-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 t