But it is with the name-son and great-grandson of this sturdy old saint that we have chiefly to do to-night. And I may say of him, to begin with, that he was altogether worthy to inherit and to hand on the tradition of family grace and truth that had begun so early and so conspicuously with the head of the Earlston house. 'Alexander Gordon of Earlston,' says John Livingstone, in one of his priceless little etchings, 'was a man of great spirit, but much subdued by inward exercise, and who attained the most rare experiences of downcasting and uplifting.' And in Rutherford's first letter to this Earlston, written from Anwoth in 1636, he says, in that lofty oracular way of his, 'Jesus Christ has said that Alexander Gordon must lead the ring in Galloway in witnessing a good conscience.' This, no doubt, refers to the prosecution that Gordon was at that moment undergoing at the hands of the Bishop of Glasgow for refusing to admit a nominee of the Bishop into the pulpit of a reclaiming parish. It would have gone still worse with Earlston than it did had not Lord Lorne, the true patron of the parish, taken his place beside Earlston at the Bishop's bar, and testified his entire approval of all that Earlston had done. With all that, the case did not end till Earlston was banished beyond the Tay for his resistance to the will of the Bishop of Glasgow. This all took place in the early half of the seventeenth century, so that Dr. Robert Buchanan might with more correctness have entitled his able book 'The Two Hundred Years' Conflict' than 'The Ten,' so early was the battle for Non-Intrusion begun in Galloway. Alexander Gordon was a Free Churchman 200 years before the Disruption, and Lord Lorne was the forerunner of those evangelical and constitutional noblemen and gentlemen in Scotland who helped so much to carry through the Disruption of 1843. We find both Lord Lorne, and Earlston his factor, sitting as elders beside one another in the Glasgow Assembly of 1638, and then we find Earlston the member for Galloway in the Parliament of 1641. We do not know exactly on what occasion it was that Earlston refused to accept the knighthood that was offered him by the Crown; but we seem to hear the old Wycliffite come back again in his great-grandson as he said, 'No, your Majesty, excuse and pardon me; but no.' Alexander Gordon felt that it would be an everlasting dishonour to him and to his house to let his shoulder be touched in knighthood by a sword that was wet, and that would soon be still more wet, with the best blood in Scotland. 'No, your Majesty, no.'