Bunyan Characters (1st Series)
by Alexander Whyte · English · Gutenberg #1885 · 450,317 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Bunyan Characters (1st Series)
Author: Alexander Whyte
Release date: September 1, 1999 [eBook #1885]
Most recently updated: December 31, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1885
Credits: Transcribed from the 1893 Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BUNYAN CHARACTERS (1ST SERIES) ***
Transcribed from the 1893 Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
BUNYAN CHARACTERS: FIRST SERIES
BEING LECTURES DELIVERED IN ST. GEORGE'S FREE CHURCH EDINBURGH
BY ALEXANDER WHYTE, D.D.
INTRODUCTORY
'The express image' [Gr. 'the character'].--Heb. 1. 3.
The word 'character' occurs only once in the New Testament, and that is
in the passage in the prologue of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the
original word is translated 'express image' in our version. Our Lord is
the Express Image of the Invisible Father. No man hath seen God at any
time. The only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath
declared Him. The Father hath sealed His divine image upon His Son, so
that he that hath seen the Son hath seen the Father. The Son is thus the
Father's character stamped upon and set forth in human nature. The Word
was made flesh. This is the highest and best use to which our so
expressive word 'character' has ever been put, and the use to which it is
put when we speak of Bunyan's Characters partakes of the same high sense
and usage. For it is of the outstanding good or evil in a man that we
think when we speak of his character. It is really either of his
likeness or unlikeness to Jesus Christ we speak, and then, through Him,
his likeness or unlikeness to God Himself. And thus it is that the
adjective 'moral' usually accompanies our word 'character'--moral or
immoral. A man's character does not have its seat or source in his body;
character is not a physical thing: not even in his mind; it is not an
intellectual thing. Character comes up out of the will and out of the
heart. There are more good minds, as we say, in the world than there are
good hearts. There are more clever people than good people;
character,--high, spotless, saintly character,--is a far rarer thing in
this world than talent or even genius. Character is an infinitely better
thing than either of these, and it is of corresponding rarity. And yet
so true is it that the world loves its own, that all men worship talent,
and even bodily strength and bodily beauty, while only one here and one
there either understands or values or pursues moral character, though it
is the strength and the beauty and the sweetness of the soul.
We naturally turn to Bishop Butler when we think of moral character.
Butler is an author who has drawn no characters of his own. Butler's
genius was not creative like Shakespeare's or Bunyan's. Butler had not
that splendid imagination which those two masters in character-painting
possessed, but he had very great gifts of his own, and he has done us
very great service by means of his gifts. Bishop Butler has helped many
men in the intelligent formation of their character, and what higher
praise could be given to any author? Butler will lie on our table all
winter beside Bunyan; the bishop beside the tinker, the philosopher
beside the poet, the moralist beside the evangelical minister.
In seeking a solid bottom for our subject, then, we naturally turn to
Butler. Bunyan will people the house for us once it is built, but Butler
lays bare for us the naked rock on which men like Bunyan build and
beautify and people the dwelling-place of God and man. What exactly is
this thing, character, we hear so much about? we ask the sagacious
bishop. And how shall we understand our own character so as to form it
well till it stands firm and endures? 'Character,' answers Butler, in
his bald, dry, deep way, 'by character is meant that temper, taste,
disposition, whole frame of mind from whence we act in one way rather
than another . . . those principles from which a man acts, when they
become fixed and habitual in him we call his character . . . And
consequently there is a far greater variety in men's characters than
there is in the features of their faces.' Open Bunyan now, with Butler's
keywords in your mind, and see the various tempers, tastes, dispositions,
frames of mind from which his various characters act, and which, at
bottom, really make them the characters, good or bad, which they are. See
the principles which Bunyan has with such inimitable felicity embodied
and exhibited in their names, the principles within them from which they
have acted till they have become a habit and then a character, that
character which they themselves are and will remain. See the variety of
John Bunyan's characters, a richer and a more endless variety than are
the features of their faces. Christian and Christiana, Obstinate and
Pliable, Mr. Fearing and Mr. Feeblemind, Temporary and Talkative, Mr. By-
ends and Mr. Facing-both-ways, Simple, Sloth, Presumption, that brisk lad
Ignorance, and the genuine Mr. Brisk himself. And then Captain Boasting,
Mr. High-mind, Mr. Wet-Eyes, and so on, through a less known (but equally
well worth knowing) company of municipal and military characters in the
_Holy War_.
We shall see, as we proceed, how this and that character in Bunyan was
formed and deformed. But let us ask in this introductory lecture if we
can find out any law or principle upon which all our own characters, good
or bad, are formed. Do our characters come to be what they are by
chance, or have we anything to do in the formation of our own characters,
and if so, in what way? And here, again, Butler steps forward at our
call with his key to our own and to all Bunyan's characters in his hand,
and in three familiar and fruitful words he answers our question and
gives us food for thought and solemn reflection for a lifetime. There
are but three steps, says Butler, from earth to heaven, or, if you will,
from earth to hell--acts, habits, character. All Butler's prophetic
burden is bound up in these three great words--acts, habits, character.
Remember and ponder these three words, and you will in due time become a
moral philosopher. Ponder and practise them, and you will become what is
infinitely better--a moral man. For acts, often repeated, gradually
become habits, and habits, long enough continued, settle and harden and
solidify into character. And thus it is that the severe and laconic
bishop has so often made us shudder as he demonstrated it to us that we
are all with our own hands shaping our character not only for this world,
but much more for the world to come, by every act we perform, by every
word we speak, almost by every breath we draw. Butler is one of the most
terrible authors in the world. He stands on our nearest shelf with Dante
on one side of him and Pascal on the other. He is indeed terrible, but
it is with a terror that purifies the heart and keeps the life in the
hour of temptation. Paul sometimes arms himself with the same terror;
only he composes in another style than that of Butler, and, with all his
vivid intensity, he calls it the terror of the Lord. Paul and Bunyan are
of the same school of moralists and stylists; Butler went to school to
the Stoics, to Aristotle, and to Plato.
Our Lord Himself came to be the express image He was and is by living and
acting under this same universal law of human life--acts, habits,
character. He was made perfect on this same principle. He learned
obedience both by the things that He did, and the things that He
suffered. Butler says in one deep place, that benevolence and justice
and veracity are the basis of all good character in God and in man, and
thus also in the God-man. And those three foundation stones of our
Lord's character settled deeper and grew stronger to bear and to suffer
as He went on practising acts and speaking words of justice, goodness,
and truth. And so of all the other elements of His moral character. Our
Lord left Gethsemane a much more submissive and a much more surrendered
man than He entered it. His forgiveness of injuries, and thus His
splendid benevolence, had not yet come to its climax and crown till He
said on the cross, 'Father, forgive them'. And, as He was, so are we in
this world. This world's evil and ill-desert made it but the better
arena and theatre for the development and the display of His moral
character; and the same instruments that fashioned Him into the perfect
and express image He was and is, are still, happily, in full operation.
Take that divinest and noblest of all instruments for the carving out and
refining of moral character, the will of God. How our Lord made His own
unselfish and unsinful will to bow to silence and to praise before the
holy will of His Father, till that gave the finishing touch to His always
sanctified will and heart! And, happily, that awful and blessed
instrument for the formation of moral character is still active and
available to those whose ambition rises to moral character, and who are
aiming at heaven in all they do and all they suffer upon the earth.
Gethsemane has gone out till it has covered all the earth. Its cup, if
not in all the depth and strength of its first mixture, still in quite
sufficient bitterness, is put many times in life into every man's hand.
There is not a day, there is not an hour of the day, that the disciple of
the submissive and all-surrendered Son has not the opportunity to say
with his Master, If it be possible, let this cup pass: nevertheless, not
as I will, but as Thou wilt.
It is not in the great tragedies of life only that character is tested
and strengthened and consolidated. No man who is not himself under God's
moral and spiritual instruments could believe how often in the quietest,
clearest, and least tempestuous day he has the chance and the call to
say, Yea, Lord, Thy will be done. And, then, when the confessedly tragic
days and nights come, when all men admit that this is Gethsemane indeed,
the practised soul is able, with a calmness and a peace that confound and
offend the bystanders, to say, to act so that he does not need to say,
Not my will, but Thine. And so of all the other forms and features of
moral character; so of humility and meekness, so of purity and
temperance, so of magnanimity and munificence, so of all self-suppression
and self-extinction, and all corresponding exalting and magnifying and
benefiting of other men. Whatever other passing uses this present world,
so full of trial and temptation and suffering, may have, this surely is
the supreme and final use of it--to be a furnace, a graving-house, a
refining place for human character. Literally all things in this life
and in this world--I challenge you to point out a single exception--work
together for this supreme and only good, the purification, the refining,
the testing, and the approval of human character. Not only so, but we
are all in the very heat of the furnace, and under the very graving iron
and in the very refining fire that our prefigured and predestinated
character needs. Your life and its trials would not suit the necessities
of my moral character, and you would lose your soul beyond redemption if
you exchanged lots with me. You do not put a pearl under the potter's
wheel; you do not cast clay into a refining fire. Abraham's character
was not like David's, nor David's like Christ's, nor Christ's like
Paul's. As Butler says, there is 'a providential disposition of things'
around every one of us, and it is as exactly suited to the flaws and
excrescences, the faults and corruptions of our character as if
Providence had had no other life to make a disposition of things for but
one, and that one our own. Have you discovered that in your life, or any
measure of that? Have you acknowledged to God that you have at last
discovered the true key of your life? Have you given Him the
satisfaction to know that He is not making His providential dispositions
around a stock or a stone, but that He has one under His hand who
understands His hand, and responds to it, and rises up to meet and salute
it?
And we cease to wonder so much at the care God takes of human character,
and the cost He lays out upon it, when we think that it is the only work
of His hands that shall last for ever. It is fit, surely, that the
ephemeral should minister to the eternal, and time to eternity, and all
else in this world to the only thing in this world that shall endure and
survive this world. All else we possess and pursue shall fade and
perish, our moral character shall alone survive. Riches, honours,
possessions, pleasures of all kinds: death, with one stroke of his
desolating hand, shall one day strip us bare to a winding-sheet and a
coffin of all the things we are so mad to possess. But the last enemy,
with all his malice and all his resistless power, cannot touch our moral
character--unless it be in some way utterly mysterious to us that he is
made under God to refine and perfect it. The Express Image carried up to
His Father's House, not only the divine life He had brought hither with
Him when He came to obey and submit and suffer among us; He carried back
more than He brought, for He carried back a human heart, a human life, a
human character, which was and is a new wonder in heaven. He carried up
to heaven all the love to God and angels and men He had learned and
practised on earth, with all the earthly fruits of it. He carried back
His humility, His meekness, His humanity, His approachableness, and His
sympathy. And we see to our salvation some of the uses to which those
parts of His moral character are at this moment being put in His Father's
House; and what we see not now of all the ends and uses and employments
of our Lord's glorified humanity we shall, mayhap, see hereafter. And we
also shall carry our moral character to heaven; it is the only thing we
have worth carrying so far. But, then, moral character is well worth
achieving here and then carrying there, for it is nothing else and
nothing less than the divine nature itself; it is the divine nature
incarnate, incorporate, and made manifest in man. And it is, therefore,
immortal with the immortality of God, and blessed for ever with the
blessedness of God.
EVANGELIST
'Do the work of an evangelist.'--Paul to Timothy.
On the 1st of June 1648 a very bitter fight was fought at Maidstone, in
Kent, between the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax and the Royalists.
Till Cromwell rose to all his military and administrative greatness,
Fairfax was generalissimo of the Puritan army, and that able soldier
never executed a more brilliant exploit than he did that memorable night
at Maidstone. In one night the Royalist insurrection was stamped out and
extinguished in its own blood. Hundreds of dead bodies filled the
streets of the town, hundreds of the enemy were taken prisoners, while
hundreds more, who were hiding in the hop-fields and forests around the
town, fell into Fairfax's hands next morning.
Among the prisoners so taken was a Royalist major who had had a deep hand
in the Maidstone insurrection, named John Gifford, a man who was destined
in the time to come to run a remarkable career. Only, to-day, the day
after the battle, he has no prospect before him but the gallows. On the
night before his execution, by the courtesy of Fairfax, Gifford's sister
was permitted to visit her brother in his prison. The soldiers were
overcome with weariness and sleep after the engagement, and Gifford's
sister so managed it that her brother got past the sentries and escaped
out of the town. He lay hid for some days in the ditches and thickets
around the town till he was able to escape to London, and thence to the
shelter of some friends of his at Bedford. Gifford had studied medicine
before he entered the army, and as soon as he thought it safe he began to
practise his old art in the town of Bedford. Gifford had been a
dissolute man as a soldier, and he became, if possible, a still more
scandalously dissolute man as a civilian. Gifford's life in Bedford was
a public disgrace, and his hatred and persecution of the Puritans in that
town made his very name an infamy and a fear. He reduced himself to
beggary with gambling and drink, but, when near suicide, he came under
the power of the truth, till we see him clothed with rags and with a
great burden on his back, crying out, 'What must I do to be saved?' 'But
at last'--I quote from the session records of his future church at
Bedford--'God did so plentifully discover to him the forgiveness of sins
for the sake of Christ, that all his life after he lost not the light of
God's countenance, no, not for an hour, save only about two days before
he died.' Gifford's conversion had been so conspicuous and notorious
that both town and country soon heard of it: and instead of being ashamed
of it, and seeking to hide it, Gifford at once, and openly, threw in his
lot with the extremest Puritans in the Puritan town of Bedford. Nor
could Gifford's talents be hid; till from one thing to another, we find
the former Royalist and dissolute Cavalier actually the parish minister
of Bedford in Cromwell's so evangelical but otherwise so elastic
establishment.
At this point we open John Bunyan's _Grace Abounding to the Chief of
Sinners_, and we read this classical passage:--'Upon a day the good
providence of God did cast me to Bedford to work in my calling: and in
one of the streets of that town I came where there were three or four
poor women sitting at the door in the sun and talking about the things of
God. But I may say I heard, but I understood not, for they were far
above and out of my reach . . . About this time I began to break my mind
to those poor people in Bedford, and to tell them of my condition, which,
when they had heard, they told Mr. Gifford of me, who himself also took
occasion to talk with me, and was willing to be well persuaded of me
though I think on too little grounds. But he invited me to his house,
where I should hear him confer with others about the dealings of God with
their souls, from all which I still received more conviction, and from
that time began to see something of the vanity and inner wretchedness of
my own heart, for as yet I knew no great matter therein . . . At that
time also I sat under the ministry of holy Mr. Gifford, whose doctrine,
by the grace of God, was much for my stability.' And so on in that
inimitable narrative.
The first minister whose words were truly blessed of God for our
awakening and conversion has always a place of his own in our hearts. We
all have some minister, some revivalist, some faithful friend, or some
good book in a warm place in our heart. It may be a great city preacher;
it may be a humble American or Irish revivalist; it may be _The Pilgrim's
Progress_, or _The Cardiphonia_, or the _Serious Call_--whoever or
whatever it was that first arrested and awakened and turned us into the
way of life, they all our days stand in a place by themselves in our
grateful heart. And John Gifford has been immortalised by John Bunyan,
both in his _Grace Abounding_ and in his _Pilgrim's Progress_. In his
_Grace Abounding_, as we have just seen, and in _The Pilgrim_, Gifford
has his portrait painted in holy oil on the wall of the Interpreter's
house, and again in eloquent pen and ink in the person of Evangelist.
John Gifford had himself made a narrow escape out of the City of
Destruction, and John Bunyan had, by Gifford's assistance, made the same
escape also. The scene, therefore, both within that city and outside the
gate of it, was so fixed in Bunyan's mind and memory that no part of his
memorable book is more memorably put than just its opening page. Bunyan
himself is the man in rags, and Gifford is the evangelist who comes to
console and to conduct him. Bunyan's portraits are all taken from the
life. Brilliant and well-furnished as Bunyan's imagination was, Bedford
was still better furnished with all kinds of men and women, and with all
kinds of saints and sinners. And thus, instead of drawing upon his
imagination in writing his books, Bunyan drew from life. And thus it is
that we see first John Gifford, and then John Bunyan himself at the gate
of the city; and then, over the page, Gifford becomes the evangelist who
is sent by the four poor women to speak to the awakened tinker.
'Wherefore dost thou so cry?' asks Evangelist. 'Because,' replied the
man, 'I am condemned to die.' 'But why are you so unwilling to die,
since this life is so full of evils?' And I suppose we must all hear
Evangelist putting the same pungent question to ourselves every day, at
whatever point of the celestial journey we at present are. Yes; why are
we all so unwilling to die? Why do we number our days to put off our
death to the last possible period? Why do we so refuse to think of the
only thing we are sure soon to come to? We are absolutely sure of
nothing else in the future but death. We may not see to-morrow, but we
shall certainly see the day of our death. And yet we have all our plans
laid for to-morrow, and only one here and one there has any plan laid for
the day of his death. And can it be for the same reason that made the
man in rags unwilling to die? Is it because of the burden on our back?
Is it because we are not fit to go to judgment? And yet the trumpet may
sound summoning us hence before the midnight clock strikes. If this be
thy condition, why standest thou still? Dost thou see yonder shining
light? Keep that light in thine eye. Go up straight to it, knock at the
gate, and it shall be told thee there what thou shalt do next. Burdened
sinner, son of man in rags and terror: What has burdened thee so? What
has torn thy garments into such shameful rags? What is it in thy burden
that makes it so heavy? And how long has it lain so heavy upon thee? 'I
cannot run,' said the man, 'because of the burden on my back.' And it
has been noticed of you that you do not laugh, or run, or dress, or
dance, or walk, or eat, or drink as once you did. All men see that there
is some burden on your back; some sore burden on your heart and your
mind. Do you see yonder wicket gate? Do you see yonder shining light?
There is no light in all the horizon for you but yonder light over the
gate. Keep it in your eye; make straight, and make at once for it, and
He who keeps the gate and keeps the light burning over it, He will tell
you what to do with your burden. He told John Gifford, and He told John
Bunyan, till both their burdens rolled off their backs, and they saw them
no more. What would you not give to-night to be released like them? Do
you not see yonder shining light?
Having set Christian fairly on the way to the wicket gate, Evangelist
leaves him in order to seek out and assist some other seeker. But
yesterday he had set Faithful's face to the celestial city, and he is off
now to look for another pilgrim. We know some of Christian's adventures
and episodes after Evangelist left him, but we do not take up these at
present. We pass on to the next time that Evangelist finds Christian,
and he finds him in a sorry plight. He has listened to bad advice. He
has gone off the right road, he has lost sight of the gate, and all the
thunders and lightnings of Sinai are rolling and flashing out against
him. What doest thou here of all men in the world? asked Evangelist,
with a severe and dreadful countenance. Did I not direct thee to His
gate, and why art thou here? Christian told him that a fair-spoken man
had met him, and had persuaded him to take an easier and shorter way of
getting rid of his burden. Read the whole place for yourselves. The end
of it was that Evangelist set Christian right again, and gave him two
counsels which would be his salvation if he attended to them: Strive to
enter in at the strait gate, and, Take up thy cross daily. He would need
more counsel afterwards than that; but, meantime, that was enough. Let
Christian follow that, and he would before long be rid of his burden.
