written the as yet unbaptized name of this new-born child.  And under his name was found written all that John Gordon was appointed and expected to do while his sand-glass was still running.  His opening life as child and boy and man in Galloway; his entrance on Rusco; his friendship with Samuel Rutherford; his duties to his family, to his tenants, to his Church, and to the Scottish Covenant; the inward life he was commanded and expected to live alone with God; the seven things he was every day to remember; the evangelical graces of heart and life and character he was to be told and to be enabled to put on; the death he was to die, and the ‘freehold’ he was after all these things to enter on in heaven.  And it is of that sand-glass that was at that moment running so fast and so low within the veil that Rutherford writes so often and so earnestly to the so-forgetful laird of Rusco.  And how solemnising it is, if anything would solemnise our hard hearts, that we all have a sand-glass standing before God with our names written upon it, and that it is running out before God day and night unceasingly.  We shall all be too suddenly solemnised when the last grain of our measured-out sand has dropped down, and the blind Fury will come, and without pity and without remorse will slit our thin-spun life with her abhorred shears.  And that whether our life-work is finished or no, half-finished or no, or not even begun.  The night cometh, and the shears with it, when no man can work.  Our family must then be left behind us, however they have been brought up; our farm also, however it has been worked; our estate also, however it has been managed; our pulpit, our pew, our church, our character, and even our salvation, and we must, all alone with God, face and account for the empty sand-glass and the accusing book.  Is it any wonder that John Gordon’s minister, when he was in the spirit in Patmos, should write him as we here read?  What kind of a minister would he have been, and what a sand-glass, and what a book of angry account he would have had soon to face himself, if he had let all his people in Anwoth live on and suddenly die in total forgetfulness of the sand and the shears, the book of duty and the book of judgment.  ‘Remember,’ Rutherford wrote, ’remember and misspend not your short sand-glass, for your forenoon is already spent, your afternoon has come, and your night will be on you when you will not see to work.  Let your heart, therefore, be set upon finishing your journey and summing up and laying out the accounts of your life and the grounds of your death alone before God.’

7.  And, above all, remember that after you have done all, it is the blood of Christ alone that will set you down safely as a freeholder in Heaven.  But His blood, and your everyday remembrance of His blood, and your everyday obligation to it, will surely set you, John Gordon of Rusco on earth, so down a freeholder in heaven.