BUNYAN CHARACTERS: FIRST SERIES
BEING LECTURES DELIVERED IN ST. GEORGE'S FREE CHURCH EDINBURGH




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. Byends 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 today, 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 gate-keeper'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 life-long 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
UNrighteousnesses 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:  . . .
Blest Cross! blest Sepulchre! blest rather be
The Man that there was put to shame for me.'



FORMALIST AND HYPOCRISY



'A form of godliness.'--Paul.

We all began our religious life by being formalists.  And we were
not altogether to blame for that.  Our parents were first to blame
for that, and then our teachers, and then our ministers.  They made
us say our psalm and our catechism to them, and if we only said our
sacred lesson without stumbling, we were straightway rewarded with
their highest praise.  They seldom took the trouble to make us
understand the things we said to them.  They were more than content
with our correct repetition of the words.  We were never taught
either to read or repeat with our eyes on the object.  And we had
come to our manhood before we knew how to seek for the visual image
that lies at the root of all our words.  And thus the ill-taught
schoolboy became in us the father of the confirmed formalist.  The
mischief of this neglect still spreads through the whole of our
life, but it is absolutely disastrous in our religious life.  Look
at the religious formalist at family worship with his household
gathered round him all in his own image.  He would not on any
account let his family break up any night without the habitual
duty.  He has a severe method in his religious duties that nothing
is ever allowed to disarrange or in any way to interfere with.  As
the hour strikes, the big Bible is brought out.  He opens where he
left off last night, he reads the regulation chapter, he leads the
singing in the regulation psalm, and then, as from a book, he
repeats his regulation prayer.  But he never says a word to show
that he either sees or feels what he reads, and his household break
up without an idea in their heads or an affection in their hearts.
He comes to church and goes through public worship in the same
wooden way, and he sits through the Lord's Table in the same formal
and ceremonious manner.  He has eyes of glass and hands of wood,
and a heart without either blood or motion in it.  His mind and his
heart were destroyed in his youth, and all his religion is a
religion of rites and ceremonies without sense or substance.
'Because I knew no better,' says Bunyan, 'I fell in very eagerly
with the religion of the times:  to wit, to go to church twice a
day, and that, too, with the foremost.  And there should I sing and
say as others did.  Withal, I was so overrun with the spirit of
superstition that I adored, and that with great devotion, even all
things, both the high place, priest, clerk, vestment, service, and
what else belonged to the church:  counting all things holy that
were therein contained.  But all this time I was not sensible of
the danger and evil of sin.  I was kept from considering that sin
would damn me, what religion soever I followed, unless I was found
in Christ.  Nay, I never thought of Christ, nor whether there was
one or no.'

A formalist is not yet a hypocrite exactly, but he is ready now and
well on the way at any moment to become a hypocrite.  As soon now
as some temptation shall come to him to make appear another and a
better man than he really is:  when in some way it becomes his
advantage to seem to other people to be a spiritual man:  when he
thinks he sees his way to some profit or praise by saying things
and doing things that are not true and natural to him,--then he
will pass on from being a bare and simple formalist, and will
henceforth become a hypocrite.  He has never had any real
possession or experience of spiritual things amid all his formal
observances of religious duties, and he has little or no
difficulty, therefore, in adding another formality or two to his
former life of unreality.  And thus the transition is easily made
from a comparatively innocent and unconscious formalist to a
conscious and studied hypocrite.  'An hypocrite,' says Samuel
Rutherford, 'is he who on the stage represents a king when he is
none, a beggar, an old man, a husband, when he is really no such
thing.  To the Hebrews, they were faciales, face-men; colorati,
dyed men, red men, birds of many colours.  You may paint a man, you
may paint a rose, you may paint a fire burning, but you cannot
paint a soul, or the smell of a rose, or the heat of a fire.  And
it is hard to counterfeit spiritual graces, such as love to Christ,
sincere intending of the glory of God, and such like spiritual
things.'  Yes, indeed; it is hard to put on and to go through with
a truly spiritual grace even to the best and most spiritually-
minded of men; and as for the true hypocrite, he never honestly
attempts it.  If he ever did honestly and resolutely attempt it, he
would at once in that pass out of the ranks of the hypocrites
altogether and pass over into a very different category.  Bunyan
lets us see how a formalist and a hypocrite and a Christian all
respectively do when they come to a real difficulty.  The three
pilgrims were all walking in the same path, and with their faces
for the time in the same direction.  They had not held much
conference together since their first conversation, and as time
goes on, Christian has no more talk but with himself, and that
sometimes sighingly, and sometimes more comfortably.  When, all at
once, the three men come on the hill Difficulty.  A severe act of
self-denial has to be done at this point of their pilgrimage.  A
proud heart has to be humbled to the dust.  A second, a third, a
tenth place has to be taken in the praise of men.  An outbreak of
anger and wrath has to be kept under for hours and days.  A great
injury, a scandalous case of ingratitude, has to be forgiven and
forgotten; in short, as Rutherford says, an impossible-to-be-
counterfeited spiritual grace has to be put into its severest and
sorest exercise; and the result was--what we know.  Our pilgrim
went and drank of the spring that always runs at the bottom of the
hill Difficulty, and thus refreshed himself against that hill;
while Formalist took the one low road, and Hypocrisy the other,
which led him into a wide field full of dark mountains, where he
stumbled and fell and rose no more.  When, after his visit to the
spring, Christian began to go up the hill, saying:


'This hill, though high, I covet to ascend;
The difficulty will not me offend;
For I perceive the way to life lies here;
Come, pluck up heart; let's neither faint nor fear;
Better, though difficult, the right way to go,
Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.'


