is rich and fruitful, and, under good management, it brings forth by handfuls.  The very shepherd boys here live a merry life, and wear more of the herb called heart’s-ease in their bosoms than he that is clad in silk and velvet.  What a rich inheritance to the right heir is the old estate of Knockbrex!  What an opportunity, and what an education, it must be to tenant Knockbrex with recollection, with understanding, and with sympathy even for a season.

Robert Gordon would very willingly have remained behind the screen all his days.  He would very willingly have given himself up to the care of his estate, to the upbringing of his children, and to the working out of his own salvation, but such a man as he now was could not be hid.  The stone that is fit for the wall is not let lie in the ditch.  We have a valuable letter of Rutherford’s addressed to Marion M’Naught about the impending election of a commissioner for Parliament for the town of Kirkcudbright.  In that letter he urges her to try to get her husband, William Fullarton, to stand for the vacant seat.  ’It is an honourable and necessary service,’ he says.  And speaking of one of the candidates, he further says:  ’I fear he has neither the skill nor the authority for the post.’  Now, it was either at this election, or it was at the next election, that an influential deputation of the gentry and burgesses and ministers and elders of the district waited on Robert Gordon to get him to stand for one of the vacant seats in Galloway; and once he was chosen and had shown himself to the world he was never let return again to his home occupations.  ‘He was much employed in those years,’ says Livingstone, ‘in parliaments and public meetings.’

There are some good men among us who think that the world is so bad that it is fit for nothing but to be abandoned to the devil and his angels altogether, and that a genuine man of God is too good to be made a member of Parliament or to be much seen on the platforms of public meetings.  Such was not Samuel Rutherford’s judgment, as will be seen in his 36th Letter.  And such was not Robert Gordon’s judgment, when he left the woods and fields of Knockbrex and gave himself wholly up to the politics of his entangled and distressful day.  What he would have said to the summons had the marches been already redd between Lex and Rex, and had the affairs of the Church of Christ not been still too much mixed up with the affairs of the State, I do not know.  Only, as long as the Crown and the Parliament had their hands so deeply in the things of the Church, Knockbrex was not hard to persuade to go to Parliament to watch over interests that were dearer to him than life, or family, or estate.  Robert Gordon carried the old family brow with him into all the debates and dangers of that day; and he added to all that a singleness of heart and a painstaking mind all his own.  And it was no wonder that such a man was much in demand at such a time.  In