his own salvation, but such a man as he now was could not be hid. The
stone that is fit for the wall is not let lie in the ditch. We have a
valuable letter of Rutherford's addressed to Marion M'Naught about the
impending election of a commissioner for Parliament for the town of
Kirkcudbright. In that letter he urges her to try to get her husband,
William Fullarton, to stand for the vacant seat. 'It is an honourable
and necessary service,' he says. And speaking of one of the candidates,
he further says: 'I fear he has neither the skill nor the authority for
the post.' Now, it was either at this election, or it was at the next
election, that an influential deputation of the gentry and burgesses and
ministers and elders of the district waited on Robert Gordon to get him
to stand for one of the vacant seats in Galloway; and once he was chosen
and had shown himself to the world he was never let return again to his
home occupations. 'He was much employed in those years,' says
Livingstone, 'in parliaments and public meetings.'

There are some good men among us who think that the world is so bad that
it is fit for nothing but to be abandoned to the devil and his angels
altogether, and that a genuine man of God is too good to be made a member
of Parliament or to be much seen on the platforms of public meetings.
Such was not Samuel Rutherford's judgment, as will be seen in his 36th
Letter. And such was not Robert Gordon's judgment, when he left the
woods and fields of Knockbrex and gave himself wholly up to the politics
of his entangled and distressful day. What he would have said to the
summons had the marches been already redd between Lex and Rex, and had
the affairs of the Church of Christ not been still too much mixed up with
the affairs of the State, I do not know. Only, as long as the Crown and
the Parliament had their hands so deeply in the things of the Church,
Knockbrex was not hard to persuade to go to Parliament to watch over
interests that were dearer to him than life, or family, or estate. Robert