In the introductory lecture Bishop Butler has been commended and praised
as a moralist, and certainly not one word beyond his deserts; but an
evangelical preacher cannot send any man with the burden of a bad past
upon him to Butler for advice and direction about that. While lecturing
on and praising the sound philosophical and ethical spirit of the great
bishop, Dr. Chalmers complains that he so much lacks the _sal
evangelicum_, the strength and the health and the sweetness of the
doctrines of grace. Legality and Civility and Morality are all good and
necessary in their own places; but he is a cheat who would send a guilt-
burdened and sick-at-heart sinner to any or all of them. The wicket gate
first, and then He who keeps that gate will tell us what to do, and where
next to go; but any other way out of the City of Destruction but by the
wicket gate is sure to land us where it landed Evangelist's quaking and
sweating charge. When Bishop Butler lay on his deathbed he called for
his chaplain, and said, 'Though I have endeavoured to avoid sin, and to
please God to the utmost of my power, yet from the consciousness of my
perpetual infirmities I am still afraid to die.' 'My lord,' said his
happily evangelical chaplain, 'have you forgotten that Jesus Christ is a
Saviour?' 'True,' said the dying philosopher, 'but how shall I know that
He is a Saviour for me?' 'My lord, it is written, "Him that cometh to
Me, I will in no wise cast out."' 'True,' said Butler, 'and I am
surprised that though I have read that Scripture a thousand times, I
never felt its virtue till this moment, and now I die in peace.'
The third and the last time on which the pilgrims meet with their old
friend and helper, Evangelist, is when they are just at the gates of the
town of Vanity. They have come through many wonderful experiences since
last they saw and spoke with him. They have had the gate opened to them
by Goodwill. They have been received and entertained in the
Interpreter's House, and in the House Beautiful. The burden has fallen
off their backs at the cross, and they have had their rags removed and
have received change of raiment. They have climbed the Hill Difficulty,
and they have fought their way through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
More than the half of their adventures and sufferings are past; but they
are not yet out of gunshot of the devil, and the bones of many a
promising pilgrim lie whitening the way between this and the city. Many
of our young communicants have made a fair and a promising start for
salvation. They have got over the initial difficulties that lay in their
way to the Lord's table, and we have entered their names with honest
pride in our communion roll. But a year or two passes over, and the
critical season arrives when our young communicant 'comes out,' as the
word is. Up till now she has been a child, a little maid, a Bible-class
student, a young communicant, a Sabbath-school teacher. But she is now a
young lady, and she comes out into the world. We soon see that she has
so come out, as we begin to miss her from places and from employments her
presence used to brighten; and, very unwillingly, we overhear men and
women with her name on their lips in a way that makes us fear for her
soul, till many, oh, in a single ministry, how many, who promised well at
the gate and ran safely past many snares, at last sell all--body and soul
and Saviour--in Vanity Fair.
Well, Evangelist remains Evangelist still. Only, without losing any of
his sweetness and freeness and fulness of promise, he adds to that some
solemn warnings and counsels suitable now, as never before, to these two
pilgrims. If one may say so, he would add now such moral treatises as
Butler's _Sermons_ and _Serious Call_ to such evangelical books as _Grace
Abounding_ and _A Jerusalem Sinner Saved_.
To-morrow the two pilgrims will come out of the wilderness and will be
plunged into a city where they will be offered all kinds of
merchandise,--houses, lands, places, honours, preferments, titles,
pleasures, delights, wives, children, bodies, souls, and what not. An
altogether new world from anything they have yet come through, and a
world where many who once began well have gone no further. Such counsels
as these, then, Evangelist gave Christian and Faithful as they left the
lonely wilderness behind them and came out towards the gate of the
seductive city--'Let the Kingdom of Heaven be always before your eyes,
and believe steadfastly concerning things that are invisible.' Visible,
tangible, sweet, and desirable things will immediately be offered to
them, and unless they have a faith in their hearts that is the substance
of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen, it will soon be
all over with them and their pilgrimage. 'Let no man take your crown,'
he said also, as he foresaw at how many booths and counters, houses,
lands, places, preferments, wives, husbands, and what not, would be
offered them and pressed upon them in exchange for their heavenly crown.
'Above all, look well to your own hearts,' he said. Canon Venables
laments over the teaching that Bunyan received from John Gifford. 'Its
principle,' he says, 'was constant introspection and scrupulous weighing
of every word and deed, and even of every thought, instead of leading the
mind off from self to the Saviour.' The canon seems to think that it was
specially unfortunate for Bunyan to be told to keep his heart and to
weigh well every thought of it; but I must point out to you that
Evangelist puts as above all other things the most important for the
pilgrims the looking well to their own hearts; and our plain-spoken
author has used a very severe word about any minister who should whisper
anything to any pilgrim that could be construed or misunderstood into
putting Christ in the place of thought and word and deed, and the
scrupulous weighing of every one of them. 'Let nothing that is on this
side the other world get within you; and above all, look well to your own
hearts, and to the lusts thereof.'
'Set your faces like a flint,' Evangelist proceeds. How little like all
that you hear in the counsels of the pulpit to young women coming out and
to young men entering into business life. I am convinced that if we
ministers were more direct and plain-spoken to such persons at such
times; if we, like Bunyan, told them plainly what kind of a world it is
they are coming out to buy and sell in, and what its merchandise and its
prices are; if our people would let us so preach to their sons and
daughters, I feel sure far fewer young communicants would make shipwreck,
and far fewer grey heads would go down with sorrow to the grave. 'Be not
afraid,' said Robert Hall in his charge to a young minister, 'of devoting
whole sermons to particular parts of moral conduct and religious duty. It
is impossible to give right views of them unless you dissect characters
and describe particular virtues and vices. The works of the flesh and
the fruits of the Spirit must be distinctly pointed out. To preach
against sin in general without descending to particulars may lead many to
complain of the evil of their hearts, while at the same time they are
awfully inattentive to the evil of their conduct.' Take Evangelist's
noble counsels at the gate of Vanity Fair, and then take John Bunyan's
masterly description of the Fair itself, with all that is bought and sold
in it, and you will have a lesson in evangelical preaching that the
evangelical pulpit needed in Bunyan's day, in Robert Hall's day, and not
less in our own.
'My sons, you have heard the truth of the gospel, that you must through
many tribulations enter the Kingdom of God. When, therefore, you are
come to the Fair and shall find fulfilled what I have here related, then
remember your friend; quit yourselves like men, and commit the keeping of
your souls to your God in well-doing as unto a faithful Creator.'
OBSTINATE
'Be ye not as the mule.'--David.
Little Obstinate was born and brought up in the City of Destruction. His
father was old Spare-the-Rod, and his mother's name was Spoil-the-Child.
Little Obstinate was the only child of his parents; he was born when they
were no longer young, and they doted on their only child, and gave him
his own way in everything. Everything he asked for he got, and if he did
not immediately get it you would have heard his screams and his kicks
three doors off. His parents were not in themselves bad people, but, if
Solomon speaks true, they hated their child, for they gave him all his
own way in everything, and nothing would ever make them say no to him, or
lift up the rod when he said no to them. When the Scriptures, in their
pedagogical parts, speak so often about the rod, they do not necessarily
mean a rod of iron or even of wood. There are other ways of teaching an
obstinate child than the way that Gideon took with the men of Succoth
when he taught them with the thorns of the wilderness and with the briars
thereof. George Offor, John Bunyan's somewhat quaint editor, gives the
readers of his edition this personal testimony:--'After bringing up a
very large family, who are a blessing to their parents, I have yet to
learn what part of the human body was created to be beaten.' At the same
time the rod must mean something in the word of God; it certainly means
something in God's hand when His obstinate children are under it, and it
ought to mean something in a godly parent's hand also. Little
Obstinate's two parents were far from ungodly people, though they lived
in such a city; but they were daily destroying their only son by letting
him always have his own way, and by never saying no to his greed, and his
lies, and his anger, and his noisy and disorderly ways. Eli in the Old
Testament was not a bad man, but he destroyed both the ark of the Lord
and himself and his sons also, because his sons made themselves vile, and
he restrained them not. God's children are never so soft, and sweet, and
good, and happy as just after He restrains them, and has again laid the
rod of correction upon them. They then kiss both the rod and Him who
appointed it. And earthly fathers learn their craft from God. The
meekness, the sweetness, the docility, and the love of a chastised child
has gone to all our hearts in a way we can never forget. There is
something sometimes almost past description or belief in the way a
chastised child clings to and kisses the hand that chastised it. But
poor old Spare-the-Rod never had experiences like that. And young
Obstinate, having been born like Job's wild ass's colt, grew up to be a
man like David's unbitted and unbridled mule, till in after life he
became the author of all the evil and mischief that is associated in our
minds with his evil name.
In old Spare-the-Rod's child also this true proverb was fulfilled, that
the child is the father of the man. For all that little Obstinate had
been in the nursery, in the schoolroom, and in the playground--all that,
only in an aggravated way--he was as a youth and as a grown-up man. For
one thing, Obstinate all his days was a densely ignorant man. He had not
got into the way of learning his lessons when he was a child; he had not
been made to learn his lessons when he was a child; and the dislike and
contempt he had for his books as a boy accompanied him through an
ignorant and a narrow-minded life. It was reason enough to this so
unreasonable man not to buy and read a book that you had asked him to buy
and read it. And so many of the books about him were either written, or
printed, or published, or sold, or read, or praised by people he did not
like, that there was little left for this unhappy man to read, even if
otherwise he would have read it. And thus, as his mulish obstinacy kept
him so ignorant, so his ignorance in turn increased his obstinacy. And
then when he came, as life went on, to have anything to do with other
men's affairs, either in public or in private life, either in the church,
or in the nation, or in the city, or in the family, this unhappy man
could only be a drag on all kinds of progress, and in obstacle to every
good work. Use and wont, a very good rule on occasion, was a rigid and a
universal rule with Obstinate. And to be told that the wont in this case
and in that had ceased to be the useful, only made him rail at you as
only an ignorant and an obstinate man can rail. He could only rail; he
had not knowledge enough, or good temper enough, or good manners enough
to reason out a matter; he was too hot-tempered for an argument, and he
hated those who had an acquaintance with the subject in hand, and a self-
command in connection with it that he had not. 'The obstinate man's
understanding is like Pharaoh's heart, and it is proof against all sorts
of arguments whatsoever.' Like the demented king of Egypt, the obstinate
man has glimpses sometimes both of his bounden duty and of his true
interest, but the sinew of iron that is in his neck will not let him
perform the one or pursue the other. 'Nothing,' says a penetrating
writer, 'is more like firm conviction than simple obstinacy. Plots and
parties in the state, and heresies and divisions in the church alike
proceed from it.' Let any honest man take that sentence and carry it
like a candle down into his own heart and back into his own life, and
then with the insight and honesty there learned carry the same candle
back through some of the plots and parties, the heresies and schisms of
the past as well as of the present day, and he will have learned a lesson
that will surely help to cure himself, at any rate, of his own remaining
obstinacy. All our firm convictions, as we too easily and too fondly
call them, must continually be examined and searched out in the light of
more reading of the best authors, in the light of more experience of
ourselves and of the world we live in, and in that best of all light,
that increasing purity, simplicity, and sincerity of heart alone can
kindle. And in not a few instances we shall to a certainty find that
what has hitherto been clothing itself with the honourable name and
character of a conviction was all the time only an ignorant prejudice, a
distaste or a dislike, a too great fondness for ourselves and for our own
opinion and our own interest. Many of our firmest convictions, as we now
call them, when we shall have let light enough fall upon them, we shall
be compelled and enabled to confess to be at bottom mere mulishness and
pride of heart. The mulish, obstinate, and proud man never says, I don't
know. He never asks anything to be explained to him. He never admits
that he has got any new light. He never admits having spoken or acted
wrongly. He never takes back what he has said. He was never heard to
say, You are right in that line of action, and I have all along been
wrong. Had he ever said that, the day he said it would have been a white-
stone day both for his mind and his heart. Only, the spoiled son of
Spare-the-Rod never said that, or anything like that.
But, most unfortunately, it is in the very best things of life that the
true mulishness of the obstinate man most comes out. He shows worst in
his home life and in the matters of religion. When our Obstinate was in
love he was as sweet as honey and as soft as butter. His old friends
that he used so to trample upon scarcely recognised him. They had
sometimes seen men converted, but they had never seen such an immediate
and such a complete conversion as this. He actually invited correction,
and reproof, and advice, and assistance, who had often struck at you with
his hands and his feet when you even hinted at such a thing to him. The
best upbringing, the best books, the best preaching, the best and most
obedient life, taken all together, had not done for other men what a
woman's smile and the touch of her hand had in a moment done for this
once so obstinate man. He would read anything now, and especially the
best books. He would hear and enjoy any preacher now, and especially the
best and most earnest in preaching. His old likes and dislikes,
prejudices and prepossessions, self-opinionativeness and
self-assertiveness all miraculously melted off him, and he became in a
day an open-minded, intelligent, good-mannered, devout-minded gentleman.
He who was once such a mule to everybody was now led about by a child in
a silken bridle. All old things had passed away, and all things had
become new. For a time; for a time. But time passes, and there passes
away with it all the humility, meekness, pliability, softness, and
sweetness of the obstinate man. Till when long enough time has elapsed
you find him all the obstinate and mulish man he ever was. It is not
that he has ceased to love his wife and his children. It is not that.
But there is this in all genuine and inbred obstinacy, that after a time
it often comes out worst beside those we love best. A man will be
affable, accessible, entertaining, the best of company, and the soul of
it abroad, and, then, instantly he turns the latch-key in his own door he
will relapse into silence, and sink back into utter boorishness and
bearishness, mulishness and doggedness. He swallows his evening meal at
the foot of the table in silence, and then he sits all night at the
fireside with a cloud out of nothing on his brow. His sunshine, his
smile, and his universal urbanity is all gone now; he is discourteous to
nobody but to his own wife. Nothing pleases him; he finds nothing at
home to his mind. The furniture, the hours, the habits of the house are
all disposed so as to please him; but he was never yet heard to say to
wife, or child, or servant that he was pleased. He never says that a
meal is to his taste or a seat set so as to shelter and repose him. The
obstinate man makes his house a very prison and treadmill to himself and
to all those who are condemned to suffer with him. And all the time it
is not that he does not love and honour his household; but by an evil law
of the obstinate heart its worst obstinacy and mulishness comes out among
those it loves best.
But, my brethren, worse than all that, we have all what good Bishop Hall
calls 'a stone of obstination' in our hearts against God. With all his
own depth and clearness and plain-spokenness, Paul tells us that our
hearts are by nature enmity against God. Were we proud and obstinate and
malicious against men only it would be bad enough, and it would be
difficult enough to cure, but our case is dreadful beyond all description
or belief when our obstinacy strikes out against God. We know as well as
we know anything, that in doing this and in not doing that we are going
every day right in the teeth both of God's law and God's grace; and yet
in the sheer obstinacy and perversity of our heart we still go on in what
we know quite well to be the suicide of our souls. We are told by our
minister to do this and not to do that; to begin to do this at this new
year and to break off from doing that; but, partly through obstinacy
towards him, reinforced by a deeper and subtler and deadlier obstinacy
against God, and against all the deepest and most godly of the things of
God, we neither do the one nor cease from doing the other. There is a
sullenness in some men's minds, a gloom and a bitter air that rises up
from the unploughed, undrained, unweeded, uncultivated fens of their
hearts that chills and blasts all the feeble beginnings of a better life.
The natural and constitutional obstinacy of the obstinate heart is
exasperated when it comes to deal with the things of God. For it is then
reinforced with all the guilt and all the fear, all the suspicion and all
the aversion of the corrupt and self-condemned heart. There is an
obdurateness of obstinacy against all the men, and the books, and the
doctrines, and the precepts, and the practices that are in any way
connected with spiritual religion that does not come out even in the
obstinate man's family life.
John Bunyan's Obstinate, both by his conduct as well as by the etymology
of his name, not only stands in the way of his own salvation, but he does
all he can to stand in the way of other men setting out to salvation
also. Obstinate set out after Christian to fetch him back by force, and
if it had not been that he met his match in Christian, _The Pilgrim's
Progress_ would never have been written. 'That can by no means be,' said
Christian to his pursuer, and he is first called Christian when he shows
that one man can be as obstinate in good as another man can be in evil.
'I never now can go back to my former life.' And then the two obstinate
men parted company for ever, Christian in holy obstinacy being determined
to have eternal life at any cost, and Obstinate as determined against it.
The opening pages of _The Pilgrim's Progress_ set the two men very
graphically and very impressively before us.
As to the cure of obstinacy, the rod in a firm, watchful, wise, and
loving hand will cure it. And in later life a long enough and close
enough succession of humble, yielding, docile, submissive,
self-chastening and thanksgiving acts will cure it. Reading and obeying
the best books on the subjugation and the regulation of the heart will
cure it. Descending with Dante to where the obstinate, and the
embittered, and the gloomy, and the sullen have made their beds in hell
will cure it. And much and most agonising prayer will above all cure it.
'O Lord, if thus so obstinate I,
Choose Thou, before my spirit die,
A piercing pain, a killing sin,
And to my proud heart run them in.
PLIABLE
'He hath not root in himself.'--Our Lord.
With one stroke of His pencil our Lord gives us this Flaxman-like outline
of one of his well-known hearers. And then John Bunyan takes up that so
expressive profile, and puts flesh and blood into it, till it becomes the
well-known Pliable of _The Pilgrim's Progress_. We call the text a
parable, but our Lord's parables are all portraits--portraits and groups
of portraits, rather than ordinary parables. Our Lord knew this man
quite well who had no root in himself. Our Lord had crowds of such men
always running after Him, and He threw off this rapid portrait from
hundreds of men and women who caused discredit to fall on His name and
His work, and burdened His heart continually. And John Bunyan, with all
his genius, could never have given us such speaking likenesses as that of
Pliable and Temporary and Talkative, unless he had had scores of them in
his own congregation.
Our Lord's short preliminary description of Pliable goes, like all His
descriptions, to the very bottom of the whole matter. Our Lord in this
passage is like one of those masterly artists who begin their portrait-
painting with the study of anatomy. All the great artists in this walk
build up their best portraits from the inside of their subjects. He hath
not root in himself, says our Lord, and we need no more than that to be
told us to foresee how all his outside religion will end. 'Without self-
knowledge,' says one of the greatest students of the human heart that
ever lived, 'you have no real root in yourselves. Real self-knowledge is
the root of all real religious knowledge. It is a deceit and a mischief
to think that the Christian doctrines can either be understood or aright
accepted by any outward means. It is just in proportion as we search our
own hearts and understand our own nature that we shall ever feel what a
blessing the removal of sin will be; redemption, pardon, sanctification,
are all otherwise mere words without meaning or power to us. God speaks
to us first in our own hearts.' Happily for us our Lord has annotated
His own text and has told us that an honest heart is the alone root of
all true religion. Honest, that is, with itself, and with God and man
about itself. As David says in his so honest psalm, 'Behold, Thou
desirest truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part Thou shalt
make me to know wisdom.' And, indeed, all the preachers and writers in
Scripture, and all Scriptural preachers and writers outside of Scripture,
are at one in this: that all true wisdom begins at home, and that it all
begins at the heart. And they all teach us that he is the wisest of men
who has the worst opinion of his own heart, as he is the foolishest of
men who does not know his own heart to be the worst heart that ever any
man was cursed with in this world. 'Here is wisdom': not to know the
number of the beast, but to know his mark, and to read it written so
indelibly in our own heart.
