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,