Now, all this brings us to the last step in the evolution of a
perfect hypocrite out of a simple formalist.  The perfect and
finished hypocrite is not your commonplace and vulgar scoundrel of
the playwright and the penny-novelist type; the finest hypocrite is
a character their art cannot touch.  'The worst of hypocrites,'
Rutherford goes on to say, 'is he who whitens himself till he
deceives himself.  It is strange that a man hath such power over
himself.  But a man's heart may deceive his heart, and he may
persuade himself that he is godly and righteous when he knows
nothing about it.'  'Preaching in a certain place,' says Boston,
'after supper the mistress of the house told me how I had terrified
God's people.  This was by my doctrine of self-love, self-
righteousness, self-ends, and such like.  She restricted hypocrites
to that sort that do all things to be seen of men, and harped much
on this--how can one be a hypocrite who hates hypocrisy in other
people? how can one be a hypocrite and not know it?  All this led
me to see the need of such doctrine.'  And if only to show you that
this is not the dismal doctrine of antediluvian Presbyterians only,
Canon Mozley says:  'The Pharisee did not know that he was a
Pharisee; if he had known it he would not have been a Pharisee.  He
does not know that he is a hypocrite.  The vulgar hypocrite knows
that he is a hypocrite because he deceives others, but the true
Scripture hypocrite deceives himself.'  And the most subtle teacher
of our century, or of any century, has said:  'What is a hypocrite?
We are apt to understand by a hypocrite one who makes a profession
of religion for secret ends without practising what he professes;
who is malevolent, covetous, or profligate, while he assumes an
outward sanctity in his words and conduct, and who does so
deliberately, deceiving others, and not at all self-deceived.  But
this is not what our Saviour seems to have meant by a hypocrite;
nor were the Pharisees such.  The Pharisees deceived themselves as
well as others.  Indeed, it is not in human nature to deceive
others for any long time without in a measure deceiving ourselves
also.  When they began, each in his turn, to deceive the people,
they were not at the moment self-deceived.  But by degrees they
forgot that outward ceremonies avail nothing without inward purity.
They did not know themselves, and they unawares deceived themselves
as well as the people.'  What a terrible light, as of the last day
itself, does all that cast upon the formalisms and the hypocrisies
of which our own religious life is full!  And what a terrible light
it casts on those miserable men who are complete and finished in
their self-deception!  For the complete and finished hypocrite is
not he who thinks that he is better than all other men; that is
hopeless enough; but the paragon of hypocrisy is he who does not
know that he is worse than all other men.  And in his stone-
blindness to himself, and consequently to all reality and
inwardness and spirituality in religion, you see him intensely
interested in, and day and night occupied with, the outside things
of religion, till nothing short of a miracle will open his eyes.
See him in the ministry, for instance, sweating at his sermons and
in his visiting, till you would almost think that he is the
minister of whom Paul prophesied, who should spend and be spent for
the salvation of men's souls.  But all the time, such is the
hypocrisy that haunts the ministerial calling, he is really and at
bottom animated with ambition for the praise of men only, and for
the increase of his congregation.  See him, again, now assailing or
now defending a church's secular privileges, and he knowing no
more, all the time, what a church has been set up for on earth than
the man in the moon.  What a penalty his defence is and his support
to a church of Christ, and what an incubus his membership must be!
Or, see him, again, making long speeches and many prayers for the
extension of the kingdom of Christ, and all the time spending ten
times more on wine or whisky or tobacco, or on books or pictures or
foreign travel, than he gives to the cause of home or foreign
missions.  And so on, all through our hypocritical and self-blinded
life.  Through such stages, and to such a finish, does the
formalist pass from his thoughtless and neglected youth to his
hardened, blinded, self-seeking life, spent in the ostensible
service of the church of Christ.  If the light that is in such men
be darkness, how great is that darkness!  We may all well shudder
as we hear our Lord saying to ministers and members and church
defenders and church supporters, like ourselves:  'Now ye say, We
see; therefore your sin remaineth.'

Now, the first step to the cure of all such hypocrisy, and to the
salvation of our souls, is to know that we are hypocrites, and to
know also what that is in which we are most hypocritical.  Well,
there are two absolutely infallible tests of a true hypocrite,--
tests warranted to unmask, expose, and condemn the most finished,
refined, and even evangelical hypocrite in this house to-night, or
in all the world.  By far and away the best and swiftest is prayer.
True prayer, that is.  For here again our inexpugnable hypocrisy
comes in and leads us down to perdition even in our prayers.  There
is nothing our Lord more bitterly and more contemptuously assails
the Pharisees for than just the length, the loudness, the number,
and the publicity of their prayers.  The truth is, public prayer,
for the most part, is no true prayer at all.  It is at best an open
homage paid to secret prayer.  We make such shipwrecks of devotion
in public prayer, that if we have a shred of true religion about
us, we are glad to get home and to shut our door.  We preach in our
public prayers.  We make speeches on public men and on public
events in our public prayers.  We see the reporters all the time in
our public prayers.  We do everything but pray in our public
prayers.  And to get away alone,--what an escape that is from the
temptations and defeats of public prayer!  No; public prayer is no
test whatever of a hypocrite.  A hypocrite revels in public prayer.
It is secret prayer that finds him out.  And even secret prayer
will sometimes deceive us.  We are crushed down on our secret knees
sometimes, by sheer shame and the strength of conscience.  Fear of
exposure, fear of death and hell, will sometimes make us shut our
door.  A flood of passing feeling will sometimes make us pray for a
season in secret.  Job had all that before him when he said, 'Will
the hypocrite delight himself in the Almighty? will he always call
upon God?'  No, he will not.  And it is just here that the
hypocrite and the true Christian best discover themselves both to
God and to themselves.  The true Christian will, as Job again says,
pray in secret till God slays him.  He will pray in his dreams; he
will pray till death; he will pray after he is dead.  Are you in
earnest, then, not to be any more a hypocrite and to know the
infallible marks of such?  Ask the key of your closet door.  Ask
the chair at your bedside.  Ask the watchman what you were doing
and why your light was in so long.  Ask the birds of the air and
the beasts of the field and the crows on the ploughed lands after
your solitary walk.

Almost a better test of true and false religion than even secret
prayer, but a test that is far more difficult to handle, is our
opinion of ourselves.  In His last analysis of the truly justified
man and the truly reprobate, our Lord made the deepest test to be
their opinion of themselves.  'God, I thank Thee that I am not as
this publican,' said the hypocrite.  'God be merciful to me a
sinner,' said the true penitent.  And then this fine principle
comes in here--not only to speed the sure sanctification of a true
Christian, but also, if he has skill and courage to use it, for his
assurance and comfort,--that the saintlier he becomes and the riper
for glory, the more he will beat his breast over what yet abides
within his breast.  Yes; a man's secret opinion of himself is
almost a better test of his true spiritual state than even secret
prayer.  But, then, these two are not competing and exclusive
tests; they always go together and are never found apart.  And at
the mouth of these two witnesses every true hypocrite shall be
condemned and every true Christian justified.