And where this first and best of all wisdom is not, there, in our Lord's
words, there is no deepness of earth, no root, and no fruit. And any
religion that most men have is of this outside, shallow, rootless
description. This was all the religion that poor Pliable ever had. This
poor creature had a certain slight root of something that looked like
religion for a short season, but even that slight root was all outside of
himself. His root, what he had of a root, was all in Christian's
companionship and impassioned appeals, and then in those impressive
passages of Scripture that Christian read to him. At your first
attention to these things you would think that no possible root could be
better planted than in the Bible and in earnest preaching. But even the
Bible, and, much more, the best preaching, is all really outside of a man
till true religion once gets its piercing roots down into himself. We
have perhaps all heard of men, and men of no small eminence, who were
brought up to believe the teaching of the Bible and the pulpit, but who,
when some of their inherited and external ideas about some things
connected with the Bible began to be shaken, straightway felt as if all
the grounds of their faith were shaken, and all the roots of their faith
pulled up. But where that happened, all that was because such men's
religion was all rooted outside of themselves; in the best things outside
of themselves, indeed, but because, in our Lord's words, their religion
was rooted in something outside of themselves and not inside, they were
by and by offended, and threw off their faith. There is another well-
known class of men all whose religion is rooted in their church, and in
their church not as a member of the body of Christ, but as a social
institution set up in this world. They believe in their church. They
worship their church. They suffer and make sacrifices for their church.
They are proud of the size and the income of their church; her past
contendings and sufferings, and present dangers, all endear their church
to their heart. But if tribulation and persecution arise, that is to
say, if anything arises to vex or thwart or disappoint them with their
church, they incontinently pull up their roots and their religion with
it, and transplant both to any other church that for the time better
pleases them, or to no church at all. Others, again, have all their
religiosity rooted in their family life. Their religion is all made up
of domestic sentiment. They love their earthly home with that supreme
satisfaction and that all-absorbing affection that truly religious men
entertain for their heavenly home. And thus it is that when anything
happens to disturb or break up their earthly home their rootless
religiosity goes with it. Other men's religion, again, and all their
interest in it, is rooted in their shop; you can make them anything or
nothing in religion, according as you do or do not do business in their
shop. Companionship, also, accounts for the fluctuations of many men's,
and almost all women's, religious lives. If they happen to fall in with
godly lovers and friends, they are sincerely godly with them; but if
their companions are indifferent or hostile to true religion, they
gradually fall into the same temper and attitude. We sometimes see
students destined for the Christian ministry also with all their religion
so without root in themselves that a session in an unsympathetic class, a
sceptical book, sometimes just a sneer or a scoff, will wither all the
promise of their coming service. And so on through the whole of human
life. He that hath not the root of the matter in himself dureth for a
while, but by and by, for one reason or another, he is sure to be
offended.
So much, then,--not enough, nor good enough--for our Lord's swift stroke
at the heart of His hearers. But let us now pass on to Pliable, as he so
soon and so completely discovers himself to us under John Bunyan's so
skilful hand. Look well at our author's speaking portrait of a
well-known man in Bedford who had no root in himself, and who, as a
consequence, was pliable to any influence, good or bad, that happened to
come across him. 'Don't revile,' are the first words that come from
Pliable's lips, and they are not unpromising words. Pliable is hurt with
Obstinate's coarse abuse of the Christian life, till he is downright
ashamed to be seen in his company. Pliable, at least, is a gentleman
compared with Obstinate, and his gentlemanly feelings and his good
manners make him at once take sides with Christian. Obstinate's foul
tongue has almost made Pliable a Christian. And this finely-conceived
scene on the plain outside the city gate is enacted over again every day
among ourselves. Where men are in dead earnest about religion it always
arouses the bad passions of bad men; and where earnest preachers and
devoted workers are assailed with violence or with bad language, there is
always enough love of fair play in the bystanders to compel them to take
sides, for the time at least, with those who suffer for the truth. And
we are sometimes too apt to count all that love of common fairness, and
that hatred of foul play, as a sure sign of some sympathy with the hated
truth itself. When an onlooker says 'Don't revile,' we are too ready to
set down that expression of civility as at least the first beginning of
true religion. But the religion of Jesus Christ cuts far deeper into the
heart of man than to the dividing asunder of justice and injustice,
civility and incivility, ribaldry and good manners. And it is always
found in the long-run that the cross of Christ and its crucifixion of the
human heart goes quite as hard with the gentlemanly-mannered man, the
civil and urbane man, as it does with the man of bad behaviour and of
brutish manners. 'Civil men,' says Thomas Goodwin, 'are this world's
saints.' And poor Pliable was one of them. 'My heart really inclines to
go with my neighbour,' said Pliable next. 'Yes,' he said, 'I begin to
come to a point. I really think I will go along with this good man. Yes,
I will cast in my lot with him. Come, good neighbour, let us be going.'
The apocalyptic side of some men's imaginations is very easily worked
upon. No kind of book sells better among those of our people who have no
root in themselves than just picture-books about heaven. Our
missionaries make use of lantern-slides to bring home the scenes in the
Gospels to the dull minds of their village hearers, and with good
success. And at home a magic-lantern filled with the splendours of the
New Jerusalem would carry multitudes of rootless hearts quite captive for
a time. 'Well said; and what else? This is excellent; and what else?'
Christian could not tell Pliable fast enough about the glories of heaven.
'There we shall be with seraphim and cherubim, creatures that will dazzle
your eyes to look on them. There also you shall meet with thousands and
ten thousands who have gone before us to that place. Elders with golden
crowns, and holy virgins with golden harps, and all clothed with
immortality as with a garment.' 'The hearing of all this,' cried
Pliable, 'is enough to ravish one's heart.' 'An overly faith,' says old
Thomas Shepard, 'is easily wrought.'
As if the text itself was not graphic enough, Bunyan's racy, humorous,
pathetic style overflows the text and enriches the very margins of his
pages, as every possessor of a good edition of _The Pilgrim_ knows.
'Christian and Obstinate pull for Pliable's soul' is the eloquent summary
set down on the side of the sufficiently eloquent page. As the picture
of a man's soul being pulled for rises before my mind, I can think of no
better companion picture to that of Pliable than that of poor, hard-beset
Brodie of Brodie, as he lets us see the pull for his soul in the honest
pages of his inward diary. Under the head of 'Pliable' in my Bunyan note-
book I find a crowd of references to Brodie; and if only to illustrate
our author's marginal note, I shall transcribe one or two of them. 'The
writer of this diary desires to be cast down under the facileness and
plausibleness of his nature, by which he labours to please men more than
God, and whence it comes that the wicked speak good of him . . . The Lord
pity the proneness of his heart to comply with the men who have the power
. . . Lord, he is unsound and double in his heart, politically crafty,
selfish, not savouring nor discerning the things of God . . . Let not
self-love, wit, craft, and timorousness corrupt his mind, but indue him
with fortitude, patience, steadfastness, tenderness, mortification . . .
Shall I expose myself and my family to danger at this time? A grain of
sound faith would solve all my questions.' 'Die Dom. I stayed at home,
partly to decline the ill-will and rage of men and to decline
observation.' Or, take another Sabbath-day entry: 'Die Dom. I stayed at
home, because of the time, and the observation, and the Earl of Moray . .
. Came to Cuttiehillock. I am neither cold nor hot. I am not rightly
principled as to the time. I suspect that it is not all conscience that
makes me conform, but wit, and to avoid suffering; Lord, deliver me from
all this unsoundness of heart.' And after this miserable fashion do
heaven and earth, duty and self-interest, the covenant and the crown pull
for Lord Brodie's soul through 422 quarto pages. Brodie's diary is one
of the most humiliating, heart-searching, and heart-instructing books I
ever read. Let all public men tempted and afflicted with a facile,
pliable, time-serving heart have honest Brodie at their elbow.
'Glad I am, my good companion,' said Pliable, after the passage about the
cherubim and the seraphim, and the golden crowns and the golden harps,
'it ravishes my very heart to hear all this. Come on, let us mend our
pace.' This is delightful, this is perfect. How often have we ourselves
heard these very words of challenge and reproof from the pliable
frequenters of emotional meetings, and from the emotional members of an
emotional but rootless ministry. Come on, let us mend our pace! 'I am
sorry to say,' replied the man with the burden on his back, 'that I
cannot go so fast as I would.' 'Christian,' says Mr. Kerr Bain, 'has
more to carry than Pliable has, as, indeed, he would still have if he
were carrying nothing but himself; and he does have about him, besides, a
few sobering thoughts as to the length and labour and some of the
unforeseen chances of the way.' And as Dean Paget says in his profound
and powerful sermon on 'The Disasters of Shallowness': 'Yes, but there is
something else first; something else without which that inexpensive
brightness, that easy hopefulness, is apt to be a frail resourceless
growth, withering away when the sun is up and the hot winds of trial are
sweeping over it. We must open our hearts to our religion; we must have
the inward soil broken up, freely and deeply its roots must penetrate our
inner being. We must take to ourselves in silence and in sincerity its
words of judgment with its words of hope, its sternness with its
encouragement, its denunciations with its promises, its requirements,
with its offers, its absolute intolerance of sin with its inconceivable
and divine long-suffering towards sinners.' But preaching like this
would have frightened away poor Pliable. He would not have understood
it, and what he did understand of it he would have hated with all his
shallow heart.
'Where are we now?' called Pliable to his companion, as they both went
over head and ears into the Slough of Despond. 'Truly,' said Christian,
'I do not know.'--No work of man is perfect, not even the all-but-perfect
_Pilgrim's Progress_. Christian was bound to fall sooner or later into a
slough filled with his own despondency about himself, his past guilt, his
present sinfulness, and his anxious future. But Pliable had not
knowledge enough of himself to make him ever despond. He was always
ready and able to mend his pace. He had no burden on his back, and
therefore no doubt in his heart. But Christian had enough of both for
any ten men, and it was Christian's overflowing despondency and doubt at
this point of the road that suddenly filled his own slough, and, I
suppose, overflowed into a slough for Pliable also. Had Pliable only had
a genuine and original slough of his own to so sink and be bedaubed in,
he would have got out of it at the right side of it, and been a tender-
stepping pilgrim all his days.--'Is this the happiness you have told me
all this while of? May I get out of this with my life, you may possess
the brave country alone for me.' And with that he gave a desperate
struggle or two, and got out of the mire on that side of the slough which
was next his own house; so he went away, and Christian saw him no more.
'The side of the slough which was next his own house.' Let us close with
that. Let us go home thinking about that. And in this trial of faith
and patience, and in that, in this temptation to sin, and in that, in
this actual transgression, and in that, let us always ask ourselves which
is the side of the slough that is farthest away from our own house, and
let us still struggle to that side of the slough, and it will all be well
with us at the last.
HELP
'I was brought low, and He helped me.'--David.
The Slough of Despond is one of John Bunyan's masterpieces. In his
description of the slough, Bunyan touches his highest water-mark for
humour, and pathos, and power, and beauty of language. If we did not
have the English Bible in our own hands we would have to ask, as Lord
Jeffrey asked Lord Macaulay, where the brazier of Bedford got his
inimitable style. Bunyan confesses to us that he got all his Latin from
the prescription papers of his doctors, and we know that he got all his
perfect English from his English Bible. And then he got his humour and
his pathos out of his own deep and tender heart. The God of all grace
gave a great gift to the English-speaking world and to the Church of
Christ in all lands when He created and converted John Bunyan, and put it
into his head and his heart to compose _The Pilgrim's Progress_. His
heart-affecting page on the slough has been wetted with the tears of
thousands of its readers, and their tears have been mingled with smiles
as they read their own sin and misery, and the never-to-be-forgotten time
and place where their sin and misery first found them out, all told so
recognisably, so pathetically, and so amusingly almost to laughableness
in the passage upon the slough. We see the ocean of scum and filth
pouring down into the slough through the subterranean sewers of the City
of Destruction and of the Town of Stupidity, which lies four degrees
beyond the City of Destruction, and from many other of the houses and
haunts of men. We see His Majesty's sappers and miners at their wits'
end how to cope with the deluges of pollution that pour into this slough
that they have been ordained to drain and dry up. For ages and ages the
royal surveyors have been laying out all their skill on this slough. More
cartloads than you could count of the best material for filling up a
slough have been shot into it, and yet you would never know that so much
as a single labourer had emptied his barrow here. True, excellent
stepping-stones have been laid across the slough by skilful engineers,
but they are always so slippery with the scum and slime of the slough,
that it is only now and then that a traveller can keep his feet upon
them. Altogether, our author's picture of the Slough of Despond is such
a picture that no one who has seen it can ever forget it. But better
than reading the best description of the slough is to see certain well-
known pilgrims trying to cross it. Mr. Fearing at the Slough of Despond
was a tale often told at the tavern suppers of that country. Never
pilgrim attempted the perilous journey with such a chicken-heart in his
bosom as this Mr. Fearing. He lay above a month on the bank of the
slough, and would not even attempt the steps. Some kind Pilgrims, though
they had enough to do to keep the steps themselves, offered him a hand;
but no. And after they were safely over it made them almost weep to hear
the man still roaring in his horror at the other side. Some bade him go
home if he would not take the steps, but he said that he would rather
make his grave in the slough than go back one hairsbreadth. Till, one
sunshiny morning,--no one knew how, and he never knew how himself--the
steps were so high and dry, and the scum and slime were so low, that this
hare-hearted man made a venture, and so got over. But, then, as an
unkind friend of his said, this pitiful pilgrim had a slough of despond
in his own mind which he carried always and everywhere about with him,
and made him the proverb of despondency that he was and is. Only, that
sunshiny morning he got over both the slough inside of him and outside of
him, and was heard by Help and his family singing this song on the hither
side of the slough: 'He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of
the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.'
Our pilgrim did not have such a good crossing as Mr. Fearing. Whether it
was that the discharge from the city was deeper and fouler, or that the
day was darker, or what, we are not told, but both Christian and Pliable
were in a moment out of sight in the slough. They both wallowed, says
their plain-spoken historian, in the slough, only the one of the two who
had the burden on his back at every wallow went deeper into the mire;
when his neighbour, who had no such burden, instead of coming to his
assistance, got out of the slough at the same side as he had entered it,
and made with all his might for his own house. But the man called
Christian made what way he could, and still tumbled on to the side of the
slough that was farthest from his own house, till a man called Help gave
him his hand and set him upon sound ground. Christiana, again, and Mercy
and the boys found the slough in a far worse condition than it had ever
been found before. And the reason was not that the country that drained
into the slough was worse, but that those who had the mending of the
slough and the keeping in repair of the steps had so bungled their work
that they had marred the way instead of mending it. At the same time, by
the tact and good sense of Mercy, the whole party got over, Mercy
remarking to the mother of the boys, that if she had as good ground to
hope for a loving reception at the gate as Christiana had, no slough of
despond would discourage her, she said. To which the older woman made
the characteristic reply: 'You know your sore and I know mine, and we
shall both have enough evil to face before we come to our journey's end.'
Now, I do not for a moment suppose that there is any one here who can
need to be told what the Slough of Despond in reality is. Indeed, its
very name sufficiently declares it. But if any one should still be at a
loss to understand this terrible experience of all the pilgrims, the
explanation offered by the good man who gave Christian his hand may here
be repeated. 'This miry slough,' he said, 'is such a place as cannot be
mended. This slough is the descent whither the scum and filth that
attends conviction of sin doth continually run, and therefore it is
called by the name of Despond, for still as the sinner is awakened about
his lost condition there ariseth in his soul many fears and doubts and
discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in
this place, and this is the reason of the badness of the ground.' That
is the parable, with its interpretation; but there is a passage in _Grace
Abounding_ which is no parable, and which may even better than this so
pictorial slough describe some men's condition here. 'My original and
inward pollution,' says Bunyan himself in his autobiography, 'that, that
was my plague and my affliction; that, I say, at a dreadful rate was
always putting itself forth within me; that I had the guilt of to
amazement; by reason of that I was more loathsome in my own eyes than a
toad; and I thought I was so in God's eyes also. Sin and corruption
would bubble up out of my heart as naturally as water bubbles up out of a
fountain. I thought now that every one had a better heart than I had. I
could have changed heart with anybody. I thought none but the devil
himself could equalise me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. I
fell, therefore, at the sight of my own vileness, deeply into despair,
for I concluded that this condition in which I was in could not stand
with a life of grace. Sure, thought I, I am forsaken of God; sure I am
given up to the devil, and to a reprobate mind.'
'Let no man, then, count me a fable maker,
Nor made my name and credit a partaker
Of their derision: what is here in view,
Of mine own knowledge I dare say is true.'
Sometimes, as with Christian at the slough, a man's way in life is all
slashed up into sudden ditches and pitfalls out of the sins of his youth.
His sins, by God's grace, find him out, and under their arrest and
overthrow he begins to seek his way to a better life and a better world;
and then both the burden and the slough have their explanation and
fulfilment in his own life every day. But it is even more dreadful than
a slough in a man's way to have a slough in his mind, as both Bunyan
himself and Mr. Fearing, his exquisite creation, had. After the awful-
enough slough, filled with the guilt and fear of actual sin, had been
bridged and crossed and left behind, a still worse slough of inward
corruption and pollution rose up in John Bunyan's soul and threatened to
engulf him altogether. So terrible to Bunyan was this experience, that
he has not thought it possible to make a parable of it, and so put it
into the _Pilgrim_; he has kept it rather for the plain, direct,
unpictured, personal testimony of the _Grace Abounding_. I do not know
another passage anywhere to compare with the eighty-fourth paragraph of
_Grace Abounding_ for hope and encouragement to a great inward sinner
under a great inward sanctification. I commend that powerful passage to
the appropriation of any man here who may have stuck fast in the Slough
of Despond to-day, and who could not on that account come to the Lord's
Table. Let him still struggle out at the side of the slough farthest
from his own house, and to-night, who can tell, Help may come and give
that man his hand. When the Slough of Despond is drained, and its bottom
laid bare, what a find of all kinds of precious treasures shall be laid
bare! Will you be able to lay claim to any of it when the long-lost
treasure-trove is distributed by command of the King to its rightful
owners?
'What are you doing there?' the man whose name was Help demanded of
Christian, as he still wallowed and plunged to the hither side of the
slough, 'and why did you not look for the steps?' And so saying he set
Christian's feet upon sound ground again, and showed him the nearest way
to the gate. Help is one of the King's officers who are planted all
along the way to the Celestial City, in order to assist and counsel all
pilgrims. Evangelist was one of those officers; this Help is another;
Goodwill will be another, unless, indeed, he is more than a mere officer;
Interpreter will be another, and Greatheart, and so on. All these are
preachers and pastors and evangelists who correspond to all those names
and all their offices. Only some unhappy preachers are better at pushing
poor pilgrims into the slough, and pushing them down to the bottom of it,
than they are at helping a sinking pilgrim out; while some other more
happy preachers and pastors have their manses built at the hither side of
the slough and do nothing else all their days but help pilgrims out of
their slough and direct them to the gate. And then there are multitudes
of so-called ministers who eat the King's bread who can neither push a
proud sinner into the slough nor help a prostrate sinner out of it; no,
nor point him the way when he has himself wallowed out. And then, there
are men called ministers, too, who also eat the King's bread, whose voice
you never hear in connection with such matters, unless it be to revile
both the pilgrims and their helpers, and all who run with fear and
trembling up the heavenly road. But our pilgrim was happy enough to meet
with a minister to whom he could look back all his remaining pilgrimage
and say: 'He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry
clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. And he
hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise to our God.'
Now, as might have been expected, there is a great deal said about all
kinds of help in the Bible. After the help of God, of which the Bible
and especially the more experimental Psalms are full, this fine name is
then applied to many Scriptural persons, and on many Scriptural
occasions. The first woman whom God Almighty made bore from her Maker to
her husband this noble name. Her Father, so to speak, gave her away
under this noble name. And of all the sweet and noble names that a woman
bears, there is none so rich, so sweet, so lasting, and so fruitful as
just her first Divine name of a helpmeet. And how favoured of God is
that man to be accounted whose life still continues to draw meet help out
of his wife's fulness of help, till all her and his days together he is
able to say, I have of God a helpmeet indeed! For in how many sloughs do
many men lie till this daughter of Help gives them her hand, and out of
how many more sloughs are they all their days by her delivered and kept!
