the Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge, he was shot by a gang of English dragoons and flung into a ditch.  Jesus Christ, says Rutherford, went suddenly home to His father’s house all over with his own blood, and it was surely enough for William Gordon that he went home like his Master.

XIII.  ROBERT GORDON OF KNOCKBREX

   ’A single-hearted and painful Christian, much employed in parliaments
   and public meetings after the year 1638.’—­Livingstone.

   ’Hall-binks are slippery.’—­Gordon to Rutherford.

Robert Gordon of Knockbrex, in his religious character, was a combination of Old Honest and Mr. Fearing in the Pilgrim’s Progress.  He was as single-hearted and straightforward as that worthy old gentleman was who early trysted one Good-Conscience to meet him and give him his hand over the river which has no bridge; and he was at the same time as troublesome to Samuel Rutherford, his minister and correspondent, as Greatheart’s most troublesome pilgrim was to him.  In two well-chosen words John Livingstone tells us the deep impression that the laird of Knockbrex made on the men of his day.  With a quite Scriptural insight and terseness of expression, Livingstone simply says that Robert Gordon was the most ‘single-hearted and painful’ of all the Christian men known to his widely-acquainted and clear-sighted biographer.

Now there may possibly be some need that the epithet ‘painful’ should be explained, as it is here applied to this good man, but everybody knows without any explanation what it is for any man to be ‘single-hearted.’  This was the fine character our Lord gave to Nathanael when He saluted him as an Israelite indeed in whom was no guile.  It is singleness of heart that so clears up the understanding