Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 8.djvu/297

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THOMAS GRAHAM (Lord Lynedoch).
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back. I was not insensible to the taunts with which we were everywhere met—the taunt that, as honest men, we should leave the Establishment. It was very wearisome and fatiguing very exhausting, even for the ablest of our men, to be day after day defending us and themselves from that charge. It was still more painful, perhaps, for many like me, who had not the power nor the qualifications to make that defence, to be remaining in silence, and hearing ourselves treated as men rebellious against the powers that be. We were all conscious of the injustice of this charge; we had the mens conscia recti, and that was our consolation. Still these trials were severe. But I feel now that I am a free man. Nay, Sir, I am not only a free man, but I am entitled to say to my adversaries, who have twitted me so often with dishonesty and whatever they may think of the bearing with which I say it, I say it with a very humble heart, and full of gratitude to Almighty God I can say to them, I am an honest man. I have given what ought to satisfy you at least that I am an honest man; I have sacrificed my all, except the promise of my heavenly Father, who will bring me support for myself and my children, through the beneficence of his own people who have been turned from darkness to light."

This trust was not disappointed, and the remaining years of the life of Dr. Gordon were spent in domestic comfort, as well as public honour and usefulness. He threw himself into his new sphere of increased duties with all the ardour of his matured manhood, and the energy with which these were discharged showed little or no abatement of his former power. If any change indeed was preceptible, it was that his style of preaching betokened the purifying furnace of trial through which his mind had passed, for his sermons had an increase of apostolic simplicity and unction, which made his pulpit ministrations even more effective than before. His studies also were more exclusively confined to his pulpit ministrations ; and although he might have lightened these labours by accepting a colleague, he conscientiously persisted in encountering the same amount that fell to the lot of his younger brethren. His death, which occurred in Northumberland Street, Edinburgh, on the 21st of October, 1853, in the sixty-eighth year of his age, and thirty-eighth of his ministry, was occasioned by a stroke of paralysis.

Dr. Gordon was a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts; he was also one of her Majesty's master printers for Scotland. Besides the volume of sermons, and the articles in the "Encyclopedia Britannica" which we have mentioned, he published nothing; but from the care with which his discourses were written, a series of them have been deemed fit for the press, and are accordingly in course of publication, under the title of "Christ as made known to the Ancient Church," and will be comprised in four octavo volumes.

GRAHAM, Thomas, Lord Lynedoch. This venerable warrior was descended from a common ancestor with the Dukes of Montrose. He was the third son of Thomas Graham of Balgowan, in Perthshire, by Lady Christian Hope, fourth daughter of Charles, first Earl of Hopetoun, and was born A.D. 1750. He had thus reached his ninety-fourth year when he died, a period of life which few who have undergone the hardships and privations of trying campaigns are privileged to attain.

Nothing in the early course of Thomas Graham indicated that he would become not only a soldier, but a skilful and successful one. By the death of his two elder brothers he became the heir and representative of the family; and by his marriage with Mary Cathcart, daughter of the ninth Lord Cathcart, his