se of the English
language. And though I thought I knew what Livingstone meant when he
called Robert Gordon a single-hearted man, at the same time I felt sure
that Roget would help me to see Gordon better. And so he did. For when
I had opened his book at the word 'single-hearted,' he at once told me
that Knockbrex was an open, frank, natural, straightforward, altogether
trustworthy man. He was above-board, outspoken, downright, blunt even,
and bald, always calling a spade a spade. And with each new synonym
Robert Gordon's honest portrait stood out clearer and clearer before me,
till I thought I saw him, and wished much that we had more single-hearted
men like him in the public and the private life of our day.

And then, as to his 'painfulness,' we have that so well expounded and
illustrated in John Bunyan's Mr. Fearing, that all I need to do is to
recall that inimitable character to your happy memory. 'He was a man
that had the root of the matter in him, but at the same time he was the
most troublesome pilgrim that ever I met with in all my days. He lay
roaring at the Slough of Despond for above a month together. He would
not go back neither. The Celestial City, he said he should die if he
came not to it, and yet was dejected at every difficulty and stumbled at
every straw. He had, I think, a Slough of Despond in his mind, a slough
that he carried everywhere with him, or else he could never have been as
he was.' Yes, both Mr. Fearing and the laird of Knockbrex were painful
Christians. That is to say, they took pains, special and exceptional
pains, with the salvation of their own souls. They took their religion
with tremendous earnestness. They would have pleased Paul had they lived
in his day, for they both worked out their own salvation with fear and
trembling. They looked on sin and death and hell with absorbing and
overwhelming solemnity, and they set themselves with all their might to
escape from these direst of evils. Pardon of sin, peace with God, a
clean heart and a Christian character, all these things were their daily
prayer; for these things they wrestled many a night like Jacob at the
Jabbok. The day of death, the day of judgment, heaven and hell--these
things were more present with them than the things they saw and handled
every day. And this was why they were such troublesome pilgrims. This
was why they sometimes stumbled at what their neighbours called a straw;
and this was why they feare