and the judgment that, as our Lord said at another time, it fills a man’s whole soul with light.  And Paul gives it as the best character that a servant can bring to or carry away from his master’s house, that he is single-hearted and not an eye-servant in all that he says and does.  I keep near me on my desk a book called Roget’s Thesaurus, which is a rich treasure-house of the English language.  And though I thought I knew what Livingstone meant when he called Robert Gordon a single-hearted man, at the same time I felt sure that Roget would help me to see Gordon better.  And so he did.  For when I had opened his book at the word ‘single-hearted,’ he at once told me that Knockbrex was an open, frank, natural, straightforward, altogether trustworthy man.  He was above-board, outspoken, downright, blunt even, and bald, always calling a spade a spade.  And with each new synonym Robert Gordon’s honest portrait stood out clearer and clearer before me, till I thought I saw him, and wished much that we had more single-hearted men like him in the public and the private life of our day.

And then, as to his ‘painfulness,’ we have that so well expounded and illustrated in John Bunyan’s Mr. Fearing, that all I need to do is to recall that inimitable character to your happy memory.  ’He was a man that had the root of the matter in him, but at the same time he was the most troublesome pilgrim that ever I met with in all my days.  He lay roaring at the Slough of Despond for above a month together.  He would not go back neither.  The Celestial City, he said he should die if he came not to it, and yet was dejected at every difficulty and stumbled at every straw.  He had, I think, a Slough of Despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him, or else he could never have been as he was.’  Yes, both Mr. Fearing and the laird of Knockbrex were painful Christians.  That is to say, they took pains, special and exceptional pains, with the salvation of their own souls.  They took their religion with tremendous earnestness.  They would have pleased Paul had they lived in his day, for they both worked out their own salvation with fear and trembling.  They looked on sin and death and hell with absorbing and overwhelming solemnity, and they set themselves with all their might to escape from these direst of evils.  Pardon of sin, peace with God, a clean heart and a Christian character, all these things were their daily prayer; for these things they wrestled many a night like Jacob at the Jabbok.  The day of death, the day of judgment, heaven and hell—­these things were more present with them than the things they saw and handled every day.  And this was why they were such troublesome pilgrims.  This was why they sometimes stumbled at what their neighbours called a straw; and this was why they feared neither king nor bishop, man nor devil, they feared God and sin and death and hell so much.  This was why, while all other men were so full of torpid assurance,