Dr. Pusey says somewhere that the perfect hypocrite is the man who
has the truth of God in his mind, but is without the love of God in
his heart.  'Truth without love,' says that saintly scholar, 'makes
a finished Pharisee.'  Now we Scottish and Free Church people
believe we have the truth, if any people on the face of the earth
have it; and if we have not love mixed with it, you see where and
what we are.  We are called to display a banner because of the
truth, but let love always be our flag-staff.  Let us be jealous
for the truth, but let it be a godly, that is to say, a loving
jealousy.  When we contend for purity of doctrine and for purity of
worship, when we protest against popery and priestcraft, when we
resist rationalism and infidelity, when we do battle now for
national religion, as we call it, and now for the freedom of the
church, let us do it all in love to all men, else we had better not
do it at all.  If we cannot do it with clean and all-men-loving
hearts, let us leave all debate and contention to stronger and
better men than we are.  The truth will never be advanced or
guarded by us, nor will the Lord of truth and love accept our
service or bless our souls, till we put on the divine nature, and
have our hearts and our mouths still more full of love than our
minds and our mouths are full of truth.  Let us watch ourselves,
lest with all our so-called love of truth we be found reprobates at
last because we loved the truth for some selfish or party end, and
hated and despised our brother, and believed all evil and
disbelieved all good concerning our brother.  Truth without love
makes a hypocrite, says Dr. Pusey; and evangelical truth without
evangelical love makes an evangelical hypocrite, says Thomas
Shepard.  Only where the whole truth is united to a heart full of
love have we the perfect New Testament Christian.



TIMOROUS AND MISTRUST



'There is a lion in the way.'--The Slothful Man.
'I must venture.'--Christian.

'I at any rate must venture,' said Christian to Timorous and
Mistrust.  'Whatever you may do I must venture, even if the lions
you speak of should pull me to pieces.  I, for one, shall never go
back.  To go back is nothing but death; to go forward is fear of
death and everlasting life beyond it.  I will yet go forward.'  So
Mistrust and Timorous ran down the hill, and Christian went on his
way.  George Offor says, in his notes on this passage, that civil
despotism and ecclesiastical tyranny so terrified many young
converts in John Bunyan's day, that multitudes turned back like
Mistrust and Timorous; while at the same time, many like Bunyan
himself went forward and for a time fell into the lion's mouth.
Civil despotism and ecclesiastical tyranny do not stand in our way
as they stood in Bunyan's way--at least, not in the same shape:
but every age has its own lions, and every Christian man has his
own lions that neither civil despots nor ecclesiastical tyrants
know anything about.

Now, who or what is the lion in your way?  Who or what is it that
fills you with such timorousness and mistrust, that you are almost
turning back from the way to life altogether?  The fiercest of all
our lions is our own sin.  When a man's own sin not only finds him
out and comes roaring after him, but when it dashes past him and
gets into the woods and thickets before him, and stands pawing and
foaming on the side of his way, that is a trial of faith and love
and trust indeed.  Sometimes a man's past sins will fill all his
future life with sleepless apprehensions.  He is never sure at what
turn in his upward way he may not suddenly run against some of them
standing ready to rush out upon him.  And it needs no little quiet
trust and humble-minded resignation to carry a man through this
slough and that bottom, up this hill and down that valley, all the
time with his life in his hand; and yet at every turn, at every
rumour that there are lions in the way, to say, Come lion, come
lamb, come death, come life, I must venture, I will yet go forward.
As Job also, that wonderful saint of God, said, 'Hold your peace,
let me alone that I may speak, and let come on me what will.
Wherefore do I take my flesh in my teeth and put my life in my
hand?  Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.  He also shall
be my salvation; for an hypocrite shall not come before Him.'

One false step, one stumble in life, one error in judgment, one
outbreak of an unbridled temperament, one small sin, if it is even
so much as a sin, of ignorance or of infirmity, will sometimes not
only greatly injure us at the time, but, in some cases, will fill
all our future life with trials and difficulties and dangers.  Many
of us shall have all our days to face a future of defeat,
humiliation, impoverishment, and many hardships, that has not come
on us on account of any presumptuous transgression of God's law so
much as simply out of some combination of unfortunate circumstances
in which we may have only done our duty, but have not done it in
the most serpent-like way.  And when we are made to suffer unjustly
or disproportionately all our days for our error of judgment or our
want of the wisdom of this world, or what not, we are sorely
tempted to be bitter and proud and resentful and unforgiving, and
to go back from duty and endurance and danger altogether.  But we
must not.  We must rather say to ourselves, Now and here, if not in
the past, I must play the man, and, by God's help, the wise man.  I
must pluck safety henceforth out of the heart of the nettle danger.
Yes, I made a mistake.  I did what I would not do now, and I must
not be too proud to say so.  I acted, I see now, precipitately,
inconsiderately, imprudently.  And I must not gloom and rebel and
run away from the cross and the lion.  I must not insist or expect
that the always wise and prudent man's reward is to come to me.
The lion in my way is a lion of my own rearing; and I must not turn
my back on him, even if he should be let loose to leap on me and
rend me.  I must pass under his paw and through his teeth, if need
be, to a life with him and beyond him of humility and duty and
quiet-hearted submission to his God and mine.

