Robert Gordon would very willingly have remained behind the screen all his days. He would very willingly have given himself up to the care of his estate, to the upbringing of his children, and to the working out of 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 Gordon carried the old family brow with him into all the debates and dangers of that day; and he added to all that a singleness of heart and a painstaking mind all his own. And it was no wonder that such a man was much in demand at such a time. In our own far happier time what a mark does a member of Parliament still make, or a speaker at public meetings, who is seen to be single in his heart, and is at constant pains with himself and with all his duties. It is at bottom our doubleness of heart and our lack of sufficient pains with ourselves and with the things of truth and righteousness that so divide us up into bitter factions, hateful and hating one another. And when all our public men are like Robert Gordon in the singleness of their aims and their motives, and when they are at their utmost pains to get at the truth about all the subjects they are called to deal with, party, if not parliamentary government, with all its vices and mischiefs, will have passed away, and the absolute Monarchy of the Kingdom of Heaven will have come.
So much, then, is told us of Robert Gordon in few words: 'A single-hearted and painful Christian, much employed in parliaments and public meetings.' To which may be added this extract taken out of the Minute Book of the Covenanters' War Committee: 'The same day there was delyverit to the said commissioners by Robert Gordoun of Knockbrax sex silver spoones Scots worke, weightan vi. unce xii. dropes.' Had Knockbrex also, like the Earlstons, been fined by the bishops and harried by the dragoons till he had nothing left to deliver to the Commissioners but six silver spoons and a single heart? It would seem so. Like the woman in the Gospel, Gordon gave to the Covenant all that he had. Had Robert Gordon been a Highlander instead of a Lowlander; had he been a Ross-shire crofter instead of a small laird in Wigtown, he would have been one of the foremost of the well-known 'men.' His temperament and his experiences would have made him a prince among the ministers and the men of the far north. Were it nothing else, the pains he spent on the growth of the life of grace in his own soul,--that would have canonised him among the saintliest of those saintly men. He would have set the Question on many a Communion Friday, and the Question in his hands would not have concerned itself with surface matters. Was it because Rutherford had now gone nearer that great region of experimental casuistry that he started that excellent Friday problem in a letter from Aberdeen to Knockbrex in 1637? With Rutherford everything,--the most doctrinal, experimental, ecclesiastical, political, all--ran always up into Christ, His love and His loveableness. 'Is Christ more to be loved for gaining for us justification or sanctification?' Such was one of the questions Rutherford set to his correspondent in the south. Did any of you north-country folk ever hear that question debated out before one of your Highland communions? If you care to see how Rutherford the minister and Knockbrex the man debated out their debt to Jesus Christ, read the priceless correspondence that passed between them, and especially, read the 170th Letter. But first, and before that, do you either know, or care to know, what either justification or sanctification is? When you do know and do care for these supreme things, then you too will in time become a single-hearted and painstaking Christian like Robert Gordon, or else an ecstatic and enraptured Christian like Samuel Rutherford. And that again will be very much according to your natural temperament, your attainments, and your experiences. And nothing in this world will thereafter interest and occupy you half so much as just those questions that are connected first with all that Christ is in Himself and all that He has done for you, and then with the signs and the fruits of the life of grace in your own souls.