Sweet, maidenly, and most sensible Mercy was a great help to widow
Christiana at the slough, and to her and her sons all the way up to the
river--a very present help in many a need to her future mother-in-law and
her pilgrim sons. Let every young man seek his future wife of God, and
let him seek her of her Divine Father under that fine, homely, divine
name. For God, who knoweth what we have need of before we ask Him, likes
nothing better than to make a helpmeet for those who so ask Him, and
still to bring the woman to the man under that so spouse-like name.
'What next I bring shall please thee, be assured,
Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self,
Thy wish exactly to thy heart's desire.'
And then when the apostle is making an enumeration of the various offices
and agencies in the New Testament church of his day, after apostles and
teachers and gifts of healing, he says, 'helps,'--assistants, that is,
succourers, especially of the sick and the aged and the poor. And we do
not read that either election or ordination was needed to make any given
member of the apostolic church a helper. But we do read of helpers being
found by the apostle among all classes and conditions of that rich and
living church; both sexes, all ages, and all descriptions of church
members bore this fine apostolic name. 'Salute Urbane, our helper in
Christ . . . Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my helpers in Christ.' And both
Paul and John and all the apostles were forward to confess in their
epistles how much they owed of their apostolic success, as well as of
their personal comfort and joy, to the helpers, both men and women, their
Lord had blessed them with.
Now, the most part of us here to-night have been at the Lord's Table to-
day. We kept our feet firm on the steps as we skirted or crossed the
slough that self-examination always fills and defiles for us before every
new communion. And before our Lord let us rise from His Table this
morning. He again said to us: 'Ye call Me Master and Lord, and ye say
well, for so I am. If I then have given you My hand, and have helped
you, ye ought also to help one another.' Who, then, any more will
withhold such help as it is in his power to give to a sinking brother?
And you do not need to go far afield seeking the slough of desponding,
despairing, drowning men. This whole world is full of such sloughs.
There is scarce sound ground enough in this world on which to build a
slough-watcher's tower. And after it is built, the very tower itself is
soon stained and blinded with the scudding slime. Where are your eyes,
and full of what? Do you not see sloughs full of sinking men at your
very door; ay, and inside of your best built and best kept house? Your
very next neighbour; nay, your own flesh and blood, if they have nothing
else of Greatheart's most troublesome pilgrim about them, have at least
this, that they carry about a slough with them in their own mind and in
their own heart. Have you only henceforth a heart and a hand to help,
and see if hundreds of sinking hearts do not cry out your name, and
hundreds of slimy hands grasp at your stretched-out arm. Sloughs of all
kinds of vice, open and secret; sloughs of poverty, sloughs of youthful
ignorance, temptation, and transgression; sloughs of inward gloom, family
disquiet and dispute; lonely grief; all manner of sloughs, deep and miry,
where no man would suspect them. And how good, how like Christ Himself,
and how well-pleasing to Him to lay down steps for such sliding feet, and
to lift out another and another human soul upon sound and solid ground.
'Know ye what I have done to you? For I have given you an example, that
ye should do as I have done to you. If ye know these things, happy are
ye if ye do them.'
MR. WORLDLY-WISEMAN
'Wise in this world.'--Paul.
Mr. Worldly-Wiseman has a long history behind him on which we cannot now
enter at any length. As a child, the little worldling, it was observed,
took much after his secular father, but much more after his scheming
mother. He was already a self-seeking, self-satisfied youth; and when he
became a man and began business for himself, no man's business flourished
like his. 'Nothing of news,' says his biographer in another place,
'nothing of doctrine, nothing of alteration or talk of alteration could
at any time be set on foot in the town but be sure Mr. Worldly-Wiseman
would be at the head or tail of it. But, to be sure, he would always
decline those he deemed to be the weakest, and stood always with those,
in his way of thinking, that he supposed were the strongest side.' He
was a man, it was often remarked, of but one book also. Sunday and
Saturday he was to be found deep in _The Architect of Fortune_; _or_,
_Advancement in Life_, a book written by its author so as to 'come home
to all men's business and bosoms.' He drove over scrupulously once a
Sunday to the State church, of which he was one of the most determined
pillars. He had set his mind on being Lord Mayor of the town before
long, and he was determined that his eldest son should be called Sir
Worldly-Wiseman after him, and he chose his church accordingly. Another
of his biographers in this connection wrote of him thus: 'Our Lord Mayor
parted his religion betwixt his conscience and his purse, and he went to
church not to serve God, but to please the king. The face of the law
made him wear the mask of the Gospel, which he used not as a means to
save his soul, but his charges.' Such, in a short word, was this
'sottish man' who crossed over the field to meet with our pilgrim when he
was walking solitary by himself after his escape from the slough.
'How now, good fellow? Whither away after this burdened manner?' What a
contrast those two men were to one another in the midst of that plain
that day! Our pilgrim was full of the most laborious going; sighs and
groans rose out of his heart at every step; and then his burden on his
back, and his filthy, slimy rags all made him a picture such that it was
to any man's credit and praise that he should stop to speak to him. And
then, when our pilgrim looked up, he saw a gentleman standing beside him
to whom he was ashamed to speak. For the gentleman had no burden on his
back, and he did not go over the plain laboriously. There was not a spot
or a speck, a rent or a wrinkle on all his fine raiment. He could not
have been better appointed if he had just stepped out of the gate at the
head of the way; they can wear no cleaner garments than his in the
Celestial City itself. 'How now, good fellow? Whither away after this
burdened manner?' 'A burdened manner, indeed, as ever I think poor
creature had. And whereas you ask me whither away, I tell you, sir, I am
going to yonder wicket gate before me; for there, as I am informed, I
shall be put into a way to be rid of my heavy burden.' 'Hast thou a wife
and children?' Yes; he is ashamed to say that he has. But he confesses
that he cannot to-day take the pleasure in them that he used to do. Since
his sin so came upon him, he is sometimes as if he had neither wife nor
child nor a house over his head. John Bunyan was of Samuel Rutherford's
terrible experience,--that our sins and our sinfulness poison all our
best enjoyments. We do not hear much of Rutherford's wife and children,
and that, no doubt, for the sufficient reason that he gives us in his so
open-minded letter. But Bunyan laments over his blind child with a
lament worthy to stand beside the lament of David over Absalom, and again
over Saul and Jonathan at Mount Gilboa. At the same time, John Bunyan
often felt sore and sad at heart that he could not love and give all his
heart to his wife and children as they deserved to be loved and to have
all his heart. He often felt guilty as he looked on them and knew in
himself that they did not have in him such a father as, God knew, he
wished he was, or ever in this world could hope to be. 'Yes,' he said,
'but I cannot take the pleasure in them that I would. I am sometimes as
if I had none. My sin sometimes drives me like a man bereft of his
reason and clean demented.' 'Who bid thee go this way to be rid of thy
burden? I beshrew him for his counsel. There is not a more troublesome
and dangerous way in the world than this is to which he hath directed
thee. And besides, though I used to have some of the same burden when I
was young, not since I settled in that town,' pointing to the town of
Carnal-Policy over the plain, 'have I been at any time troubled in that
way.' And then he went on to describe and denounce the way to the
Celestial City, and he did it like a man who had been all over it, and
had come back again. His alarming description of the upward way reads to
us like a page out of Job, or Jeremiah, or David, or Paul. 'Hear me,' he
says, 'for I am older than thou. Thou art like to meet with in the way
which thou goest wearisomeness, painfulness, hunger, perils, nakedness,
sword, lions, dragons, darkness, and in a word, death, and what not.' You
would think that you were reading the eighth of the Romans at the thirty-
fifth verse; only Mr. Worldly-Wiseman does not go on to finish the
chapter. He does not go on to add, 'I am persuaded that neither death,
nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall
be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ our
Lord.' No; Worldly-Wiseman never reads the Romans, and he never hears a
sermon on that chapter when he goes to church.
Mr. Worldly-Wiseman became positively eloquent and impressive and all but
convincing as he went so graphically and cumulatively over all the
sorrows that attended on the way to which this pilgrim was now setting
his face. But, staggering as it all was, the man in rags and slime only
smiled a sad and sobbing smile in answer, and said: 'Why, sir, this
burden upon my back is far more terrible to me than all the things which
you have mentioned; nay, methinks I care not what I meet with in the way,
so be I can also meet with deliverance from my burden.' This is what our
Lord calls a pilgrim having the root of the matter in himself. This poor
soul had by this time so much wearisomeness, painfulness, hunger, perils,
nakedness, sword, lions, dragons, darkness, death, and what not in
himself, that all these threatened things outside of himself were but so
many bugbears and hobgoblins wherewith to terrify children; they were but
things to be laughed at by every man who is in ernest in the way. 'I
care not what else I meet with if only I also meet with deliverance.'
There speaks the true pilgrim. There speaks the man who drew down the
Son of God to the cross for that man's deliverance. There speaks the
man, who, mire, and rags, and burdens and all, will yet be found in the
heaven of heavens where the chief of sinners shall see their Deliverer
face to face, and shall at last and for ever be like Him. Peter examined
Dante in heaven on faith, James examined him on hope, and John took him
through his catechism on love, and the seer came out of the tent with a
laurel crown on his brow. I do not know who the examiner on sin will be,
but, speaking for myself on this matter, I would rather take my degree in
that subject than in all the other subjects set for a sinner's
examination on earth or in heaven. For to know myself, and especially,
as the wise man says, to know the plague of my own heart, is the true and
the only key to all other true knowledge: God and man; the Redeemer and
the devil; heaven and hell; faith, hope, and charity; unbelief, despair,
and malignity, and all things of that kind else, all knowledge will come
to that man who knows himself, and to that man alone, and to that man in
the exact measure in which he does really know himself. Listen again to
this slough-stained, sin-burdened, sighing and sobbing pilgrim, who, in
spite of all these things--nay, in virtue of all these things--is as sure
of heaven and of the far end of heaven as if he were already enthroned
there. 'Wearisomeness,' he protests, 'painfulness, hunger, perils,
nakedness, sword, lions, dragons, darkness, death, and what not--why,
sir, this burden on my back is far more terrible to me than all these
things which you have mentioned; nay, methinks I care not what I meet
with in the way, so be I can also meet with deliverance from my burden.'
O God! let this same mind be found in me and in all the men and women for
whose souls I shall have to answer at the day of judgment, and I shall be
content and safe before Thee.
That strong outburst from this so forfoughten man for a moment quite
overawed Worldly-Wiseman. He could not reply to an earnestness like
this. He did not understand it, and could not account for it. The only
thing he ever was in such earnestness as that about was his success in
business and his title that he and his wife were scheming for. But
still, though silenced by this unaccountable outburst of our pilgrim,
Worldly-Wiseman's enmity against the upward way, and especially against
all the men and all the books that made pilgrims take to that way, was
not silenced. 'How camest thou by thy burden at first?' By reading this
Book in my hand.' Worldly-Wiseman did not fall foul of the Book indeed,
but he fell all the more foul of those who meddled with matters they had
not a head for. 'Leave these high and deep things for the ministers who
are paid to understand and explain them, and attend to matters more
within thy scope.' And then he went on to tell of a far better way to
get rid of the burden that meddlesome men brought on themselves by
reading that book too much--a far better and swifter way than attempting
the wicket-gate. 'Thou wilt never be settled in thy mind till thou art
rid of that burden, nor canst thou enjoy the blessings of wife and child
as long as that burden lies so heavy upon thee.' That was so true that
it made the pilgrim look up. A gentleman who can speak in that true
style must know more than he says about such burdens as this of mine;
and, after all, he may be able, who knows, to give me some good advice in
my great straits. 'Pray, sir, open this secret to me, for I sorely stand
in need of good counsel.' Let him here who has no such burden as this
poor pilgrim had cast the first stone at Christian; I cannot. If one who
looked like a gentleman came to me to-night and told me how I would on
the spot get to a peace of conscience never to be lost again, and how I
would get a heart to-night that would never any more plague and pollute
me, I would be mightily tempted to forget what all my former teachers had
told me and try this new Gospel. And especially if the gentleman said
that the remedy was just at hand. 'Pray, sir,' said the breathless and
spiritless man, 'wilt thou, then, open this secret to me?'
The wit and the humour and the satire of the rest of the scene must be
fully enjoyed over the great book itself. The village named Morality,
hard by the hill; that judicious man Legality, who dwells in the first
house you come at after you have turned the hill; Civility, the pretty
young man that Legality hath to his son; the hospitality of the village;
the low rents and the cheap provisions, and all the charities and
amenities of the place,--all together make up such a picture as you
cannot get anywhere out of John Bunyan. And then the pilgrim's stark
folly in entering into Worldly-Wiseman's secret; his horror as the hill
began to thunder and lighten and threaten to fall upon him; the sudden
descent of Evangelist; and then the plain-spoken words that passed
between the preacher and the pilgrim,--don't say again that the poorest
of the Puritans were without letters, or that they had not their own
esoteric writings full of fun and frolic; don't say that again till you
are a pilgrim yourself, and have our John Bunyan for one of your classics
by heart.
We are near an end, but before you depart, stand still a little, as
Evangelist said to Christian, that I may show you the words of God. And
first, watch yourselves well, for you all have a large piece of this
worldly-wise man in yourselves. You all take something of some ancestor,
remote or immediate, who was wise only for this world. Yes, to be sure,
for you still decline as they did, and desert as they did, those you deem
to be the weakest, and stand with those that you suppose to be the
strongest side. _The Architect of Fortune_ is perhaps too strong meat
for your stomach; but still, if you ever light upon its powerful pages,
you will surely blush in secret to see yourself turned so completely
inside out. You may not have chosen your church wholly with an eye to
your shop; but you must admit that you see as good and better men than
you are doing that every day. And it is a sure sign to you that you do
not yet know the plague of your own heart, unless you know yourself to be
a man more set upon the position and the praise that this world gives
than you yet are on the position and the praise that come from God only.
Set a watch on your own worldly heart. Watch and pray, lest you also
enter into all Worldly-Wiseman's temptation. This is one of the words of
God to you.
Another word of God is this. The way of the cross, said severe
Evangelist, is odious to every worldly-wise man; while, all the time, it
is the only way there is, and there never will be any other way to
eternal life. The only way to life is the way of the cross. There are
two crosses, indeed, on the way to the Celestial City; there is, first,
the Cross of Christ, once for you, and then there is your cross daily for
Christ, and it takes both crosses to secure and to assure any man that he
is on the right road, and that he will come at last to the right end.
'The Christian's great conquest over the world,' says William Law, 'is
all contained in the mystery of Christ upon the cross. And true
Christianity is nothing else but an entire and absolute conformity to
that spirit which Christ showed in the mysterious sacrifice of Himself
upon the cross. Every man is only so far a Christian as he partakes of
this same spirit of Christ--the same suffering spirit, the same sacrifice
of himself, the same renunciation of the world, the same humility and
meekness, the same patient bearing of injuries, reproaches, and
contempts, the same dying to all the greatness, honours, and happiness of
this world that Christ showed on the cross. We also are to suffer, to be
crucified, to die, to rise with Christ, or else His crucifixion, His
death, and His resurrection will profit us nothing. 'This is the second
word of God unto thee. And the third thing to-night is this, that though
thy sin be very great, though thou hast a past life round thy neck enough
to sink thee for ever out of the sight of God and all good men; a youth
of sensuality now long and closely cloaked over with an after life of
worldly prosperity, worldly decency, and worldly religion, all which only
makes thee that whited sepulchre that Christ has in His eye when He
speaks of thee with such a severe and dreadful countenance; yet if thou
confess thyself to be all the whited sepulchre He sees thee to be, and
yet knock at His gate in all thy rags and slime, He will immediately lay
aside that severe countenance and will show thee all His goodwill.
Notwithstanding all that thou hast done, and all thou still art, He will
not deny His own words, or do otherwise than at once fulfil them all to
thee. Ask, then, and it shall be given thee; seek, and thou shalt find;
knock, and it shall be opened unto thee. And with a great goodwill, He
will say to those that stand by Him, Take away the filthy garments from
him. And to thee He will say, Behold, I have caused all thine iniquity
to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment.
GOODWILL, THE GATEKEEPER
'Goodwill.'--Luke 2. 14.
'So in process of time Christian got up to the gate. Now there was
written over the gate, _Knock_, _and it shall be opened unto you_. He
knocked, therefore, more than once or twice, saying, May I now enter
here? when at last there came a grave person to the gate, named Goodwill,
who asked him who was there?' The gravity of the gatekeeper was the
first thing that struck the pilgrim. And it was the same thing that so
struck some of the men who saw most of our Lord that they handed down to
their children the true tradition that He was often seen in tears, but
that no one had ever seen or heard Him laugh. The prophecy in the
prophet concerning our Lord was fulfilled to the letter. He was indeed a
man of sorrows, and He early and all His life long had a close
acquaintance with grief. Our Lord had come into this world on a very sad
errand. We are so stupefied and besotted with sin, that we have no
conception how sad an errand our Lord had been sent on, and how sad a
task He soon discovered it to be. To be a man without sin, a man hating
sin, and hating nothing else but sin, and yet to have to spend all His
days in a world lying in sin, and in the end to have all that world of
sin laid upon Him till He was Himself made sin,--how sad a task was that!
Great, no doubt, as was the joy that was set before our Lord, and sure as
He was of one day entering on that joy, yet the daily sight of so much
sin in all men around Him, and the cross and the shame that lay right
before Him, made Him, in spite of the future joy, all the Man of Sorrow
Isaiah had said He would be, and made light-mindedness and laughter
impossible to our Lord,--as it is, indeed, to all men among ourselves who
have anything of His mind about this present world and the sin of this
world, they also are men of sorrow, and of His sorrow. They, too, are
acquainted with grief. Their tears, like His, will never be wiped off in
this world. They will not laugh with all their heart till they laugh
where He now laughs. Then it will be said of them, too, that they began
to be merry. 'What was the matter with you that you did laugh in your
sleep last night? asked Christiana of Mercy in the morning. I suppose
you were in a dream. So I was, said Mercy, but are you sure that I
laughed? Yes, you laughed heartily; but, prithee, Mercy, tell me thy
dream. Well, I dreamed that I was in a solitary place and all alone, and
was there bemoaning the hardness of my heart, when methought I saw one
coming with wings towards me. So he came directly to me, and said,
Mercy, what aileth thee? Now, when he heard my complaint, he said, Peace
be to thee. He also wiped mine eyes with his handkerchief, and clad me
in silver and gold; he put a chain about my neck also, and earrings in
mine ears, and a beautiful crown upon my head. So he went up. I
followed him till we came to a golden gate; and I thought I saw your
husband there. But did I laugh? Laugh! ay, and well you might, to see
yourself so well.'
