'A man of great spirit, but much subdued by inward exercise.'
Livingstone's _Characteristics_.
The Gordons of Airds and Earlston could set their family seal to the
truth of the promise that the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to
everlasting upon them that fear Him, and His righteousness to children's
children. For the life of grace entered the Gordon house three long
generations before it came to our Alexander of to-night, and it still
descended upon his son and his son's son. His great-grandfather,
Alexander Gordon also, was early nicknamed 'Strong Sandy,' on account of
his gigantic size and his Samson-like strength. While yet a young man,
happily for himself and for all his future children, as well as for the
whole of Galloway, Gordon had occasion to cross the English border on
some family business, to buy cattle or cutlery or what not, when he made
a purchase he had not intended to make when he set out. He brought home
with him a copy of Wycliffe's contraband New Testament, and from the day
he bought that interdicted book till the day of his death, Strong Sandy
Gordon never let his purchase out of his own hands. He carried his
Wycliffe about with him wherever he went, to kirk and to market; he would
as soon have thought of leaving his purse or his dirk behind him as his
Wycliffe, his bosom friend. And many were the Sabbath-days that the
laird of Earlston read his New Testament in the woods of Earlston to his
tenants and neighbours, the Testament in the one hand and the dirk in the
other. Tamed and softened as old Sandy Gordon became by that taming and
softening book, yet there were times when the old Samson still came to
the surface. As the Sabbath became more and more sanctified in Reformed
Scotland, the Saints' days of the Romish Calendar fell more and more into
open neglect, till the Romish clergy got an Act passed for the enforced
observance of all the fasts and festivals of the Romish Communion. One
of the enacted clauses forbade a plough to be yoked on Christmas Day, on
pain of the forfeiture and public sale of the cattle that drew the
plough. Old Earlston, at once to protest against the persecution, and at
the same time to save his draught-oxen, yoked ten of his stalwart sons to
the mid-winter plough, and, after ploughing the whole of Christmas Day,
openly defied both priest and bishop to distrain his team. Christmas
Day, whatever its claims and privileges might be, had no chance in
Scotland till it came with better reasons than the threat of a Popish
king and Parliament. The Patriarch of Galloway, as the south of Scotland
combined to call old Alexander Gordon of Earlston, lived to the ripe age
of over a hundred years, and we are told that he kept family worship
himself to the day of his death, holding his Wycliffe in his own hand,
and yielding it and his place at the family altar over to none.
But it is with the name-son and great-grandson of this sturdy old saint
that we have chiefly to do to-night. And I may say of him, to begin
with, that he was altogether worthy to inherit and to hand on the
tradition of family grace and truth that had begun so early and so
conspicuously with the head of the Earlston house. 'Alexander Gordon of
Earlston,' says John Livingstone, in one of his priceless little
etchings, 'was a man of great spirit, but much subdued by inward
exercise, and who attained the most rare experiences of downcasting and
uplifting.' And in Rutherford's first letter to this Earlston, written
from Anwoth in 1636, he says, in that lofty oracular way of his, 'Jesus
Christ has said that Alexander Gordon must lead the ring in Galloway in
witnessing a good conscience.' This, no doubt, refers to the prosecution
that Gordon was at that moment undergoing at the hands of the Bishop of
Glasgow for refusing to admit a nominee of the Bishop into the pulpit of
a reclaiming parish. It would have gone still worse with Earlston than
it did had not Lord Lorne, the true patron of the parish, taken his place
beside Earlston at the Bishop's bar, and testified his entire approval of
all that Earlston had done. With all that, the case did not end till
Earlston was banished beyond the Tay for his resistance to the will of
the Bishop of Glasgow. This all took place in the early half of the
seventeenth century, so that Dr. Robert Buchanan might with more
correctness have entitled his able book 'The Two Hundred Years' Conflict'
than 'The Ten,' so early was the battle for Non-Intrusion begun in
Galloway. Alexander Gordon was a Free Churchman 200 years before the
Disruption, and Lord Lorne was the forerunner of those evangelical and
constitutional noblemen and gentlemen in Scotland who helped so much to
carry through the Disruption of 1843. We find both Lord Lorne, and
Earlston his factor, sitting as elders beside one another in the Glasgow
Assembly of 1638, and then we find Earlston the member for Galloway in
the Parliament of 1641.
We do not know exactly on what occasion it was that Earlston refused to
accept the knighthood that was offered him by the Crown; but we seem to
hear the old Wycliffite come back again in his great-grandson as he said,
'No, your Majesty, excuse and pardon me; but no.' Alexander Gordon felt
that it would be an everlasting dishonour to him and to his house to let
his shoulder be touched in knighthood by a sword that was wet, and that
would soon be still more wet, with the best blood in Scotland. 'No, your
Majesty, no.'