Then, again, our salvation itself sometimes, our true
sanctification, puts on a lion's skin and not unsuccessfully
imitates an angry lion's roar.  Some saving grace that up till now
we have been fatally lacking in lies under the very lip of that
lion we see standing straight in our way.  God in His wisdom so
orders our salvation, that we must work out the best part of it
with fear and trembling.  Right before us, just beside us, standing
over us with his heavy paw upon us, is a lion, from under whose paw
and from between whose teeth we must pluck and put on that grace in
which our salvation lies.  Repentance and reformation lie in the
way of that lion; resignation also and humility; the crucifixion of
our own will; the sacrifice of our own heart; in short, everything
that is still lacking but is indispensable to our salvation lies
through that den of lions.  One man here is homeless and loveless;
another is childless; another has a home and children, and much
envies the man who has neither; one has talents there is no scope
for; another has the scope, but not the sufficient talent; another
must now spend all his remaining life in a place where he sees that
anger and envy and jealousy and malevolence will be his roaring
lions daily seeking to devour his soul.  There is not a Christian
man or woman in this house whose salvation, worth being called a
salvation, does not lie through such a lion's thicket as that.  Our
Lord Himself was a roaring lion to John the Baptist.  For the
Baptist's salvation lay not in his powerful preaching, but in his
being laid aside from all preaching; not in his crowds increasing,
but in his Successor's crowds increasing and his decreasing.  The
Baptist was the greatest born of woman in that day, not because he
was a thundering preacher--any ordinary mother in Israel might have
been his mother in that:  but to decrease sweetly and to steal down
quietly to perfect humility and self-oblivion,--that salvation was
reserved for the son of Elisabeth alone.  I would not like to say
Who that is champing and pawing for your blood right in your
present way.  Reverence will not let me say Who it is.  Only, you
venture on Him.

'Yes, I shall venture!' said Christian to the two terrified and
retreating men.  Now, every true venture is made against risk and
uncertainty, against anxiety and danger and fear.  And it is just
this that constitutes the nobleness and blessedness of faith.
Faith sells all for Christ.  Faith risks all for eternal life.
Faith faces all for salvation.  When it is at the worst, faith
still says, Very well; even if there is no Celestial City anywhere
in the world, it is better to die still seeking it than to live on
in the City of Destruction.  Even if there is no Jesus Christ,--I
have read about Him and heard about Him and pictured Him to myself,
till, say what you will, I shall die kissing and embracing that
Divine Image I have in my heart.  Even if there is neither mercy-
seat nor intercession in heaven, I shall henceforth pray without
ceasing.  Far far better for me all the rest of my sinful life to
be clothed with sackcloth and ashes, even if there is no fountain
opened in Jerusalem for sin and uncleanness, and no change of
raiment.  Christian protested that, as for him, lions and all, he
had no choice left.  And no more have we.  He must away somewhere,
anywhere, from his past life.  And so must we.  If all the lions
that ever drank blood are to collect upon his way, let them do so;
they shall not all make him turn back.  Why should they?  What is a
whole forest full of lions to a heart and a life full of sin?
Lions are like lambs compared with sin.  'Good morning!  I for one
must venture.  I shall yet go forward.'  So Mistrust and Timorous
ran down the hill, and Christian went on his way.

So I saw in my dream that he made haste and went forward, that if
possible he might get lodging in the house called Beautiful that
stood by the highway side.  Now, before he had gone far he entered
into a very narrow passage which was about a furlong off from the
porter's lodge, and looking very narrowly before him as he went, he
espied two lions in the way.  Then was he afraid, and thought also
to go back, for he thought that nothing but death was before him.
But the porter at the lodge, whose name was Watchful, perceiving
that Christian made a halt, as if he would go back, cried unto him,
saying, 'Is thy strength so small?  Fear not the lions, for they
are chained, and are only placed there for the trial of faith where
it is, and for the discovery of those who have none.  Keep the
midst of the path and no hurt shall come to thee.'  Yes, that is
all we have to do.  Whatever our past life may have been, whatever
our past sins, past errors of judgment, past mistakes and mishaps,
whatever of punishment or chastisement or correction or instruction
or sanctification and growth in grace may be under those lions'
skins and between their teeth for us, all we have got to do at
present is to leave the lions to Him who set them there, and to go
on, up to them and past them, keeping always to the midst of the
path.  The lions may roar at us till they have roared us deaf and
blind, but we are far safer in the midst of that path than we would
be in our own bed.  Only let us keep in the midst of the path.
When their breath is hot and full of blood on our cheek; when they
paw up the blinding earth; when we feel as if their teeth had
closed round our heart,--still, all the more, let us keep in the
midst of the path.  We must sometimes walk on a razor-edge of fear
and straightforwardness; that is the only way left for us now.
But, then, we have the Divine assurance that on that perilous edge
no hurt shall come to us.  'Temptations,' says our author in
another place, 'when we meet them at first, are as the lion that
roared upon Samson; but if we overcome them, the next time we see
them we shall find a nest of honey in them.'  O God, for grace and
sense and imagination to see and understand and apply all that to
our own daily life!  O to be able to take all that home to-night
and see it all there; lions and runaways, venturesome souls, narrow
paths, palaces of beauty, everlasting life and all!  Open Thou our
eyes that we may see the wonderful things that await us in our own
house at home!


'Things out of hope are compassed oft with venturing.'


So they are; and so they were that day with our terrified pilgrim.
He made a venture at the supreme moment of his danger, and things
that were quite out of all hope but an hour before were then
compassed and ever after possessed by him.  Make the same venture,
then, yourselves to-night.  Naught venture, naught have.  Your lost
soul is not much to venture, but it is all that Christ at this
moment asks of you--that you leave your lost soul in His hand, and
then go straight on from this moment in the middle of the path:
the path, that is, as your case may be, of purity, humility,
submission, resignation, and self-denial.  Keep your mind and your
heart, your eyes and your feet, in the very middle of that path,
and you shall have compassed the House Beautiful before you know.
The lions shall soon be behind you, and the grave and graceful
damsels of the House--Discretion and Prudence and Piety and
Charity--shall all be waiting upon you.



PRUDENCE {1}



'Let a man examine himself.'--Paul.

Let a man examine himself, says the apostle to the Corinthians, and
so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup.  And thus it
was, that before the pilgrim was invited to sit down at the supper
table in the House Beautiful, quite a number of most pointed and
penetrating questions were put to him by those who had charge of
that house and its supper table.  And thus the time was excellently
improved till the table was spread, while the short delay and the
successive exercises whetted to an extraordinary sharpness the
pilgrim's hunger for the supper.  Piety and Charity, who had joint
charge of the house from the Master of the house, held each a
characteristic conversation with Christian, but it was left to
Prudence to hold the most particular discourse with him until
supper was ready, and it is to that so particular discourse that I
much wish to turn your attention to-night.