But to return and begin again. Goodwill, who opened the gate, was, as we
saw, a person of a very grave and commanding aspect; so much so, that in
his sudden joy our pilgrim was a good deal overawed as he looked on the
countenance of the man who stood in the gate, and it was some time
afterwards before he understood why he wore such a grave and almost sad
aspect. But afterwards, as he went up the way, and sometimes returned in
thought to the wicket-gate, he came to see very good reason why the
keeper of that gate looked as he did look. The site and situation of the
gate, for one thing, was of itself enough to banish all light-mindedness
from the man who was stationed there. For the gatehouse stood just above
the Slough of Despond, and that itself filled the air of the place with a
dampness and a depression that could be felt. And then out of the
downward windows of the gate, the watcher's eye always fell on the City
of Destruction in the distance, and on her sister cities sitting like her
daughters round about her. And that also made mirth and hilarity
impossible at that gate. And then the kind of characters who came
knocking all hours of the day and the night at that gate. Goodwill never
saw a happy face or heard a cheerful voice from one year's end to the
other. And when any one so far forgot himself as to put on an untimely
confidence and self-satisfaction, the gatekeeper would soon put him
through such questions as quickly sobered him if he had anything at all
of the root of the matter in him. Terror, horror, despair, remorse,
chased men and women up to that gate. They would often fall before his
threshold more dead than alive. And then, after the gate was opened and
the pilgrims pulled in, the gate had only opened on a path of such
painfulness, toil, and terrible risk, that at whatever window Goodwill
looked out, he always saw enough to make him and keep him a grave, if not
a sad, man. It was, as he sometimes said, his meat and his drink to keep
the gate open for pilgrims; but the class of men who came calling
themselves pilgrims; the condition they came in; the past, that in spite
of all both he and they could do, still came in through his gate after
them, and went up all the way with them; their ignorance of the way, on
which he could only start them; the multitudes who started, and the
handfuls who held on; the many who for a time ran well, but afterwards
left their bones to bleach by the wayside; and all the impossible-to-be-
told troubles, dangers, sorrows, shipwrecks that certainly lay before the
most steadfast and single-hearted pilgrim--all that was more than enough
to give the man at the gate his grave and anxious aspect.
Not that his great gravity, with all the causes of it, ever made him a
melancholy, a morose, a despairing, or even a desponding man. Far from
that. The man of sorrows Himself sometimes rejoiced in spirit. Not
sometimes only, but often He lifted up His heart and thanked His Father
for the work His Father had given Him to do, and for the success that had
been granted to Him in the doing of it. And as often as He looked
forward to the time when he should finish His work and receive His
discharge, and return to His Father's house, at the thought of that He
straightway forgot all His present sorrows. And somewhat so was it with
Goodwill at his gate. No man could be but at bottom happy, and even
joyful, who had a post like his to occupy, a gate like his to keep, and,
altogether, a work like his to do. No man with his name and his nature
can ever in any circumstances be really unhappy. 'Happiness is the bloom
that always lies on a life of true goodness,' and this gatehouse was full
of the happiness that follows on and always dwells with true goodness.
Goodwill cannot have more happiness till he shuts in his last pilgrim
into the Celestial City, and then himself enters in after him as a
shepherd after a lost sheep.
The happy, heavenly, divine disposition of the gatekeeper was such, that
it overflowed from the pilgrim who stood beside him and descended upon
his wife and children who remained behind him in the doomed city. So
full of love was the gatekeeper's heart, that it ran out upon Obstinate
and Pliable also. His heart was so large and so hospitable, that he was
not satisfied with one pilgrim received and assisted that day. How is
it, he asked, that you have come here alone? Did any of your neighbours
know of your coming? And why did he who came so far not come through?
Alas, poor man, said Goodwill, is the celestial glory of so little esteem
with him that he counteth it not worth running the hazards of a few
difficulties to obtain it? Our pilgrim got a lifelong lesson in goodwill
to all men at that gate that day. The gatekeeper showed such deep and
patient and genuine interest in all the pilgrim's past history, and in
all his family and personal affairs, that Christian all his days could
never show impatience, or haste, or lack of interest in the most long-
winded and egotistical pilgrim he ever met. He always remembered, when
he was becoming impatient, how much of his precious time and of his
loving attention his old friend Goodwill had given to him. Our pilgrim
got tired of talking about himself long before Goodwill had ceased to ask
questions and to listen to the answers. So much was Christian taken with
the courtesy and the kindness of Goodwill, that had it not been for his
crushing burden, he would have offered to remain in Goodwill's house to
run his errands, to light his fires, and to sweep his floors. So much
was he taken captive with Goodwill's extraordinary kindness and unwearied
attention. And since he could not remain at the gate, but must go on to
the city of all goodwill itself, our pilgrim set himself all his days to
copy this gatekeeper when he met with any fellow-pilgrim who had any
story that he wished to tell. And many were the lonely and forgotten
souls that Christian cheered and helped on, not by his gold or his
silver, nor by anything else, but just by his open ear. To listen with
patience and with attention to a fellow-pilgrim's wrongs and sorrows, and
even his smallest interests, said this Christian to himself, is just what
Goodwill so winningly did to me.
With all his goodwill the grave gatekeeper could not say that the way to
the Celestial City was other than a narrow, a stringent, and a
heart-searching way. 'Come,' he said, 'and I will tell thee the way thou
must go.' There are many wide ways to hell, and many there be who crowd
them, but there is only one way to heaven, and you will sometimes think
you must have gone off it, there are so few companions; sometimes there
will be only one footprint, with here and there a stream of blood, and
always as you proceed, it becomes more and more narrow, till it strips a
man bare, and sometimes threatens to close upon him and crush him to the
earth altogether. Our Lord in as many words tells us all that. Strive,
He says, strive every day. For many shall seek to enter into the way of
salvation, but because they do not early enough, and long enough, and
painfully enough strive, they come short, and are shut out. Have you,
then, anything in your religious life that Christ will at last accept as
the striving He intended and demanded? Does your religion cause you any
real effort--Christ calls it _agony_? Have you ever had, do you ever
have, anything that He would so describe? What cross do you every day
take up? In what thing do you every day deny yourself? Name it. Put
your finger on it. Write it in cipher on the margin of your Bible. Would
the most liberal judgment be able to say of you that you have any fear
and trembling in the work of your salvation? If not, I am afraid there
must be some mistake somewhere. There must be great guilt somewhere. At
your parents' door, or at your minister's, or, if their hands are clean,
then at your own. Christ has made it plain to a proverb, and John Bunyan
has made it a nursery and a schoolboy story, that the way to heaven is
steep and narrow and lonely and perilous. And that, remember, not a few
of the first miles of the way, but all the way, and even through the dark
valley itself. 'Almost all that is said in the New Testament of men's
watching, giving earnest heed to themselves, running the race that is set
before them, striving and agonising, fighting, putting on the whole
armour of God, pressing forward, reaching forth, crying to God day and
night; I say, almost all that we have in the New Testament on these
subjects is spoken and directed to the saints. Where those things are
applied to sinners seeking salvation once, they are spoken of the saints'
prosecution of their salvation ten times' (Jonathan Edwards). If you
have a life at all like that, you will be sorely tempted to think that
such suffering and struggle, increasing rather than diminishing as life
goes on, is a sign that you are so bad as not to be a true Christian at
all. You will be tempted to think and say so. But all the time the
truth is, that he who has not that labouring, striving, agonising,
fearing, and trembling in himself, knows nothing at all about the
religion of Christ and the way to heaven; and if he thinks he does, then
that but proves him a hypocrite, a self-deceived, self-satisfied
hypocrite; there is not an ounce of a true Christian in him. Says Samuel
Rutherford on this matter: 'Christ commandeth His hearers to a strict and
narrow way, in mortifying heart-lusts, in loving our enemy, in feeding
him when he is hungry, in suffering for Christ's sake and the gospel's,
in bearing His cross, in denying ourselves, in becoming humble as
children, in being to all men and at all times meek and lowly in heart.'
Let any man lay all that intelligently and imaginatively alongside of his
own daily life. Let him name some such heart-lust. Let him name also
some enemy, and ask himself what it is to love that man, and to feed him
in his hunger; what it is in which he is called to suffer for Christ's
sake and the gospel's, in his reputation, in his property, in his
business, in his feelings. Let him put his finger on something in which
he is every day to deny himself, and to be humble and teachable, and to
keep himself out of sight like a little child; and if that man does not
find out how narrow and heart-searching the way to heaven is, he will be
the first who has so found his way thither. No, no; be not deceived.
Deceive not yourself, and let no man deceive you. God is not mocked,
neither are His true saints. 'Would to God I were back in my pulpit but
for one Sabbath,' said a dying minister in Aberdeen. 'What would you
do?' asked a brother minister at his bedside. 'I would preach to the
people the difficulty of salvation,' he said. All which things are told,
not for purposes of debate or defiance, but to comfort and instruct God's
true people who are finding salvation far more difficult than anybody had
ever told them it would be. Comfort My people, saith your God. Speak
comfortably to My people. Come, said Goodwill, and I will teach thee
about the way thou must go. Look before thee, dost thou see that narrow
way? That is the way thou must go. And then thou mayest always
distinguish the right way from the wrong. The wrong is crooked and wide,
and the right is straight as a rule can make it,--straight and narrow.
Goodwill said all that in order to direct and to comfort the pilgrim; but
that was not all that this good man said with that end. For, when
Christian asked him if he could not help him off with his burden that was
upon his back, he told him: 'As to thy burden, be content to bear it
until thou comest to the place of deliverance, for there it will fall
from thy back of itself.' Get you into the straight and narrow way, says
Goodwill, with his much experience of the ways and fortunes of true
pilgrims; get you sure into the right way, and leave your burden to God.
He appoints the place of deliverance, and it lies before thee. The place
of thy deliverance cannot be behind thee, and it is not in my house, else
thy burden would have been already off. But it is before thee. Be
earnest, therefore, in the way. Look not behind thee. Go not into any
crooked way; and one day, before you know, and when you are not pulling
at it, your burden will fall off of itself. Be content to bear it till
then, says bold and honest Goodwill, speaking so true to pilgrim
experience. Yes; be content, O ye people of God, crying with this
pilgrim for release from your burden of guilt, and no less those of you
who are calling with Paul for release from the still more bitter and
crushing burden made up of combined guilt and corruption. Be content
till the place and the time of deliverance; nay, even under your burden
and your bonds be glad, as Paul was, and go up the narrow way, still
chanting to yourself, I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. It is
only becoming that a great sinner should tarry the Lord's leisure; all
the more that the greatest sinner may be sure the Lord will come, and
will not tarry. The time is long, but the thing is sure.
And now two lessons from Goodwill's gate:--
1. The gate was shut when Christian came up to it, and no one was
visible anywhere about it. The only thing visible was the writing over
the gate which told all pilgrims to knock. Now, when we come up to the
same gate we are disappointed and discouraged that the gatekeeper is not
standing already upon his doorstep and his arms round our neck. We knelt
to-day in secret prayer, and there was only our bed or our chair visible
before us. There was no human being, much less to all appearance any
Divine Presence, in the place. And we prayed a short, indeed, but a not
unearnest prayer, and then we rose up and came away disappointed because
no one appeared. But look at him who is now inheriting the promises. He
knocked, says his history, more than once or twice. That is to say, he
did not content himself with praying one or two seconds and then giving
over, but he continued in prayer till the gatekeeper came. And as he
knocked, he said, so loud and so impatient that all those in the
gatehouse could hear him,
'May I now enter here? Will he within
Open to sorry me, though I have been
A wandering rebel? Then shall I
Not fail to sing his lasting praise on high.'
2. 'We make no objections against any,' said Goodwill; 'notwithstanding
all that they have done before they come hither, they are in no wise cast
out.' He told me all things that ever I did, said the woman of Samaria,
telling her neighbours about our Lord's conversation with her. And,
somehow, there was something in the gatekeeper's words that called back
to Christian, if not all the things he had ever done, yet from among them
the worst things he had ever done. They all rose up black as hell before
his eyes as the gatekeeper did not name them at all, but only said
'notwithstanding all that thou hast done.' Christian never felt his past
life so black, or his burden so heavy, or his heart so broken, as when
Goodwill just said that one word 'notwithstanding.' 'We make no
objections against any; notwithstanding all that they have done before
they come hither, they are in no wise cast out.'
THE INTERPRETER
'An interpreter, one among a thousand.'--Elihu.
We come to-night to the Interpreter's House. And since every minister of
the gospel is an interpreter, and every evangelical church is an
interpreter's house, let us gather up some of the precious lessons to
ministers and to people with which this passage of the _Pilgrim's
Progress_ so much abounds.
1. In the first place, then, I observe that the House of the Interpreter
stands just beyond the Wicket Gate. In the whole topography of the
_Pilgrim's Progress_ there lies many a deep lesson. The church that Mr.
Worldly-Wiseman supported, and on the communion roll of which he was so
determined to have our pilgrim's so unprepared name, stood far down on
the other side of Goodwill's gate. It was a fine building, and it had an
eloquent man for its minister, and the whole service was an attraction
and an enjoyment to all the people of the place; but our Interpreter was
never asked to show any of his significant things there; and, indeed,
neither minister nor people would have understood him had he ever done
so. And had any of the parishioners from below the gate ever by any
chance stumbled into the Interpreter's house, his most significant rooms
would have had no significance to them. Both he and his house would have
been a mystery and an offence to Worldly-Wiseman, his minister, and his
fellow-worshippers. John Bunyan has the clear warrant both of Jesus
Christ and the Apostle Paul for the place on which he has planted the
Interpreter's house. 'It is given to you,' said our Lord to His
disciples, 'to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to them
it is not given.' And Paul tells us that 'the natural man receiveth not
the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him:
neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.' And,
accordingly, no reader of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ will really understand
what he sees in the Interpreter's House, unless he is already a man of a
spiritual mind. Intelligent children enjoy the pictures and the people
that are set before them in this illustrated house, but they must become
the children of God, and must be well on in the life of God, before they
will be able to say that the house next the gate has been a profitable
and a helpful house to them. All that is displayed here--all the
furniture and all the vessels, all the ornaments and all the employments
and all the people of the Interpreter's House--is fitted and intended to
be profitable as well as interesting to pilgrims only. No man has any
real interest in the things of this house, or will take any abiding
profit out of it, till he is fairly started on the upward road. In his
former life, and while still on the other side of the gate, our pilgrim
had no interest in such things as he is now to see and hear; and if he
had seen and heard them in his former life, he would not, with all the
Interpreter's explanation, have understood them. As here among ourselves
to-night, they who will understand and delight in the things they hear in
this house to-night are those only who have really begun to live a
religious life. The realities of true religion are now the most real
things in life--to them; they love divine things now; and since they
began to love divine things, you cannot entertain them better than by
exhibiting and explaining divine things to them. There is no house in
all the earth, after the gate itself, that is more dear to the true
pilgrim heart than just the Interpreter's House. 'I was glad when it was
said to me, Let us go into the house of the Lord. Peace be within thy
walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.'
2. And besides being built on the very best spot in all the land for its
owner's purposes, every several room in that great house was furnished
and fitted up for the entertainment and instruction of pilgrims. Every
inch of that capacious and many-chambered house was given up to the
delectation of pilgrims. The public rooms were thrown open for their
convenience and use at all hours of the day and night, and the private
rooms were kept retired and secluded for such as sought retirement and
seclusion. There were dark rooms also with iron cages in them, till
Christian and his companions came out of those terrible places, bringing
with them an everlasting caution to watchfulness and a sober mind. There
were rooms also given up to vile and sordid uses. One room there was
full of straws and sticks and dust, with an old man who did nothing else
day nor night but wade about among the straws and sticks and dust, and
rake it all into little heaps, and then sit watching lest any one should
overturn them. And then, strange to tell it, and not easy to get to the
full significance of it, the bravest room in all the house had absolutely
nothing in it but a huge, ugly, poisonous spider hanging to the wall with
her hands. 'Is there but one spider in all this spacious room?' asked
the Interpreter. And the water stood in Christiana's eyes; she had come
by this time thus far on her journey also. She was a woman of a quick
apprehension, and the water stood in her eyes at the Interpreter's
question, and she said: 'Yes, Lord, there is here more than one. Yea,
and spiders whose venom is far more destructive than that which is in
her.' The Interpreter then looked pleasantly on her, and said: 'Thou
hast said the truth.' This made Mercy blush, and the boys to cover their
faces, for they all began now to understand the riddle. 'This is to show
you,' said the Interpreter, 'that however full of the venom of sin you
may be, yet you may, by the hand of faith, lay hold of, and dwell in the
best room that belongs to the King's House above.' Then they all seemed
to be glad, but the water stood in their eyes. A wall also stood apart
on the grounds of the house with an always dying fire on one side of it,
while a man on the other side of the wall continually fed the fire
through hidden openings in the wall. A whole palace stood also on the
grounds, the inspection of which so kindled our pilgrim's heart, that he
refused to stay here any longer, or to see any more sights--so much had
he already seen of the evil of sin and of the blessedness of salvation.
Not that he had seen as yet the half of what that house held for the
instruction of pilgrims. Only, time would fail us to visit the hen and
her chickens; the butcher killing a sheep and pulling her skin over her
ears, and she lying still under his hands and taking her death patiently;
also the garden with the flowers all diverse in stature, and quality, and
colour, and smell, and virtue, and some better than some, and all where
the gardener had set them, there they stand, and quarrel not with one
another. The robin-red-breast also, so pretty of note and colour and
carriage, but instead of bread and crumbs, and such like harmless matter,
with a great spider in his mouth. A tree also, whose inside was rotten,
and yet it grew and had leaves. So they went on their way and sang:
'This place hath been our second stage,
Here have we heard and seen
Those good things that from age to age
To others hid have been.
The butcher, garden, and the field,
The robin and his bait,
Also the rotten tree, doth yield
Me argument of weight;
To move me for to watch and pray,
To strive to be sincere,
To take my cross up day by day,
And serve the Lord with few.'
The significant rooms of that divine house instruct us also that all the
lessons requisite for our salvation are not to be found in any one
scripture or in any one sermon, but that all that is required by any
pilgrim or any company of pilgrims should all be found in every
minister's ministry as he leads his flock on from one Sabbath-day to
another, rightly dividing the word of truth. Our ministers should have
something in their successive sermons for everybody. Something for the
children, something for the slow-witted and the dull of understanding,
and something specially suited for those who are of a quick apprehension;
something at one time to make the people smile, at another time to make
them blush, and at another time to make the water stand in their eyes.
3. And, then, the Interpreter's life was as full of work as his house
was of entertainment and instruction. Not only so, but his life, it was
well known, had been quite as full of work before he had a house to work
for as ever it had been since. The Interpreter did nothing else but
continually preside over his house and all that was in it and around it,
and it was all gone over and seen to with his own eyes and hands every
day. He had been present at the laying of every stone and beam of that
solid and spacious house of his. There was not a pin nor a loop of its
furniture, there was not a picture on its walls, nor a bird nor a beast
in its woods and gardens, that he did not know all about and could not
hold discourse about. And then, after he had taken you all over his
house, with its significant rooms and woods and gardens, he was full all
supper-time of all wise saws and witty proverbs. 'One leak will sink a
ship,' he said that night, 'and one sin will destroy a sinner.' And all
their days the pilgrims remembered that word from the Interpreter's lips,
and they often said it to themselves as they thought of their own
besetting sin. Now, if it is indeed so, that every gospel minister is an
interpreter, and every evangelical church an interpreter's house, what an
important passage this is for all those who are proposing and preparing
to be ministers. Let them reflect upon it: what a house this is that the
Interpreter dwells in; how early and how long ago he began to lay out his
grounds and to build his house upon them; how complete in all its parts
it is, and how he still watches and labours to have it more complete.
