hell-deservingness, its hell-alreadyness. 'All his religious
illuminations, affections, and comforts,' says Jonathan Edwards of David
Brainerd, 'were attended with evangelical humiliation, that is to say,
with a deep sense of his own despicableness and odiousness, his
ignorance, pride, vileness, and pollution. He looked on himself as the
least and the meanest of all saints, yea, very often as the vilest and
worst of mankind.' But let Rutherford and Brainerd and Edwards pour out
their blackest vocabulary upon sin, and still sin goes and will go
without its proper name. Only let those Christian noblemen and gentlemen
to whom Rutherford wrote, labour in their own hearts all their days for
some sound and lively and piercing sense of this unspeakably evil thing,
and they will know, as Rutherford wrote to William Gordon, that they have
got to some sound and lively sense of sin when they feel that there is no
one on earth or in hell that has such a sinful heart as they have. The
nearer to heaven you get, the nearer will you feel to hell, said
Rutherford to young Earlston, till, all at once, the door will open over
you, and, or ever you are aware, you will be for ever with Christ and the
blessed; as it indeed was with William Gordon at the end. For as he was
on his way to join the Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge, he was shot by a
gang of English dragoons and flung into a ditch. Jesus Christ, says
Rutherford, went suddenly home to His father's house all over with his
own blood, and it was surely enough for William Gordon that he went home
like his Master.




XIII. ROBERT GORDON OF KNOCKBREX