With great tenderness, but at the same time with the greatest
possible gravity, Prudence asked the pilgrim whether he did not
still think sometimes of the country from whence he had come out.
Yes, he replied; how could I help thinking continually of that
unhappy country and of my sad and miserable life in it; but,
believe me,--or, rather, you cannot believe me,--with what shame
and detestation I always think of my past life.  My face burns as I
now speak of my past life to you, and as I think what my old
companions know and must often say about me.  I detest, as you
cannot possibly understand, every remembrance of my past life, and
I hate and never can forgive myself, who, with mine own hands, so
filled all my past life with shame and self-contempt.  Gently
stopping the remorseful pilgrim's self-accusations about his past
life, Prudence asked him if he had not still with him, and, indeed,
within him, some of the very things that had so destroyed both him
and all his past life.  'Yes,' he honestly and humbly said.  'Yes,
but greatly against my will:  especially my inward and sinful
cogitations.'  At this Prudence looked on him with all her deep and
soft eyes, for it was to this that she had been leading the
conversation up all the time.  Prudence had a great look of
satisfaction, mingled with love and pity, at the way the pilgrim
said 'especially my inward and sinful cogitations.'  Those who
stood by and observed Prudence wondered at her delight in the sad
discourse on which the pilgrim now entered.  But she had her own
reasons for her delight in this particular kind of discourse, and
it was seldom that she lighted on a pilgrim who both understood her
questions and responded to them as did this man now sitting beside
her.  Now, my brethren, all parable apart, is that your religious
experience?  Are you full of shame and detestation at your inward
cogitations?  Are you tormented, enslaved, and downright cursed
with your own evil thoughts?  I do not ask whether or no you have
such thoughts always within you.  I do not ask, because I know.
But I ask, because I would like to make sure that you know what,
and the true nature of what, goes on incessantly in your mind and
in your heart.  Do you, or do you not, spit out your most inward
thoughts ten times a day like poison?  If you do, you are a truly
religious man, and if you do not, you do not yet know the very ABC
of true religion, and your dog has a better errand at the Lord's
table than you have.  And if your minister lets you sit down at the
Lord's table without holding from time to time some particular
discourse with you about your sinful thoughts, he is deceiving and
misleading you, besides laying up for himself an awakening at last
to shame and everlasting contempt.  What a mill-stone his communion
roll will be round such a minister's neck!  And how his
congregation will gnash their teeth at him when they see to what
his miserable ministry has brought them!

Let a man examine himself, said Paul.  What about your inward and
sinful cogitations? asked Prudence.  How long shall thy vain
thoughts lodge within thee? demanded the bold prophet.  Now, my
brethren, what have you to say to that particular accusation? Do
you know what vain thoughts are?  Are you at all aware what
multitudes of such thoughts lodge within you?  Do they drive you
every day to your knees, and do you blush with shame when you are
alone before God at the fountain of folly that fills your mind and
your heart continually?  The Apostle speaks of vain hopes that make
us ashamed that we ever entertained them.  You have been often so
ashamed, and yet do not such hopes still too easily arise in your
heart?  What castles of idiotic folly you still build!  Were a sane
man or a modest woman even to dream such dreams of folly overnight,
they would blush and hide their heads all day at the thought.  Out
of a word, out of a look, out of what was neither a word nor a look
intended for you, what a world of vanity will you build out of it!
The question of Prudence is not whether or no you are still a born
fool at heart, she does not put unnecessary questions:  hers to you
is the more pertinent and particular question, whether, since you
left your former life and became a Christian, you feel every day
increasing shame and detestation at yourself, on account of the
vanity of your inward cogitations.  My brethren, can you satisfy
her who is set by her Master to hold particular discourse with all
true Christians before supper?  Can you say with the Psalmist,--
could you tell Prudence where the Psalmist says,--I hate vain
thoughts, but Thy law do I love?  And can you silence her by
telling her that her Master alone knows with what shame you think
that He has such a fool as you are among His people?

Anger, also, sudden and even long-entertained anger, was one of the
'many failings' of which Christian was so conscious to himself.
His outbursts of anger at home, he bitterly felt, might well be one
of the causes why his wife and children did not accompany him on
his pilgrimage.  And though he knew his failing in this respect,
and was very wary of it, yet he often failed even when he was most
wary.  Now, while anger is largely a result of our blood and
temperament, yet few of us are so well-balanced and equable in our
temperament and so pure and cool in our blood, as altogether to
escape frequent outbursts of anger.  The most happily constituted
and the best governed of us have too much cause to be ashamed and
penitent both before God and our neighbours for our outbursts of
angry passion.  But Prudence is so particular in her discourse
before supper, that she goes far deeper into our anger than our
wives and our children, our servants and our neighbours, can go.
She not only asks if we stamp out the rising anger of our heart as
we would stamp out sparks of fire in a house full of gunpowder; but
she insists on being told what we think of ourselves when the house
of our heart is still so full of such fire and such gunpowder.  Any
man, to call a man, would be humbled in his own eyes and in his
walk before his house at home after an explosion of anger among
them; but he who would satisfy Prudence and sit beside her at
supper, must not only never let his anger kindle, but the simple
secret heat of it, that fire of hell that is hid from all men but
himself in the flint of his own hard and proud heart,--what, asks
Prudence, do you think of that, and of yourself on account of that?
Does that keep you not only watchful and prayerful, but, what is
the best ground in you of all true watchfulness and prayerfulness,
full of secret shame, self-fear, and self-detestation?  One
forenoon table would easily hold all our communicants if Prudence
had the distribution of the tokens.

