r 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