h 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.

XII. EARLSTON THE YOUNGER

'A renowned Gordon, a patriot, a good Christian, a confessor, and, I
may add, a martyr of Jesus Christ.'--Livingstone's _Characteristics_.

Thomas Boston in his most interesting autobiography tells us about one of
his elders who, though a poor man, had always 'a brow for a good cause.'
Now nothing could better describe the Gordons of Earlston than just that
saying. For old Alexander Gordon, the founder of the family, lifted up
his brow for the cause of the Bible and the Sabbath-day when his brow was
as yet alone in the whole of Galloway; his great-grandson Alexander also
lifted up his brow in his day for the liberty of public worship and the
freedom of the courts and congregations of the Church of Scotland, and
paid heavily for his courage; and his son William, of whom we are to
speak to-night, showed the same brow to the end. The Gordons, as John
Howie says, have all along made no small figure in our best Scottish
history, and that because they had always a brow for the best cause