And, then, we who are true pilgrims, are of all men the most
miserable, on account of that 'failing,' that rankling sting in our
hearts, when any of our friends has more of this world's
possessions, honours, and praises than we have, that pain at our
neighbour's pleasure, that sickness at his health, that hunger for
what we see him eat, that thirst for what we see him drink, that
imprisonment of our spirits when we see him set at liberty, that
depression at his exaltation, that sorrow at his joy, and joy at
his sorrow, that evil heart that would have all things to itself.
Yes, said Christian, I am only too conversant with all these sinful
cogitations, but they are all greatly against my will, and might I
but choose mine own thoughts, do you suppose that I would ever
think these things any more?  'The cause is in my will,' said
Caesar, on a great occasion.  But the true Christian, unhappily,
cannot say that.  If he could say that, he would soon say also that
the snare is broken and that his soul has escaped.  And then the
cause of all his evil cogitations, his vain thoughts, his angry
feelings, his envious feelings, his ineradicable covetousness, his
hell-rooted and heaven-towering pride, and his whole evil heart of
unbelief would soon be at an end.  'I cannot be free of sin,' said
Thomas Boston, 'but God knows that He would be welcome to make
havoc of my lusts to-night and to make me henceforth a holy man.  I
know no lust that I would not be content to part with.  My will
bound hand and foot I desire to lay at His feet.'  Yes:  such is
the mystery and depth of sin in the hearts of all God's saints,
that far deeper than their will, far back behind their will, the
whole substance and very core of their hearts is wholly corrupt and
enslaved to sin.  And thus it is that while their renewed and
delivered will works out, so far, their salvation in their walk and
conversation among men, the helplessness of their will in the
cleansing and the keeping of their hearts is to the end the sorrow
and the mystery of their sanctification.  To will was present with
Paul, and with Bunyan, and with Boston; but their heart--they could
not with all their keeping keep their heart.  No man can; no man
who has at all tried it can.  'Might I but choose mine own
thoughts, I would choose never to think of these things more:  but
when I would be doing of that which is best, that which is worst is
with me.'  We can choose almost all things.  Our will and choice
have almost all things at their disposal.  We can choose our God.
We can choose life or death.  We can choose heaven or hell.  We can
choose our church, our minister, our books, our companions, our
words, our works, and, to some extent, our inward thoughts, but
only to some extent.  We can encourage this or that thought; we can
entertain it and dwell upon it; or we can detect it, detest it, and
cast it out.  But that secret place in our heart where our thoughts
hide and harbour, and out of which they spring so suddenly upon the
mind and the heart, the imagination and the conscience,--of that
secretest of all secret places, God alone is able to say, I search
the heart.  'As for secret thoughts,' says our author, speaking of
his own former religious life, 'I took no notice of them, neither
did I understand what Satan's temptations were, nor how they were
to be withstood and resisted.'  But now all these things are his
deepest grief, as they are ours,--as many of us as have been truly
turned in our deepest hearts to God.

'But,' replied Prudence, 'do you not find sometimes as if those
things were vanquished which at other times are your perplexity?'
'Yes, but that is but seldom; but they are to me golden hours in
which such things happen to me.'  'Can you remember by what means
you find your annoyances at times as if they were vanquished?'
'Yes, when I think what I saw at the cross, that will do it; and
when I look upon my broidered coat, that will do it; also, when I
look into the roll that I carry in my bosom, that will do it; and
when my thoughts wax warm about whither I am going, that will do
it.'  Yes; and these same things have many a time done it to
ourselves also.  We also, my brethren--let me tell you your own
undeniable experience--we also have such golden hours sometimes,
when we feel as if we should never again have such an evil heart
within us.  The Cross of Christ to us also has done it.  It is of
such golden hours that Isaac Watts sings in his noble hymn:


'When I survey the wondrous Cross;'


and as often as we sing that hymn with our eyes upon the object,
that will for a time vanquish our worst cogitations.  Also, when we
read the roll that we too carry in our bosom--that is to say, when
we go back into our past life till we see it and feel it all, and
till we can think and speak of nothing else but the sin that
abounded in it and the grace that much more abounded, that has a
thousand times given us also golden hours, even rest from our own
evil hearts.  And we also have often made our hearts too hot for
sin to show itself, when we read our hearts deep into such books as
The Paradiso, The Pilgrim's Progress, The Saint's Rest, The Serious
Call, The Religious Affections, and such like.  These books have
often vanquished our annoyances, and given us golden hours on the
earth.  Yes, but that is but seldom.

'Now, what is it,' asked Prudence, as she wound up this so
particular colloquy, 'that makes you so desirous to go to Mount
Zion?'

'Why,' replied the pilgrim, and the water stood in his eyes, 'why,
there I hope to see Him alive that did hang dead on the cross; and
there I hope to be rid of all those things that to this day are an
annoyance to me; there they say is no death, and there shall I
dwell with such company as I love best.  For, to tell you truth, I
love Him, because by Him I was eased of my burden, and I am weary
of my inward sickness; and I would fain be where I shall die no
more, and for ever with that company that shall continually cry,
Holy, holy, holy.'



CHARITY



'I will walk within my house with a perfect heart.'--David.

There can be nobody here to-night so stark stupid as to suppose
that the pilgrim had run away from home and left his wife and
children to the work-house.  There have been wiseacres who have
found severe fault with John Bunyan because he made his Puritan
pilgrim such a bad husband and such an unnatural father.  But
nobody possessed of a spark of common sense, not to say religion or
literature, would ever commit himself to such an utter imbecility
as that.  John Bunyan's pilgrim, whatever he may have been before
he became a pilgrim, all the time he was a pilgrim, was the most
faithful, affectionate, and solicitous husband in all the country
round about, and the tenderest, the most watchful, and the wisest
of fathers.  This pilgrim stayed all the more at home that he went
so far away from home; he accomplished his whole wonderful
pilgrimage beside his own forge and at his own fireside; and he
entered the Celestial City amid trumpets and bells and harps and
psalms, while all the time sleeping in his own humble bed.  The
House Beautiful, therefore, to which we have now come in his
company, is not some remote and romantic mansion away up among the
mountains a great many days' journey distant from this poor man's
everyday home.  The House Beautiful was nothing else,--what else
better, what else so good could it be?--than just this Christian
man's first communion Sabbath and his first communion table (first,
that is, after his true conversion from sin to God and his
confessed entrance into a new life), while the country from whence
he had come out, and concerning which both Piety and Prudence
catechised him so closely, was just his former life of open
ungodliness and all his evil walk and conversation while he was as
yet living without God and without hope in the world.  The country
on which he confessed that he now looked back with so much shame
and detestation was not England or Bedfordshire, but the wicked
life he had lived in that land and in that shire.  And when Charity
asked him as to whether he was a married man and had a family, she
knew quite well that he was, only she made a pretence of asking him
those domestic questions in order thereby to start the touching
conversation.