Understandest thou what thou here readest? it is asked of all ministers,
young and old, as they turn over John Bunyan's pungent pages. And every
new room, every new bird, and beast, and herb, and flower makes us blush
for shame as we contrast our own insignificant and ill-furnished house
with the noble house of the Interpreter. Let all our students who have
not yet fatally destroyed themselves and lost their opportunity lay the
Interpreter's House well to heart. Let them be students not in idle name
only, as so many are, but in intense reality, as so few are. Let them
read everything that bears upon the Bible, and let them read nothing that
does not. They have not the time nor the permission. Let them be
content to be men of one book. Let them give themselves wholly to the
interpretation of divine truth as its riddles are set in nature and in
man, in scripture, in providence, and in spiritual experience. Let them
store their memories at college with all sacred truth, and with all
secular truth that can be made sacred. And if their memories are weak
and treacherous, let them be quiet under God's will in that, and all the
more labour to make up in other ways for that defect, so that they may
have always something to say to the purpose when their future people come
up to church hungry for instruction and comfort and encouragement. Let
them look around and see the sin that sinks the ship of so many
ministers; and let them begin while yet their ship is in the yard and see
that she is fitted up and furnished, stored and stocked, so that she
shall in spite of sure storms and sunken rocks deliver her freight in the
appointed haven. When they are lying in bed of a Sabbath morning, let
them forecast the day when they shall have to give a strict account of
their eight years of golden opportunity among the churches, and the
classes, and the societies, and the libraries of our university seats.
Let them be able to name some great book, ay, more than one great book,
they mastered, for every year of their priceless and irredeemable student
life. Let them all their days have old treasure-houses that they filled
full with scholarship and with literature and with all that will minister
to a congregation's many desires and necessities, collected and kept
ready from their student days. 'Meditate upon these things; give thyself
wholly up to them, that thy profiting may appear unto all.'
4. And then with a sly stroke at us old ministers, our significant
author points out to us how much better furnished the Interpreter's House
was by the time Christiana and the boys visited it compared with that
early time when Christian was entertained in it. Our pilgrim got far
more in the Interpreter's House of delight and instruction than he could
carry out of it, but that did not tempt the Interpreter to sit down and
content himself with taking all his future pilgrims into the same room,
and showing them the same pictures, and repeating to them the same
explanations. No, for he reflected that each coming pilgrim would need
some new significant room to himself, and therefore, as soon as he got
one pilgrim off his hands, he straightway set about building and
furnishing new rooms, putting up new pictures, and replenishing his woods
and his waters with new beasts and birds and fishes. I am ashamed, he
said, that I had so little to show when I first opened my gates to
receive pilgrims, and I do not know why they came to me as they did. I
was only a beginner in these things when my first visitor came to my
gates. Let every long-settled, middle-aged, and even grey-headed
minister read the life of the Interpreter at this point and take courage
and have hope. Let it teach us all to break some new ground in the field
of divine truth with every new year. Let it teach us all to be students
all our days. Let us buy, somehow, the poorest and the oldest of us,
some new and first-rate book every year. Let us not indeed shut up
altogether our old rooms if they ever had anything significant in them,
but let us add now a new wing to our spiritual house, now a new picture
to its walls, and now a new herb to its gardens. 'Resolved,' wrote
Jonathan Edwards, 'that as old men have seldom any advantage of new
discoveries, because these are beside a way of thinking they have been
long used to; resolved, therefore, if ever I live to years, that I will
be impartial to hear the reasons of all pretended discoveries, and
receive them, if rational, how long soever I have been used to another
way of thinking.'
5. The fickle, frivolous, volatile character of so many divinity
students is excellently hit off by Bunyan in our pilgrim's impatience to
be out of the Interpreter's House. No sooner had he seen one or two of
the significant rooms than this easily satisfied student was as eager to
get out of that house as he had been to get in. Twice over the wise and
learned Interpreter had to beg and beseech this ignorant and impulsive
pilgrim to stop and get another lesson in the religious life before he
left the great school-house. All our professors of divinity and all our
ministers understand the parable at this point only too well. Their
students are eager to get into their classes; like our pilgrim, they have
heard the fame of this and that teacher, and there is not standing-room
in the class for the first weeks of the session. But before Christmas
there is room enough for strangers, and long before the session closes,
half the students are counting the weeks and plotting to petition the
Assembly against the length and labour of the curriculum. Was there ever
a class that was as full and attentive at the end of the session as it
was at the beginning? Never since our poor human nature was so stricken
with laziness and shallowness and self-sufficiency. But what is the
chaff to the wheat? It is the wheat that deserves and repays the
husbandman's love and labour. When Plato looked up from his desk in the
Academy, after reading and expounding one of his greatest Dialogues, he
found only one student left in the class-room, but then, that student was
Aristotle. 'Now let me go,' said Christian. 'Nay, stay,' said the
Interpreter, 'till I have showed thee a little more.' 'Sir, is it not
time for me to go?' 'Do tarry till I show thee just one thing more.'
6. 'Here have I seen things rare and profitable,
. . . Then let me be
Thankful, O good Interpreter, to thee.'
Sydney Smith, with his usual sagacity, says that the last vice of the
pulpit is to be uninteresting. Now, the Interpreter's House had this
prime virtue in it, that it was all interesting. Do not our children beg
of us on Sabbath nights to let them see the Interpreter's show once more;
it is so inexhaustibly and unfailingly interesting? It is only stupid
men and women who ever weary of it. But, 'profitable' was the one and
universal word with which all the pilgrims left the Interpreter's House.
'Rare and pleasant,' they said, and sometimes 'dreadful;' but it was
always 'profitable.' Now, how seldom do we hear our people at the church
door step down into the street saying, 'profitable'? If they said that
oftener their ministers would study profit more than they do. The people
say 'able,' or 'not at all able'; 'eloquent,' or 'stammering and
stumbling'; 'excellent' in style and manner and accent, or the opposite
of all that; and their ministers, to please the people and to earn their
approval, labour after these approved things. But if the people only
said that the prayers and the preaching were profitable and helpful, even
when they too seldom are, then our preachers would set the profit of the
people far more before them both in selecting and treating and delivering
their Sabbath-day subjects. A lady on one occasion said to her minister,
'Sir, your preaching does my soul good.' And her minister never forgot
the grave and loving look with which that was said. Not only did he
never forget it, but often when selecting his subject, and treating it,
and delivering it, the question would rise in his heart and conscience,
Will that do my friend's soul any good? 'Rare and profitable,' said the
pilgrim as he left the gate; and hearing that sent the Interpreter back
with new spirit and new invention to fill his house of still more
significant, rare, and profitable things than ever before. 'Meditate on
these things,' said Paul to Timothy his son in the gospel, 'that thy
profiting may appear unto all.' 'Thou art a minister of the word,' wrote
the learned William Perkins beside his name on all his books, 'mind thy
business.'
PASSION
'A man subject to like passions as we are.'--James 5. 17.
That was a very significant room in the Interpreter's House where our
pilgrim saw Passion and Patience sitting each one in his chair. Passion
was a young lad who seemed to our pilgrim to be much discontented. He
was never satisfied. He would have all his good things now. His
governor would have him wait for his best things till the beginning of
next year; but no, he will have them all now. And then, when he had got
all his good things, he soon lavished and wasted them all till he had
nothing left but rags. Then said Christian to the Interpreter, 'Expound
this matter more fully to me.' So he said, 'Those two lads are figures;
Passion, of the men of this world; and Patience of the men of that which
is to come.' 'Then I perceive,' said Christian, ''tis not best to covet
things that are now, but to wait for things to come.' 'You say truth,'
replied the Interpreter, 'for the things that are seen are temporal, but
the things that are not seen are eternal.'
Now from the texts that I have taken out of James and out of this so
significant room in the Interpreter's House, let me try to tell you
something profitable, if so it may be, about passion; the nature of it,
the place it holds, and the part it performs both in human nature and in
the life and the character of a Christian man.
The name of Passion has already told us his nature, his past life, and
his present character. The whole nomenclature of _The Pilgrim's
Progress_ and of _The Holy War_ is composed on the divine, original, and
natural principle of embodying the nature of a man in his name. God
takes His own names to Himself on that principle. The Creator gave Adam
his name also on that same principle; and then Adam gave their names to
all cattle, to the fowls of the air, and to every beast of the field on
the same principle on which he had got his own name. And so it was at
first with all the Bible names of men and of nations of men. Their name
contained their nature. And John Bunyan was such a student of the Bible,
and of no other book but the Bible, that all his best books are all full,
like the Bible, of the most descriptive and suggestive names. As soon as
Bunyan tells us the name of some new acquaintance or fellow-traveller, we
already know him, so exactly is his nature put into his name. And thus
it is that when we stop for a moment at the door of this little
significant room in the Interpreter's House and ask ourselves the meaning
of the name Passion, we see at once where we are and what we have here
before us. For a 'passion' is just some excitement or agitation of the
mind caused by some outward thing acting on the mind. The inward world
of the mind and heart of man, and this outward world down into which God
has placed man, instantly and continually respond to one another. And
what are called, with so much correctness and propriety, our passions,
are just those inward responses, excitements, and agitations that the
outward world causes in the inward world when those two worlds meet
together. 'Passion' and 'perturbation' are the old classical names that
the ancient philosophers and moralists gave to what they felt in
themselves as their minds and their hearts were affected by the world of
men and things around them. And they used to illustrate their teaching
on the subject of the passions by the figure of a storm at sea. They
said that it was because God had made the sea sensitive and responsive to
the winds that blew over it that a storm at sea ever arose. The storm
did not arise and the ships were not wrecked by anything from within the
sea itself; it was the outward world of the winds striking against the
quiet and inward world of the waters that roused the storms and sank the
ships. And with that illustration well printed in the minds and
imaginations of their scholars the old moralists felt their work among
their scholars was already all but done. For, so full of adaptation and
appeal is the whole outward world to the mind and heart of man, and so
sensitive and instantly responsive is the mind and heart of man to all
the approaches of the outward world, that the mind and heart of man are
constantly full of all kinds of passions, both bad and good. And, then,
this is our present life of probation and opportunity, that all our
passions are placed within us and are committed and entrusted to us as so
many first elements and so much unformed material out of which we are
summoned to build up our life and to shape and complete our character.
The springs of all our actions are in our passions. All our activities
in life, trace them all up to their source, and they will all be found to
run up into the wellhead of our passions. All our virtues are cut as
with a chisel out of our passions, and all our vices are just the
disorders and rebellions of our passions. Our several passions, as they
lie still asleep in our hearts, have as yet no moral character; they are
only the raw material so to speak, of moral character. Our passions are
the life and the riches and the ornaments of human nature, and it is only
because human nature in its present estate is so corrupt and disordered
and degraded, that the otherwise so honourable name of passion has such a
sinister sound to us. And the full regeneration and restitution of human
nature will be accomplished when every several passion is in its right
place, and when reason and conscience and the Spirit of God shall inspire
and rule and regulate all that is within us.
'On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but passion is the gale.'
And not Elijah only, as James says, and not Paul and Barnabas only, as
they themselves said, were men of like passions with ourselves, but our
Lord Himself was a man of like passions with us also. He took to Himself
a true body, full of all the appetites of the body, and a reasonable
soul, full of all the affections, passions, and emotions of the soul.
Only, in Him reason and conscience and the law and the Spirit of God were
the card and the compass according to which He steered His life. We have
all our ruling passion, and our Lord also had His. As His disciples saw
His ruling passion kindled in His heart and coming out in His life, they
remembered that it was written of Him in an old Messianic psalm: 'The
zeal of Thine house hath eaten me up.' They were all eaten up of their
ruling passions also. One of ambition, one of emulation, one of avarice,
and so on,--each several disciple was eaten up of his own besetting sin.
But they all saw that it was not so with their Master. He was eaten up
always and wholly of the zeal of His Father's house, and of absolute
surrender and devotion to His Father's service, till His ruling passion
was seen to be as strong in His death as it had been in His life. The
Laird of Brodie's Diary has repeatedly been of great use to us in these
inward matters, and his words on this subject are well worth repeating.
'We poor creatures,' he says, 'are commanded by our affections and
passions. They are not at our command. But the Holy One doth exercise
all His attributes at His own will; they are at His command; they are not
passions nor perturbations in His mind, though they transport us. When I
would hate, I cannot. When I would love, I cannot. When I would grieve,
I cannot. When I would desire, I cannot. But it is the better for us
that all is as He wills it to be.'
And now, to come still closer home, let us look for a moment or two at
some of our own ruling and tyrannising passions. And let us look first
at self-love--that master-passion in every human heart. Let us give self-
love the first place in the inventory and catalogue of our passions,
because it has the largest place in all our hearts and lives. Nay, not
only has self-love the largest place of any of the passions of our
hearts, but it is out of self-love that all our other evil passions
spring. It is out of this parent passion that all the poisonous brood of
our other evil passions are born. The whole fall and ruin and misery of
our present human nature lies in this, that in every human being self-
love has taken, in addition to its own place, the place of the love of
God and of the love of man also. We naturally now love nothing and no
one but ourselves. And as long as self-love is in the ascendant in our
hearts, all the passions that are awakened in us by our self-love will be
selfish with its selfishness, inhumane with its inhumanity, and ungodly
with its ungodliness. And it is to kill and extirpate our so passionate
self-love that is the end and aim of all God's dealings with us in this
world. All that God is doing with us and for us in providence and in
grace, in the world and in the church,--it is all to cure us of this
deadly disease of self-love. We may never have had that told us before,
and we may not like it, and we may not believe it; but there can be no
better proof of the truth of what is now said than just this, that we do
not like it and will not have it. Self-love will not let us listen to
the truth about ourselves; it puts us in a passion both against the truth
and against him who tells the truth, as the history of the truth
abundantly testifies. Yes, your indignant protest is quite true. Self-
love has her divine rights,--no doubt she has. But you are not commanded
to attend to them. Your self-love will look after herself. She will
manage to have her full share of what is right and proper for any passion
to possess even after she cries out that she is trampled upon and
despoiled. My brethren, till you begin to crucify yourselves and to
pluck up your self-love by the roots, you will never know what a cruel
and hopeless task the Christian life is--I do not say the Christian
profession. Nor, on the other hand, will you ever discover what a noble
task it is--what a divine task and how divinely assisted and divinely
recompensed. You will not know what a kennel of hell-hounds your own
heart is till you have long sought to enter it and cleanse it out. And
after you have done your utmost, and your best, death will hurry you away
from your but half-accomplished task. Only, in that case you will be
able to die in the hope that what is impossible with man is possible with
God, as promised by Him, and that He will not leave your soul in hell,
but will perfect that good thing which alone concerneth you, even your
everlasting deliverance from all sinful self-love.
And if self-love is the fruitful mother of all our passions, then
sensuality is surely her eldest son. Indeed, so shallow are we, and so
shallow are our words, that when we speak of sinful passion most men
instantly think of sensuality. There are so many seductive things that
appeal to our appetites, and our appetites are so easily awakened, and
are so imperious when they are awakened, that when passion is spoken
about, few men think of the soul, all men think instantly of the body.
And no wonder. For, stupid and besotted as we are, we must all at some
time of our life have felt the bondage and degradation of the senses.
Passion in the Interpreter's House had soon nothing left but rags. And
in this house to-night there are many men whose consciences and hearts
and characters are all in such rags from sensual sin, that when the
Scriptures speak of uncleanness, or rags, or corruption, their thoughts
flee at once to sensual sin and its conscience-rending results. Cease
from sensuality, said Cicero, for if once you give your minds up to
sensuality, you will never be able to think of anything else.
Ambition, emulation, and envy are the leading members of a whole prolific
family of satanic passions in the human heart. Indeed, these passions,
taken along with their kindred passions of hatred and ill-will, are, in
our Lord's words, the very lusts of the devil himself. The Jews hated
our Lord the more for what He said about these detestable passions, but
His own disciples love Him only the more that He so well knows the evil
affections of their hearts, and so well describes and denounces them.
Anybody can denounce sensual sin, and everybody will understand and
approve. But spiritual sin,--ambition and emulation and envy and ill-
will--these things are more easy to denounce than they are to detect and
describe, and more easy to detect and describe than they are to cast out.
These sins seem rather to multiply and to strike a deeper root when you
begin to cast them out. What an utterly and abominably evil passion is
envy which is awakened not by bad things but by the best things! That
another man's talents, attainments, praises, rewards should kindle it,
and that the blame, the depreciation, the hurt that another man suffers
should satisfy it,--what a piece of very hell must that be in the human
heart! What more do we need than just a little envy in our hearts to
make us prostrate penitents before God and man all our days? What more
doctrine, argument, proof, authority, persuasion should a sane man need
beyond a little envy in his heart at his best friend to make him an
evangelical believer and an evangelical preacher? How, in the name of
wonder, is it that men can be so ignorant of the plague of their own
hearts as to remain indifferent, and, much more, hostile, to the gospel
of love and holiness? Pride, also,--what a hateful and intolerable
passion is that! How stone-blind to his own state must that sinner be
whose heart is filled with pride, and how impossible it is for that man
to make any real progress in any kind of truth or goodness! And
resentment,--what a deep-seated, long-lived, and suicidal passion is
that! How it hunts down him it hates, and how surely it shuts the door
of salvation against him who harbours it! Forgive us our debts, the
resentful man says in his prayer, as we forgive our debtors. And
detraction,--how some men's ink-horns are filled with detraction for ink,
and how it drops from their tongue like poison! At their every word a
reputation dies. Life and all its opportunities of doing good and having
good done to us is laid like a bag of treasure at our feet, but, like the
prodigal son in the Interpreter's House, with all those passions raging
in our own hearts at other men, and in other men's hearts at us, we have
soon nothing left us but rags. God be thanked for every man here who
sees and feels that he has nothing left him but rags; and, still more,
thanks for all those who see and feel how, by their bad passions, sensual
and spiritual, they have left on other people nothing but rags.
Now, from all this let us lay it to heart that our sanctification and
salvation lie in our mastery over all these and over many other passions
that have not even been named. He is an accepted saint of God, who,
taking his and other people's rags to God's mercy every day, every day
also in God's strength grapples with, bridles, and tames his own wild and
ungodly passions. Be not deceived, my friends; he alone is a saint of
God who is a sanctified man; and his passions,--as they are the spring of
his actions, so they are the sphere and seat of his sanctification. Be
not deceived; that man, and no other manner of man, is, or ever will be,
a partaker of God's salvation. You often hear me recommending those
students who have first to subdue their own passions and then the
passions of those who hear them to study Jonathan Edwards' ethical and
spiritual writings. Well, just at this present point, to show you how
well that great man practised what he preached, let me read to you a few
lines from his biographer: 'Few men,' says Henry Rogers, 'ever attained a
more complete mastery over their passions than Jonathan Edwards did. This
was partly owing to the ascendency of his intellect; partly, and in a
still greater degree, to the elevation of his piety. For the subjugation
of his passions he was no doubt very greatly indebted to the prodigious
superiority of his reason. Such was the commanding attitude his reason
assumed, and such the tremendous power with which it controlled the whole
man, that any insurrection among his senses was hopeless; they had their
tenure only by doing fealty and homage to his intellect. Those other and
more dangerous enemies, because more subtle and more spiritual, such as
pride, vanity, wrath, and envy, which lurk in the inmost recesses of our
nature, and some of which have such affinities for a genius like that of
Edwards, yield not to such exorcism. Such more powerful kind of demons
go not forth but by prayer and fasting; to their complete mortification,
therefore, Edwards brought incessant watchfulness and devotion; and
seldom, assuredly, have they been more nearly expelled from the bosom of
a depraved intelligence.' We shall be in the best company, both
intellectually and spiritually, if we work out our own salvation among
the sinful passions of our depraved hearts. And then, as life goes on,
and we continue in well-doing, we shall be able to measure and register
our growth in grace best by watching the effect of outward temptations
upon our still sinful and but half-sanctified hearts. And among much to
be humbled for, and much to make us fear and tremble for the issue, we
shall, from time to time, have a good conscience and a holy and humble
joy that this passion and that is at last showing some signs of
crucifixion and mortification. And thus that death to sin shall
gradually set in which shall issue at last in an everlasting life unto
holiness.
'Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from
all your filthiness, and from all your idols will I cleanse you. A new
heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you . . .
Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe
thee with change of raiment. In that day there shall be a fountain
opened to the house of David, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for
sin and for uncleanness . . . Bring forth the best robe and put it upon
him, for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is
found . . . What are these that are arrayed in white robes, and whence
came they? These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have
washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.'
PATIENCE
'In your patience possess ye your souls.' (Revised Version: 'In your
patience ye shall win your souls.')--Our Lord.
'I saw moreover in my dream that the Interpreter took the pilgrim by the
hand, and had him into a little room, where sate two little children,
each one in his chair. The name of the eldest was Passion and of the
other Patience. Passion seemed to be much discontent, but Patience was
very quiet. Then Christian asked, What is the reason of the discontent
of Passion? The interpreter answered, The governor of them would have
him stay for his best things till the beginning of the next year; but he
will have all now. But Patience is willing to wait.'
Passion and Patience, like Esau and Jacob, are twin-brothers. And their
names, like their natures, spring up from the same root. 'Patience,'
says Crabb in his _English Synonyms_, 'comes from the active participle
to suffer; while passion comes from the passive participle of the same
verb; and hence the difference between the two names. Patience signifies
suffering from an active principle, a determination to suffer; while
passion signifies what is suffered from want of power to prevent the
suffering. Patience, therefore, is always taken in a good sense, and
Passion always in a bad sense.' So far this excellent etymologist. This
is, therefore, another case of blessing and cursing proceeding out of the
same mouth, and of the same fountain sending forth at the same place both
sweet water and bitter.
Our Lord tells us in this striking text that our very souls by reason of
sin are not our own. He tells us that we have lost hold of our souls
before we have as yet come to know that we have souls. We only discover
that we have souls after we have lost them. And our Lord,--our best,
indeed our only, authority in the things of the soul,--here tells us that
it is only by patience that we shall ever win back our lost souls. More,
far more, is needed to the winning back of a lost soul than its owner's
patience, and our Lord knew that to His cost. But that is not His point
with us to-night. His sole point with each one of us to-night is our
personal part in the conquest and redemption of our sin-enslaved souls.
He who has redeemed our souls with His own blood tells us with all
plainness of speech, that His blood will be shed in vain, as far as we
are concerned, unless we add to His atoning death our own patient life.
Every human life, as our Lord looks at it, and would have us look at it,
is a vast field of battle in which a soul is lost or won; little as we
think of it or will believe it, in His sight every trial, temptation,
provocation, insult, injury, and all kinds and all degrees of pain and
suffering, are all so many divinely appointed opportunities afforded us
for the reconquest and recovery of our souls. Sometimes faith is
summoned into the battle-field, sometimes hope, sometimes self-denial,
sometimes prayer, sometimes one grace and sometimes another; but as with
the sound of a trumpet the Captain of our salvation here summons Patience
to the forefront of the fight.
1. To begin with, how much impatience we are all from time to time
guilty of in our family life. Among the very foundations of our family
life how much impatience the husband often exhibits toward the wife, and
the wife toward her husband. Patience is the very last grace they look
forward to having any need of when they are still dreaming about their
married life; but, in too many cases, they have not well entered on that
life, when they find that they need no grace of God so much as just
patience, if the yoke of their new life is not to gall them beyond
endurance. However many good qualities of mind and heart and character
any husband or wife may have, no human being is perfect, and most of us
are very far from being perfect. When therefore, we are closely and
indissolubly joined to another life and another will, it is no wonder
that sometimes the ill-fitting yoke eats into a lifelong sore. We have
all many defects in our manners, in our habits, and in our constitutional
ways of thinking and speaking and acting,--defects that tempt those who
live nearest us to fall into annoyances with us that sometimes deepen
into dislike, and even positive disgust, till it has been seen, in some
extreme cases, that home-life has become a very prison-house, in which
the impatient prisoner chafes and jibs and strikes out as he does nowhere
else. Now, when any unhappy man or woman wakens up to discover how
different life is now to be from what it once promised to become, let
them know that all their past blindness, and precipitancy, and all the
painful results of all that, may yet be made to work together for good.
In your patience with one another, says our Lord, you will make a
conquest of your adverse lot, and of your souls to the bargain. Say to
yourselves, therefore, that perfection, faultlessness, and absolute
satisfaction are not to be found in this world. And say also that since
you have not brought perfection to your side of the house any more than
your partner has to his side, you are not so foolish as to expect
perfection in return for such imperfection. You have your own share of
what causes fireside silence, aversion, disappointment, and dislike; and,
with God's help, say that you will patiently submit to what may not now
be mended. And then, the sterner the battle the nobler will the victory
be; and the lonelier the fight, the more honour to him who flinches not
from it. In your patience possess ye your souls.
What a beautiful, instructive, and even impressive sight it is to see a
nurse patiently cherishing her children! How she has her eye and her
heart at all their times upon them, till she never has any need to lay
her hand upon them! Passion has no place in her little household,
because patience fills all its own place and the place of passion too.
What a genius she displays in her talks to her children! How she cheats
their little hours of temptation, and tides them over the rough places
that her eye sees lying like sunken rocks before her little ship! How
skilfully she stills and heals their impulsive little passions by her
sudden and absorbing surprise at some miracle in a picture-book, or some
astonishing sight under her window! She has a thousand occupations also
for her children, and each of them with a touch of enterprise and
adventure and benevolence in it. She is so full of patience herself,
that the little gusts of passion are soon over in her presence, and the
sunshine is soon back brighter than ever in her little paradise. And,
over and above her children rising up and calling her blessed, what
wounds she escapes in her own heart and memory by keeping her patient
hands from ever wounding her children! What peace she keeps in the
house, just by having peace always within herself! Paul can find no
better figure wherewith to set forth God's marvellous patience with
Israel during her fretful childhood in the wilderness, than just that of
such a nurse among her provoking children. And we see the deep hold that
same touching and instructive sight had taken of the apostle's heart as
he returns to it again to the Thessalonians: 'We were gentle among you,
even as a nurse cherisheth her children. So, being affectionately
desirous of you, we were willing to have imparted unto you, not the
gospel of God only, but also our own souls, because ye were dear unto
us.' What a school of divine patience is every man's own family at home
if he only were teachable, observant, and obedient!
2. Clever, quick-witted, and, themselves, much-gifted men, are terribly
intolerant of slow and stupid men, as they call them. But the
many-talented man makes a great mistake here, and falls into a great sin.
In his fulness of all kinds of intellectual gifts, he quite forgets from
Whom he has his many gifts, and why it is that his despised neighbour has
so few gifts. If you have ten or twenty talents, and I have only two,
who is to be praised and who is to be blamed for that allotment? Your
cleverness has misled you and has hitherto done you far more evil than
good. You bear yourself among ordinary men, among less men than
yourself, as if you had added all these cubits to your own stature. You
ride over us as if you had already given in your account, and had heard
it said, Take the one talent from them and give it to this my
ten-talented servant. You seem to have set it down to your side of the
great account, that you had such a good start in talent, and that your
fine mind had so many tutors and governors all devoting themselves to
your advancement. And you conduct yourself to us as if the Righteous
Judge had cast us away from His presence, because we were not found among
the wise and mighty of this world. The truth is, that the whole world is
on a wholly wrong tack in its praise and in its blame. We praise the man
of great gifts, and we blame the man of small gifts, completely forgetful
that in so doing we give men the praise that belongs to God, and lay on
men the blame, which, if there is any blame in the matter, ought to be
laid elsewhere. Learn and lay to heart, my richly-gifted brethren, to be
patient with all men, but especially to be patient with all stupid, slow-
witted, ungifted, God-impoverished men. Do not add your insults and your
ill-usage to the low estate of those on whom, in the meantime, God's hand
lies so cold and so straitened. For who maketh thee to differ from
another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? Now, if thou
didst receive it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?
Call that to mind the next time you are tempted to cry out that you have
no patience with your slow-witted servant.
3. 'Is patient with the bad' is one of the tributes of praise that is
paid in the fine paraphrase to that heart that is full of the same love
that is in God. A patient love to the unjust and the evil is one of the
attributes and manifestations of the divine nature, as that nature is
seen both in God and in all genuinely godly men. And, indeed, in no
other thing is the divine nature so surely seen in any man as just in his
love to and his patience with bad men. He schools and exercises himself
every day to be patient and good to other men as God has been to him. He
remembers when tempted to resentment how God did not resent his evil,
but, while he was yet an enemy to God and to godliness, reconciled him to
Himself by the death of His Son. And ever since the godly man saw that,
he has tried to reconcile his worst enemies to himself by the death of
his impatience and passion toward them, and has more pitied than blamed
them, even when their evil was done against himself. Let God judge, and
if it must be, condemn that bad man. But I am too bad myself to cast a
stone at the worst and most injurious of men. If we so much pity
ourselves for our sinful lot, if we have so much compassion on ourselves
because of our inherited and unavoidable estate of sin and misery, why do
we not share our pity and our compassion with those miserable men who are
in an even worse estate than our own? At any rate, I must not judge them
lest I be judged. I must take care when I say, Forgive me my trespasses,
as I forgive them that trespass against me. Not to seven times must I
grudgingly forgive, but ungrudgingly to seventy times seven. For with
what judgment I judge, I shall be judged; and with what measure I mete,
it shall be measured to me again.
'Love harbours no suspicious thought,
Is patient to the bad:
Grieved when she hears of sins and crimes,
And in the truth is glad.'
4. And then, most difficult and most dangerous, but most necessary of
all patience, we must learn how to be patient with ourselves. Every day
we hear of miserable men rushing upon death because they can no longer
endure themselves and the things they have brought on themselves. And
there are moral suicides who cast off the faith and the hope and the
endurance of a Christian man because they are so evil and have lived such
an evil life. We speak of patience with bad men, but there is no man so
bad, there is no man among all our enemies who has at all hurt us like
that man who is within ourselves. And to bear patiently what we have
brought upon ourselves,--to endure the inward shame, the self-reproof,
the self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood, the lifelong injuries,
impoverishment, and disgrace,--to bear all these patiently and
uncomplainingly,--to acquiesce humbly in the discovery that all this was
always in our hearts, and still is in our hearts--what humility, what
patience, what compassion and pity for ourselves must all that call
forth! The wise nurse is patient with her passionate, greedy, untidy,
disobedient child. She does not cast it out of doors, she does not run
and leave it, she does not kill it because all these things have been and
still are in its sad little heart. Her power for good with such a child
lies just in her pity, in her compassion, and in her patience with her
child. And the child that is in all of us is to be treated in the same
patient, hopeful, believing, forgiving, divine way. We should all be
with ourselves as God is with us. He knoweth our frame. He remembereth
that we are dust. He shows all patience toward us. He does not look for
great things from us. He does not break the bruised reed, nor quench the
smoking flax. He shall not fail nor be discouraged till He have set
judgment in the earth. And so shall not we.
5. And, then,--it is a sufficiently startling thing to say, but--we must
learn to be patient with God also. All our patience, and all the
exercises of it, if we think aright about it, all run up in the long-run
into patience with God. But there are some exercises of patience that
have to do directly and immediately with God and with God alone. When
any man's heart has become fully alive to God and to the things of God;
when he begins to see and feel that he lives and moves and has his being
in God; then everything that in any way affects him is looked on by him
as come to him from God. Absolutely, all things. The very weather that
everybody is so atheistic about, the climate, the soil he labours, the
rain, the winter's cold and the summer's heat,--true piety sees all these
things as God's things, and sees God's immediate will in the disposition
and dispensation of them all. He feels the untameableness of his tongue
in the indecent talk that goes on everlastingly about the weather. All
these things may be without God to other men, as they once were to him
also, but you will find that the truly and the intelligently devout man
no longer allows himself in such unbecoming speech. For, though he
cannot trace God's hand in all the changes of the seasons, in heat and
cold, in sunshine and snow, yet he is as sure that God's wisdom and will
are there as that Scripture is true and the Scripture-taught heart.
'Great is our Lord, and His understanding is infinite. Who covereth the
heavens with clouds, and prepareth rain for the earth, and maketh the
grass to grow upon the mountains. He giveth snow like wool; He
scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes; He casteth forth His ice like
morsels. Who can stand before his cold?' Here is the patience and the
faith of the saints. Here are they that keep the commandments of God and
the faith of Jesus Christ.
And, then, when through rain or frost or fire, when out of any terror by
night or arrow that flieth by day, any calamity comes on the man who is
thus pointed and practised in his patience, he is able with Job to say,
'This is the Lord. What, shall we receive good at the hand of God and
not also receive evil?' By far the best thing I have ever read on this
subject, and I have read it a thousand times since I first read it as a
student, is Dr. Thomas Goodwin's _Patience and its Perfect Work_. That
noble treatise had its origin in the great fire of London in 1666. The
learned President of Magdalen College lost the half of his library, five
hundred pounds worth of the best books, in that terrible fire. And his
son tells us he had often heard his father say that in the loss of his
not-to-be-replaced books, God had struck him in a very sensible place. To
lose his Augustine, and his Calvin, and his Musculus, and his Zanchius,
and his Amesius, and his Suarez, and his Estius was a sore stroke to such
a man. I loved my books too well, said the great preacher, and God
rebuked me by this affliction. Let the students here read Goodwin's
costly treatise, and they will be the better prepared to meet such
calamities as the burning of their manse and their library, as also to
counsel and comfort their people when they shall lose their shops or
their stockyards by fire.
'Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan His work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.'
And, then, in a multitude of New Testament scriptures, we are summoned to
great exercise of patience with the God of our salvation, because it is
His purpose and plan that we shall have to wait long for our salvation.
God has not seen it good to carry us to heaven on the day of our
conversion. He does not glorify us on the same day that He justifies us.
We are appointed to salvation indeed, but it is also appointed us to wait
long for it. This is not our rest. We are called to be pilgrims and
strangers for a season with God upon the earth. We are told to endure to
the end. It is to be through faith and patience that we, with our
fathers, shall at last inherit the promises. Holiness is not a Jonah's
gourd. It does not come up in a night, and it does not perish in a
night. Holiness is the Divine nature, and it takes a lifetime to make us
partakers of it. But, then, if the time is long the thing is sure. Let
us, then, with a holy and a submissive patience wait for it.
'I saw moreover in my dream that Passion seemed to be much discontent,
but Patience was very quiet. Then Christian asked, What is the reason of
the discontent of Passion? The Interpreter answered, The governor of
them would have him stay for his best things till the beginning of the
next year; but he will have them all now. But Patience is willing to
wait.'
SIMPLE, SLOTH, AND PRESUMPTION
'Ye did run well, who did hinder you?'--Paul.
It startles us not a little to come suddenly upon three pilgrims fast
asleep with fetters on their heels on the upward side of the
Interpreter's House, and even on the upward side of the cross and the
sepulchre. We would have looked for those three miserable men somewhere
in the City of Destruction or in the Town of Stupidity, or, at best,
somewhere still outside of the wicket-gate. But John Bunyan did not lay
down his _Pilgrim's Progress_ on any abstract theory, or on any easy and
pleasant presupposition, of the Christian life. He constructed his so
lifelike book out of his own experiences as a Christian man, as well as
out of all he had learned as a Christian minister. And in nothing is
Bunyan's power of observation, deep insight, and firm hold of fact better
seen than just in the way he names and places the various people of the
pilgrimage. Long after he had been at the Cross of Christ himself, and
had seen with his own eyes all the significant rooms in the Interpreter's
House, Bunyan had often to confess that the fetters of evil habit, unholy
affection, and a hard heart were still firmly riveted on his own heels.
And his pastoral work had led him to see only too well that he was not
alone in the temptations and the dangers and the still-abiding bondage to
sin that had so surprised himself after he was so far on in the Christian
life. It was the greatest sorrow of his heart, he tells us in a powerful
passage in his _Grace Abounding_, that so many of his spiritual children
broke down and came short in the arduous and perilous way in which he had
so hopefully started them. 'If any of those who were awakened by my
ministry did after that fall back, as sometimes too many did, I can truly
say that their loss hath been more to me than if one of my own children,
begotten of my body, had been going to its grave. I think, verily, I may
speak it without an offence to the Lord, nothing hath gone so near me as
that, unless it was the fear of the salvation of my own soul. I have
counted as if I had goodly buildings and lordships in those places where
my children were born; my heart has been so wrapped up in this excellent
work that I counted myself more blessed and honoured of God by this than
if He had made me the emperor of the Christian world, or the lord of all
the glory of the earth without it.' And I have no doubt that we have
here the three things that above everything else bereft Bunyan of so many
of his spiritual children personified and then laid down by the heels in
Simple, Sloth, and Presumption.
SIMPLE
Let us shake up Simple first and ask him what it was that laid him so
soon and in such a plight and in such company in this bottom. It was not
that which from his name we might at first think it was. It was not the
weakness of his intellects, nor his youth, nor his inexperience. There
is danger enough, no doubt, in all these things if they are not carefully
attended to, but none of all these things in themselves, nor all of them
taken together, will lay any pilgrim by the heels. There must be more
than mere and pure simplicity. No blame attaches to a simple mind, much
less to an artless and an open heart. We do not blame such a man even
when we pity him. We take him, if he will let us, under our care, or we
put him under better care, but we do not anticipate any immediate ill to
him so long as he remains simple in mind, untainted in heart, and willing
to learn. But, then, unless he is better watched over than any young man
or young woman can well be in this world, that simplicity and
child-likeness and inexperience of his may soon become a fatal snare to
him. There is so much that is not simple and sincere in this world;
there is so much falsehood and duplicity; there are so many men abroad
whose endeavour is to waylay, mislead, entrap, and corrupt the simple-
minded and the inexperienced, that it is next to impossible that any
youth or maiden shall long remain in this world both simple and safe
also. My son, says the Wise Man, keep my words, and lay up my
commandments with thee. For at the window of my house I looked through
my casement, and beheld among the simple ones, I discerned among the
youths, a young man void of understanding;--and so on,--till a dart
strike through his liver, and he goeth as an ox to the slaughter. And
so, too often in our own land, the maiden in her simplicity also opens
her ear to the promises and vows and oaths of the flatterer, till she
loses both her simplicity and her soul, and lies buried in that same
bottom beside Sloth and Presumption.
It is not so much his small mind and his weak understanding that is the
fatal danger of their possessor, it is his imbecile way of treating his
small mind. In our experience of him we cannot get him, all we can do,
to read an instructive book. We cannot get him to attend our young men's
class with all the baits and traps we can set for him. Where does he
spend his Sabbath-day and week-day evenings? We cannot find out until we
hear some distressing thing about him, that, ten to one, he would have
escaped had he been a reader of good books, or a student with us, say, of
Dante and Bunyan and Rutherford, and a companion of those young men and
young women who talk about and follow such intellectual tastes and
pursuits. Now, if you are such a young man or young woman as that, or
such an old man or old woman, you will not be able to understand what in
the world Bunyan can mean by saying that he saw you in his dream fast
asleep in a bottom with irons on your heels. No; for to understand the
_Pilgrim's Progress_, beyond a nursery and five-year-old understanding of
it, you must have worked and studied and suffered your way out of your
mental and spiritual imbecility. You must have for years attended to
what is taught from the pulpit and the desk, and, alongside of that, you
must have made a sobering and solemnising application of it all to your
own heart. And then you would have seen and felt that the heels of your
mind and of your heart are only too firmly fettered with the irons of
ignorance and inexperience and self-complacency. But as it is, if you
would tell the truth, you would say to us what Simple said to Christian,
I see no danger. The next time that John Bunyan passed that bottom, the
chains had been taken off the heels of this sleeping fool and had been
put round his neck.