Almost all that we are told about Earlston in the histories of his time
bears out the greatness of his spirit; that, and the stories that gives
rise to, take the eye of the ordinary historian; but good John
Livingstone, though not a great historian in other respects, is by far
the best historian of that day for our purpose. John Livingstone's
_Characteristics_ is a perfect gallery of spiritual portraits, and the
two or three strokes he gives to Alexander Gordon make him stand out
impressively and memorably to all who understand and care for the things
of the Spirit.
'A man of great spirit, but much subdued by inward exercise.' I do not
need to tell you what exercise is--at least bodily exercise. All that a
man does to draw out, develop, and healthfully occupy his bodily powers
in walking, riding, running, wrestling, carrying burdens, and leaping
over obstacles--all that is called bodily exercise, and some part of that
is absolutely necessary every day for the health of the body and for the
continuance and the increase of its strength. But we are not all body;
we are soul as well, and much more soul than body. Bodily exercise
profiteth little, says the Apostle,--compared, that is, with the exercise
of the soul, of the mind, and of the heart. Now, Alexander Gordon was
such an athlete of the heart that all who knew him saw well what exercise
he must have gone through before he was subdued in his high mind and
proud spirit to be so humble, so meek, so silent, so unselfish, and so
full of godliness and brotherly kindness--what a world of inward exercise
all that bespoke! Alexander Gordon's patience under wrong, his low
esteem of himself and of all he did, his miraculous power over himself in
the forgiveness of enemies and in the forgetfulness of injuries, his
contentment amid losses and disappointments, his silence when other men
were bursting to speak, and his openness to be told that when he did
speak he had spoken rashly, unadvisedly, and offensively--in all that
Earlston was a conspicuous example of what inward exercise carried on
with sufficient depth and through a sufficiently long life will do even
for a man of a hot temper and a proud heart. Alexander Gordon had, to
begin with, a large heart. A large heart was a family possession of the
Gordons; the fathers had it and the mothers had it; and whatever came and
went in the family estate, the Gordon heart was always entailed
unimpaired--increased indeed--upon 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?'
Earlston frightened into silence the Presbytery of Kirkcudbright on one
occasion also, when at their first meeting after he had spoken out so
bravely before the king and the Parliament, and they were to move him a
vote of thanks, he cried out: 'Fathers and brethren, the heart is
deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, and you do not know
it. For I had a deep, malicious, revengeful motive in my heart behind
all my fine and patriotic speeches in Parliament. I hated Montrose more
than I loved the freedom of the Kirk. Spare me, therefore, the sentence
of putting that act of shame on your books!' It was discoveries like
this that accumulated in John Livingstone's note-book till he blotted out
all his instances and left only the blessed result, 'Alexander Gordon, a
man of great spirit, but much subdued by inward exercise, and who was
visited with most rare experiences of downcasting and uplifting.' No
doubt, dear John Livingstone; we can well believe it. Too rare with us,
alas! but every day with your noble friend; every day and every night,
when he lay down and when he rose up. His very dreams often cast him
down all day after them; for he said, If my heart were not one of the
chambers of hell itself, such hateful things would not stalk about in it
when the watchman is asleep. Downcastings! downcastings! Yes, down to
such depths of self-discovery and self-detestation and self-despair as
compelled his Heavenly Master to give commandment that His prostrate
servant should be lifted up as few men on the earth have ever been lifted
up, or could bear to be. Yes; they were rare experiences both of
downcastings and of upliftings; when such downcastings and upliftings
become common the end of this world will have come, and with it the very
Kingdom of Heaven.
The last sight we see of Alexander Gordon in this world is after his
Master has given commandment that the last touch be put to His servant's
subdued and childlike humility. The old saint is sitting in his
grandfather's chair and his wife is feeding him like a weaned child. John
Livingstone tells that Mr. John Smith, a minister in Teviotdale, had all
the Psalms of David by heart, and that instead of a curtailed,
monotonous, and mechanical grace before meat he always repeated a whole
Psalm. Earlston must have remembered once dining in the Manse of Maxton
at a Communion time; for, as his tender-handed wife took her place beside
his chair to feed her helpless husband, he always lifted up his palsied
hand and always said to himself, to her, and above all, to God, the 131st
Psalm--
'As child of mother weaned; my soul
Is like a weaned child;'
till all the godly households in Galloway knew the 131st Psalm as
Alexander Gordon of Earlston's grace before meat.