Beginning, then, at home, as she always began, Charity said to
Christian, 'Have you a family?  Are you a married man?'  'I have a
wife and four small children,' answered Christian.  'And why did
you not bring them with you?'  Then Christian wept and said, 'Oh,
how willingly would I have done so, but they were all of them
utterly averse to my going on pilgrimage.'  'But you should have
talked to them and have shown them their danger.'  'So I did,' he
replied, 'but I seemed to them as one that mocked.'  Now, this of
talking, and, especially, of talking about religious things to
children, is one of the most difficult things in the world,--that
is, to do it well.  Some people have the happy knack of talking to
their own and to other people's children so as always to interest
and impress them.  But such happy people are few.  Most people talk
at their children whenever they begin to talk to them, and thus,
without knowing it, they nauseate their children with their
conversation altogether.  To respect a little child, to stand in
some awe of a little child, to choose your topics, your
opportunities, your neighbourhood, your moods and his as well as
all your words, and always to speak your sincerest, simplest, most
straightforward and absolutely wisest is indispensable with a
child.  Take your mannerisms, your condescensions, your
affectations, your moralisings, and all your insincerities to your
debauched equals, but bring your truest and your best to your
child.  Unless you do so, you will be sure to lay yourself open to
a look that will suddenly go through you, and that will swiftly
convey to you that your child sees through you and despises you and
your conversation too.  'You should not only have talked to your
children of their danger,' said Charity, 'but you should have shown
them their danger.'  Yes, Charity; but a man must himself see his
own and his children's danger too, before he can show it to them,
as well as see it clearly at the time he is trying to show it to
them.  And how many fathers, do you suppose, have the eyes to see
such danger, and how then can they shew such danger to their
children, of all people?  Once get fathers to see dangers or
anything else aright, and then you will not need to tell them how
they are to instruct and impress their children.  Nature herself
will then tell them how to talk to their children, and when Nature
teaches, all our children will immediately and unweariedly listen.

But, especially, said Charity, as your boys grew up--I think you
said that you had four boys and no girls?--well, then, all the
more, as they grew up, you should have taken occasion to talk to
them about yourself.  Did your little boy never petition you for a
story about yourself; and as he grew up did you never confide to
him what you have never confided to his mother?  Something, as I
was saying, that made you sad when you were a boy and a rising man,
with a sadness your son can still see in you as you talk to him.
In conversations like that a boy finds out what a friend he has in
his father, and his father from that day has his best friend in his
son.  And then as Matthew grew up and began to out-grow his
brothers and to form friendships out of doors, did you study to
talk at the proper time to him, and on subjects on which you never
venture to talk about to any other boy or man?  You men, Charity
went on to say, live in a world of your own, and though we women
are well out of it, yet we cannot be wholly ignorant that it is
there.  And, we may well be wrong, but we cannot but think that
fathers, if not mothers, might safely tell their men-children at
least more than they do tell them of the sure dangers that lie
straight in their way, of the sorrow that men and women bring on
one another, and of what is the destruction of so many cities.  We
may well be wrong, for we are only women, but I have told you what
we all think who keep this house and hear the reports and
repentances of pilgrims, both Piety and Prudence and I myself.  And
I, for one, largely agree with the three women.  It is easier said
than done.  But the simple saying of it may perhaps lead some
fathers and mothers to think about it, and to ask whether or no it
is desirable and advisable to do it, which of them is to attempt
it, on what occasion, and to what extent.  Christian by this time
had the Slough of Despond with all its history and all that it
contained to tell his eldest son about; he had the wicket gate also
just above the slough, the hill Difficulty, the Interpreter's
House, the place somewhat ascending with a cross standing upon it,
and a little below, in the bottom, a sepulchre, not to speak of her
who assaulted Faithful, whose name was Wanton, and who at one time
was like to have done even that trusty pilgrim a life-long
mischief.  Christian rather boasted to Charity of his wariness,
especially in the matter of his children's amusements, but Charity
seemed to think that he had carried his wariness into other matters
besides amusements, without the best possible results there either.
I have sometimes thought with her that among our multitude of
congresses and conferences of all kinds of people and upon all
manner of subjects, room and membership might have been found for a
conference of fathers and mothers.  Fathers to give and take
counsel about how to talk to their sons, and mothers to their
daughters.  I am much of Charity's mind, that, if more were done at
home, and done with some frankness, for our sons and daughters,
there would be fewer fathers and mothers found sitting at the
Lord's table alone.  'You should have talked to them,' said
Charity, with some severity in her tones, 'and, especially, you
should have told them of your own sorrow.'

And then, coming still closer up to Christian, Charity asked him
whether he prayed, both before and after he so spoke to his
children, that God would bless what he said to them.  Charity
believeth all things, hopeth all things, but when she saw this man
about to sit down all alone at the supper table, it took Charity
all her might to believe that he had both spoken to his children
and at the same time prayed to God for them as he ought to have
done.  Our old ministers used to lay this vow on all fathers and
mothers at the time of baptism, that they were to pray both with
and for their children.  Now, that is a fine formula; it is a most
comprehensive, and, indeed, exhaustive formula.  Both with and for.
And especially with.  With, at such and such times, on such and
such occasions, and in such and such places.  At those times, say,
when your boy has told a lie, or struck his little brother, or
stolen something, or destroyed something.  To pray with him at such
times, and to pray with him properly, and, if you feel able to do
it, and are led to do it, to tell him something after the prayer
about yourself, and your own not-yet-forgotten boyhood, and your
father; it makes a fine time to mix talk and prayer together in
that way.  Charity is not easily provoked, but the longer she lives
and keeps the table in the House Beautiful the more she is provoked
to think that there is far too little prayer among pilgrims; far
too little of all kinds of prayer, but especially prayer with and
for their children.  But hard as it was to tell all the truth at
that moment about Christian's past walk in his house at home, yet
he was able with the simple truth to say that he had indeed prayed
both with and for his children, and that, as they knew and could
not but remember, not seldom.  Yes, he said, I did sometimes so
pray with my boys, and that too, as you may believe, with much
affection, for you must think that my four boys were all very dear
to me.  And it is my firm belief that all that good man's boys will
come right yet:  Matthew and Joseph and James and Samuel and all.
'With much affection.'  I like that.  I have unbounded faith in
those prayers, both for and with, in which there is much affection.
It is want of affection, and want of imagination, that shipwrecks
so many of our prayers.  But this man's prayers had both these
elements of sure success in them, and they must come at last to
harbour.  At that one word 'with much affection,' this man's closet
door flies open and I see the old pilgrim first alone, and then
with his arms round his eldest son's neck, and both father and son
weeping together till they are ashamed to appear at supper till
they have washed their faces and got their most smiling and
everyday looks put on again.  You just wait and see if Matthew and
all the four boys down to the last do not escape into the Celestial
City before the gate is shut.  And when it is asked, Who are these
and whence came they? listen to their song and you will hear those
four happy children saying that their father, when they were yet
boys, both talked with them and prayed for and with them with so
much affection that therefore they are before the throne.