SLOTH
Sloth had a far better head than Simple had; but what of that when he
made no better use of it? There are many able men who lie all their days
in a sad bottom with the irons of indolence and inefficiency on their
heels. We often envy them their abilities, and say about them, What
might they not have done for themselves and for us had they only worked
hard? Just as we are surprised to see other men away above us on the
mountain top, not because they have better abilities than we have, but
because they tore the fetters of sloth out of their soft flesh and set
themselves down doggedly to their work. And the same sloth that starves
and fetters the mind at the same time casts the conscience and the heart
into a deep sleep. I often wonder as I go on working among you, if you
ever attach any meaning or make any application to yourselves of all
those commands and counsels of which the Scriptures are full,--to be up
and doing, to watch and pray, to watch and be sober, to fight the good
fight of faith, to hold the fort, to rise early, and even by night, and
to endure unto death, and never for one moment to be found off your
guard. Do you attach any real meaning to these examples of the
psalmists, to these continual commands and examples of Christ, and to
these urgent counsels of his apostles? Do you? Against whom and against
what do you thus campaign and fight? For fear of whom or of what do you
thus watch? What fort do you hold? What occupies your thoughts in night-
watches, and what inspires and compels your early prayers? It is your
stupefying life of spiritual sloth that makes it impossible for you to
answer these simple and superficial questions. Sloth is not the word for
it. Let them give the right word to insanity like that who sleep and
soak in sinful sloth no longer.
We have all enemies in our own souls that never sleep, whatever we may
do. There are no irons on their heels. They never procrastinate. They
never say to their master, A little more slumber. Now, could you name
any hateful enemy entrenched in your own heart, of which you have of
yourself said far more than that? And, if so, what have you done, what
are you at this moment doing, to cast that enemy out? Have you any
armour on, any weapons of offence and precision, against that enemy? And
what success and what defeat have you had in unearthing and casting out
that enemy? What fort do you hold? On what virtue, on what grace are
you posted by your Lord to keep for yourself and for Him? And with what
cost of meat and drink and sleep and amusement do you lose it or keep it
for Him? Alexander used to leave his tent at midnight and go round the
camp, and spear to his post the sentinel he found sleeping.
There is nothing we are all so slothful in as secret, particular,
importunate prayer. We have an almighty instrument in our hand in secret
and exact prayer if we would only importunately and perseveringly employ
it. But there is an utterly unaccountable restraint of secret and
particularising prayer in all of us. There is a soaking, stupefying
sloth, that so fills our hearts that we forget and neglect the immense
concession and privilege we have afforded us in secret prayer. Our sloth
and stupidity in prayer is surely the last proof of our fall and of the
misery of our fallen state. Our sloth with a gold mine open at our feet;
a little more sleep on the top of a mast with a gulf under us that hath
no bottom,--no language of this life can adequately describe the
besottedness of that man who lies with irons on his heels between Simple
and Presumption.
PRESUMPTION
The greatest theologian of the Roman Catholic Church has made an
induction and classification of sins that has often been borrowed by our
Protestant and Puritan divines. His classification is made, as will be
seen, on an ascending scale of guilt and aggravation. In the world of
sin, he says, there are, first, sins of ignorance; next, there are sins
of infirmity; and then, at the top, there are sins of presumption. And
this, it will be remembered, was the Psalmist's inventory and estimate of
sins also. His last and his most earnest prayer was, that he might be
kept back from all presumptuous sin. Now you know quite well, without
any explanation, what presumption is. Don't presume, you say, with
rising and scarce controlled anger. Don't presume too far. Take care,
you say, with your heart beating so high that you can scarcely command
it, take care lest you go too far. And the word of God feels and speaks
about presumptuous sin very much as you do yourself. Now, what gave this
third man who lay in fetters a little beyond the cross the name of
Presumption was just this, that he had been at the cross with his past
sin, and had left the cross to commit the same sin at the first
opportunity. Presumption presumed upon his pardon. He presumed upon the
abounding grace of God. He presumed upon the blood of Christ. He was so
high on the Atonement, that he held that the gospel was not sufficiently
preached to him, unless not past sin only and present, but also all
future sin was atoned for on the tree before it was committed. There is
a reprobate in Dante, who, all the time he was repenting, had his eye on
his next opportunity. Now, our Presumption was like that. He presumed
on his youth, on his temptations, on his opportunities, and especially on
his future reformation and the permanence and the freeness of the gospel
offer. When he was in the Interpreter's House he did not hear what the
Interpreter was saying, the blood was roaring so through his veins. His
eyes were so full of other images that he did not see the man in the iron
cage, nor the spider on the wall, nor the fire fed secretly. He had no
more intention of keeping always to the way that was as straight as a
rule could make it, than he had of cutting off both his hands and
plucking out both his eyes. When the three shining ones stripped him of
his rags and clothed him with change of raiment, he had no more intention
of keeping his garments clean than he had of flying straight up to heaven
on the spot. Now, let each man name to himself what that is in which he
intentionally, deliberately, and by foresight and forethought sins. Have
you named it? Well, it was for that that this reprobate was laid by the
heels on the immediately hither side of the cross and the sepulchre. Not
that the iron might not have been taken off his heels again on certain
conditions, even after it was on; but, even so, he would never have been
the same man again that he was before his presumptuous sin. You will
easily know a man who has committed much presumptuous sin,--that is to
say, if you have any eye for a sinner. I think I would find him out if I
heard him pray once, or preach once, or even select a psalm for public or
for family worship; even if I heard him say grace at a dinner-table, or
reprove his son, or scold his servant. Presumptuous sin has so much of
the venom and essence of sin in it that, forgiven or unforgiven, even a
little of it never leaves the sinner as it found him. Even if his
fetters are knocked off, there is always a piece of the poisonous iron
left in his flesh; there is always a fang of his fetters left in the
broken bone. The presumptuous saint will always be detected by the way
he halts on his heels all his after days. Keep back Thy servant, O God,
from presumptuous sin. Let him be innocent of the great transgression.
Dr. Thomas Goodwin says somewhere that the worm that dieth not only comes
to its sharpest sting and to its deadliest venom when it is hatched up
under gospel light. The very light of nature itself greatly aggravates
some of our sins. The light of our early education greatly aggravates
others of our sins. But nothing wounds our conscience and then
exasperates the wound like a past experience of the same sin, and,
especially, an experience of the grace of God in forgiving that sin. Had
we found young Presumption in his irons before his conversion, we would
have been afraid enough at the sight. Had we found him laid by the heels
after his first uncleanness, it would have made us shudder for ourselves.
But we are horrified and speechless as we see him apprehended and laid in
irons on the very night of his first communion, and with the wine
scarcely dry on his unclean lips. Augustine postponed his baptism till
he should have his fill of sin, and till he should no longer return to
sin like a dog to his vomit. Now, next Sabbath is our communion day in
this congregation. Let us therefore this week examine ourselves. And if
we must sin as long as we are in this world, let it henceforth be the sin
of ignorance and of infirmity.
So the three reprobates lay down to sleep again, and Christian as he left
that bottom went on in the narrow way singing:
'O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be
Let that grace, Lord, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.'
THE THREE SHINING ONES AT THE CROSS
'Salvation shall God appoint for walls.'--Isaiah.
John Bunyan's autobiography, _Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners_,
is the best of all our commentaries on _The Pilgrim's Progress_, and
again to-night I shall have to fall back on that incomparable book. 'Now,
I saw in my dream that the highway up which Christian was to go was
fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall is called Salvation. Up
this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run, but not without great
difficulty, because of the load on his back.' In the corresponding
paragraph in _Grace Abounding_, our author says, speaking about himself:
'But forasmuch as the passage was wonderful narrow, even so narrow that I
could not but with great difficulty enter in thereat, it showed me that
none could enter into life but those that were in downright earnest, and
unless also they left this wicked world behind them; for here was only
room for body and soul, but not for body and soul and sin.' 'He ran thus
till he came to a place somewhat ascending, and upon that place stood a
cross, and a little below in the bottom a sepulchre. So I saw in my
dream, that just as Christian came up with this cross, his burden loosed
from off his shoulders and fell from off his back, and began to tumble,
and so continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where
it fell in, and I saw it no more.' Turning again to the _Grace
Abounding_, we read in the 115th paragraph: 'I remember that one day as I
was travelling into the country and musing on the wickedness and
blasphemy of my heart, and considering of the enmity that was in me to
God, that scripture came into my mind, He hath made peace by the blood of
His Cross. By which I was made to see both again and again and again
that day that God and my soul were friends by that blood: yea, I saw that
the justice of God and my sinful soul could embrace and kiss each other
through that blood. That was a good day to me; I hope I shall not forget
it. I thought I could have spoken of His love and of His mercy to me
that day to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me had
they been capable to have understood me. Wherefore I said in my soul
with much gladness, Well, I would I had a pen and ink here and I would
write this down before I go any farther, for surely I will not forget
this forty years hence.'
From all this we learn that the way to the Celestial City lies within
high and close fencing walls. There is not room for many pilgrims to
walk abreast in that way; indeed, there is seldom room for two. There
are some parts of the way where two or even three pilgrims can for a time
walk and converse together, but for the most part the path is
distressingly lonely. The way is so fenced up also that a pilgrim cannot
so much as look either to the right hand or the left. Indeed, it is one
of the laws of that road that no man is to attempt to look except
straight on before him. But then there is this compensation for the
solitude and stringency of the way that the wall that so encloses it is
Salvation. And Salvation is such a wall that it is companionship and
prospect enough of itself. Dante saw a long reach of this same wall
running round the bottom of the mount that cleanses him who climbs it,--a
long stretch of such sculptured beauty, that it arrested him and
instructed him and delighted him beyond his power sufficiently to praise
it. And thus, that being so, burdened and bowed down to the earth as our
pilgrim was, he was on the sure way, sooner or later, to deliverance.
Somewhere and sometime and somehow on that steep and high fenced way
deliverance was sure to come. And, then, as to the burdened man himself.
His name was once Graceless, but his name is Graceless no longer. No
graceless man runs long between these close and cramping-up walls; and,
especially, no graceless man has that burden long on his back. That is
not Graceless any longer who is leaving the Interpreter's House for the
fenced way; that is Christian, and as long as he remains Christian, the
closeness of the fence and the weight of his burden are a small matter.
But long-looked-for comes at last. And so, still carrying his burden and
keeping close within the fenced-up way, our pilgrim came at last to a
cross. And a perfect miracle immediately took place in that somewhat
ascending ground. For scarcely had Christian set his eyes on the cross,
when, without his pulling at it, or pushing it, or even at that moment
thinking of it, ere ever he was aware, he saw his burden begin to tumble,
and so it continued to do till it fell fairly out of his sight into an
open sepulchre.
The application of all that is surely self-evident. For our way in a
holy life is always closely fenced up. It is far oftener a lonely way
than otherwise. And the steepness, sternness, and loneliness of our way
are all aggravated by the remembrance of our past sins and follies. They
still, and more and more, lie upon our hearts a heart-crushing burden.
But if we, like Christian, know how to keep our back to our former house
and our face to heaven, sooner or later we too shall surely come to the
cross. And then, either suddenly, or after a long agony, our burden also
shall be taken off our back and shut down into Christ's sepulchre. And I
saw it no more, says the dreamer. He does not say that its owner saw it
no more. He was too wise and too true a dreamer to say that.
It will be remembered that the first time we saw this man, with whose
progress to the Celestial City we are at present occupied, he was
standing in a certain place clothed with rags and with a burden on his
back. After a long journey with him, we have just seen his burden taken
off his back, and it is only after his burden is off and a Shining One
has said to him, Thy sins be forgiven, that a second Shining One comes
and strips him of his rags and clothes him with change of raiment. Now,
why, it may be asked, has Christian had to carry his burden so long, and
why is he still kept so ragged and so miserable and he so far on in the
pilgrim's path? Surely, it will be said, John Bunyan was dreaming indeed
when he kept a truly converted man, a confessedly true and sincere
Christian, so long in bonds and in rags. Well, as to his rags: filthy
rags are only once spoken of in the Bible, and it is the prophet Isaiah,
whose experience and whose language John Bunyan had so entirely by heart,
who puts them on. And that evangelist among the prophets not only calls
his own and Israel's sins filthy rags, but Isaiah is very bold, and calls
their very righteousnesses by that opprobrious name. Had that bold
prophet said that all his and all his people's _un_righteousnesses were
filthy rags, all Israel would have subscribed to that. There was no man
so brutish as not to admit that. But as long as they had any sense of
truth and any self-respect, multitudes of Isaiah's first hearers and
readers would resent what he so rudely said of their righteousnesses. On
the other hand, the prophet's terrible discovery and comparison, just
like our dreamer's dramatic distribution of Christian experience, was, to
a certainty, an immense consolation to many men in Israel in his day.
They gathered round Isaiah because, but for him and his evangelical
ministry, they would have been alone in their despair. To them Isaiah's
ministry was a house of refuge, and the prophet himself a veritable tower
of strength. They felt they were not alone so long as Isaiah dwelt in
the same city with them. And thus, whatever he might be to others, he
was God's very prophet to them as his daily prayers in the temple both
cast them down and lifted them up. 'Oh that Thou wouldst rend the
heavens and come down . . . But we are all as an unclean thing, and all
our righteousnesses are as filthy rags, and our iniquities like the wind
have taken us away.' Thousands in Israel found in these terrible words a
door of hope, a sense of fellowship, and a call to trust and
thanksgiving. And tens of thousands have found the same help and
consolation out of what have seemed to others the very darkest and most
perplexing pages of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ and the _Grace Abounding_.
'It made me greatly ashamed,' says Hopeful, 'of the vileness of my former
life, and confounded me with the sense of mine own ignorance, for there
never came into mine heart before now that showed me so by contrast the
beauty of the Lord Jesus. My own vileness and nakedness made me love a
holy life. Yea, I thought that had I now a thousand gallons of blood in
my body, I could spill it all for the sake of the Lord Jesus.' And if
you, my brother, far on in the way of Salvation, still think sometimes
that, after all, you must be a reprobate because of your filthy rags,
read what David Brainerd wrote with his half-dead hand on the last page
of his seraphic journal: 'How sweet it is to love God and to have a heart
all for God! Yes; but a voice answered me, You are not all for God, you
are not an angel. To which my whole soul replied, I as sincerely desire
to love and glorify God as any angel in heaven. But you are filthy, and
not fit for heaven. When hereupon there instantly appeared above me and
spread over me the blessed robes of Christ's righteousness which I could
not but exult and triumph in. And then I knew that I should be as active
as an angel in heaven, and should then be for ever stripped of my filthy
garments and clothed with spotless raiment.' Let me die the death of
David Brainerd, and let my latter end be like his!
The third Shining One then came forward and set a mark on the forehead of
this happy man. And it was a most ancient and a most honourable mark.
For it was the same redeeming mark that was set by Moses upon the
foreheads of the children of Israel when the Lord took them into covenant
with Himself at the Passover in the wilderness. It was the same
distinguishing mark also that the man with the slaughter-weapon in his
hand first set upon the foreheads of the men who sighed and cried for the
abominations that were done in the midst of Jerusalem. And it was the
same glorious mark that John saw in the foreheads of the hundred and
forty and four thousand who stood upon Mount Zion and sang a song that no
man knew but those men who had been redeemed from the earth by the blood
of the Lamb. The mark was set for propriety and for ornament and for
beauty. It was set upon his forehead so that all who looked on him ever
after might thus know to what company and what country he belonged, and
that this was not his rest, but that he had been called and chosen to a
heavenly inheritance. And, besides, it was no sooner set upon his
forehead than it greatly added to his dignity and his comeliness. He had
now the gravity and beauty of an angel; nay, the beauty in his measure
and the gravity of Goodwill at the gate himself. And, then, as if that
were not enough, the third Shining One also gave him a roll with a seal
upon it, which he was bidden look on as he ran, and which he was to give
in when he arrived at the Celestial Gate. Now, what was that sealed roll
but just the inward memory and record of all this pilgrim's experiences
of the grace of God from the day he set out on pilgrimage down to that
day when he stood unburdened of his guilt, unclothed of his rags, and
clothed upon with change of raiment? The roll contained his own secret
life, all sealed and shone in upon by the light of God's countenance. The
secret of the Lord with this pilgrim was written within that roll, a
secret that no man could read but he himself alone. It was the same roll
that this same Shining One gave to Abraham, the first pilgrim and the
father of all true pilgrims, after Melchizedek, the priest of the Most
High God, had brought forth bread and wine and had blessed that great
believer. 'Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great
reward.' And, again, after Abram had lost his roll, like our pilgrim in
the arbour, when he recovered it he read thus in it: 'I am the Almighty
God: walk before Me, and be thou perfect. And I will make My covenant
between Me and thee.' And Abram fell on his face for joy. It was the
same roll out of which the Psalmist proposed to read a passage to all
those in his day who feared God. 'Come and hear, all ye that fear God,
and I will declare what He hath done for my soul.' It was the same roll
also that God sent to Israel in his sore captivity. 'Fear not, O Israel,
for I have redeemed thee; I have called thee by thy name, thou art Mine.
When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.' The high
priest Joshua also had the same roll put into his hand, and that not only
for his own comfort, but to make him the comforter of God's afflicted
people. For after the Lord had plucked Joshua as a brand out of the
fire, and had made his iniquity to pass from him, and had clothed him
with change of raiment, and had set a fair mitre on his head, the Lord
gave to Joshua a sealed roll, the contents of which may be read to this
day in the book of the prophet Zechariah. Nay, more: 'Will you have me
to speak plainly?' says great Goodwin on this matter. 'Then, though our
Lord had the assurance of faith that He was the Son of God, for He knew
it out of the Scriptures by reading all the prophets, yet, to have it
sealed to Him with joy unspeakable and glorious,--this was deferred to
the time of His baptism. He was then anointed with the oil of assurance
and gladness in a more peculiar and transcendent manner.' 'In His
baptism,' says Bengel, 'our Lord was magnificently enlightened. He was
previously the Son of God, and yet the power of the Divine testimony to
His Sonship at His baptism long affected Him in a lively manner.' And we
see our Lord reading His roll to assure and sustain His heart when all
outward acceptance and sustenance failed Him. 'There is One who beareth
witness of Me, and His witness is true. I receive not witness from men.
I have a greater witness than even that of John. For the Father Himself
that hath sent Me, He beareth witness of Me.' No wonder that our heavy-
laden pilgrim of yesterday gave three leaps for joy and went on singing
with such a roll as that in his bosom. For, at that supreme moment he
had that inward illumination and assurance sealed on his heart that had
so gladdened and sustained so many prophets and psalmists and apostles
and saints before his day. And though, like Abraham and all the other
saints who ever had that noble roll put into their keeping, except Jesus
Christ, he often lost it, yet as often as he again recovered it, it
brought back again with it all his first joy and gladness.
But, as was said at the beginning, the _Grace Abounding_ is the best of
all our commentaries on _The Pilgrim's Progress_. As thus here also:
'Now had I an evidence, as I thought, of my salvation from heaven, with
many golden seals thereon, all hanging in my sight. Now could I remember
this manifestation and that other discovery of grace with comfort, and
should often long and desire that the last day were come, that I might be
for ever inflamed with the sight and joy of Him and communion with Him
whose head was crowned with thorns, whose face was spit on, and body
broken, and soul made an offering for my sins. For whereas, before, I
lay continually trembling at the mouth of hell, now, methought, I was got
so far therefrom that I could not, when I looked back, scarce discern it.
And oh! thought I, that I were fourscore years old now, that I might die
quickly, that my soul might be gone to rest.'
Then Christian gave three leaps for joy and went on singing:
'Thus far did I come laden with my sin,
Nor could ought ease the grief that I was in
Till I came hither: .
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