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 causes of
their respective days. As Rutherford also says, the truth kept the
causey in the south-west of Scotland largely through the intelligence,
the courage, and the true piety of the Gordon house.

While still living at home and assisting his father in his farms and
factorships, young Earlston was already one of Rutherford's most intimate
correspondents. In a kind of reflex way we see what kind of head and
heart and character young Earlston must already have had from the letters
that Rutherford wrote to him. If we are to judge of the character and
attainments and intelligence of Rutherford's correspondents by the
letters he wrote to them, then I should say that William Gordon of
Earlston must have been a remarkable man very early in life, both in the
understanding and the experience of divine things. One of the Aberdeen
letters especially, numbered 181 in Dr. Andrew Bonar's edition, for
intellectual power, inwardness, and eloquence stands almost if not
altogether at the head of all the 365 letters we have from Rutherford's
pen. He never wrote an abler or a better letter than that he wrote to
William Gordon the younger of Earlston on the 16th of June 1637. Not
James Durham, not George Gillespie, not David Dickson themselves ever got