Why, then, with such a father and with such makable boys, why was
this household brought so near everlasting shipwreck?  It was the
mother that did it.  In one word, it was the wife and the mother
that did it.  It was the mistress of the house who wrought the
mischief here.  She was a poor woman, she was a poor man's wife,
and one would have thought that she had little enough temptation to
harm upon this present world.  But there it was, she did hang upon
it as much as if she had been the mother of the finest daughters
and the most promising boys in all the town.  Things like this were
from time to time reported to her by her neighbours.  One fine lady
had been heard to say that she would never have for her tradesman
any man who frequented conventicles, who was not content with the
religion of his betters, and who must needs scorn the parish church
and do despite to the saints' days.  Another gossip asked her what
she expected to make of her great family of boys when it was well
known that all the gentry in the neighbourhood but two or three had
sworn that they would never have a hulking Puritan to brush their
boots or run their errands.  And it almost made her husband burn
his book and swear that he would never be seen at another prayer-
meeting when his wife so often said to him that he should never
have had children, that he should never have made her his wife, and
that he was not like this when they were first man and wife.  And
in her bitterness she would name this wife or that maid, and would
say, You should have married her.  She would have gone to the
meeting-house with you as often as you wished.  Her sons are far
enough from good service to please you.  'My wife,' he softly said,
'was afraid of losing the world.  And then, after that, my growing
sons were soon given over, all I could do, to the foolish delights
of youth, so that, what by one thing and what by another, they left
me to wander in this manner alone.'  And I suppose there is
scarcely a household among ourselves where there have not been
serious and damaging misunderstandings between old-fashioned
fathers and their young people about what the old people called the
'foolish delights' of their sons and daughters.  And in thinking
this matter over, I have often been struck with how Job did when
his sons and his daughters were bent upon feasting and dancing in
their eldest brother's house.  The old man did not lay an interdict
upon the entertainment.  He did not take part in it, but neither
did he absolutely forbid it.  If it must be it must be, said the
wise patriarch.  And since I do not know whom they may meet there,
or what they may be tempted to do, I will sanctify them all.  I
will not go up into my bed till I have prayed for all my seven sons
and three daughters, each one of them by their names; and till they
come home safely I will rise every morning and offer burnt-
offerings according to the number of them all.  And do you think
that those burnt-offerings and accompanying intercessions would go
for nothing when the great wind came from the wilderness and smote
the four corners of the banqueting-house?  If you cannot banish the
love of foolish delights out the hearts of your sons and daughters,
then do not quarrel with them over such things; a family quarrel in
a Christian man's house is surely far worse than a feast or a
dance.  Only, if they must feast and dance and such like, be you
all the more diligent in your exercises at home on their behalf
till they are back again, where, after all, they like best to be,
in their good, kind, liberal, and loving father's house.

Have you a family?  Are you a married man?  Or, if not, do you hope
one day to be?  Then attend betimes to what Charity says to
Christian in the House Beautiful, and not less to what he says back
again to her.



SHAME



'Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me, and of My words, of him shall
the Son of Man be ashamed, when He shall come in His own glory, and
in His Father's, and of the holy angels.'--Our Lord.

Shame has not got the attention that it deserves either from our
moral philosophers or from our practical and experimental divines.
And yet it would well repay both classes of students to attend far
more to shame.  For, what really is shame?  Shame is an original
instinct planted in our souls by our Maker, and intended by Him to
act as a powerful and pungent check to our doing of any act that is
mean or dishonourable in the eyes of our fellow-men.  Shame is a
kind of social conscience.  Shame is a secondary sense of sin.  In
shame, our imagination becomes a kind of moral sense.  Shame sets
up in our bosom a not undivine tribunal, which judges us and
sentences us in the absence or the silence of nobler and more awful
sanctions and sentences.  But then, as things now are with us, like
all the rest of the machinery of the soul, shame has gone sadly
astray both in its objects and in its operations, till it demands a
long, a severe, and a very noble discipline over himself before any
man can keep shame in its proper place and directed in upon its
proper objects.  In the present disorder of our souls, we are all
acutely ashamed of many things that are not the proper objects of
shame at all; while, on the other hand, we feel no shame at all at
multitudes of things that are really most blameworthy,
dishonourable, and contemptible.  We are ashamed of things in our
lot and in our circumstances that, if we only knew it, are our
opportunity and our honour; we are ashamed of things that are the
clear will and the immediate dispensation of Almighty God.  And,
then, we feel no shame at all at the most dishonourable things, and
that simply because the men around us are too coarse in their
morals and too dull in their sensibilities to see any shame in such
things.  And thus it comes about that, in the very best of men,
their still perverted sense of shame remains in them a constant
snare and a source of temptation.  A man of a fine nature feels
keenly the temptation to shrink from those paths of truth and duty
that expose him to the cruel judgments and the coarse and
scandalising attacks of public and private enemies.  It was in the
Valley of Humiliation that Shame set upon Faithful, and it is a
real humiliation to any man of anything of this pilgrim's fine
character and feeling to be attacked, scoffed at, and held up to
blame and opprobrium.  And the finer and the more affectionate any
man's heart and character are, the more he feels and shrinks from
the coarse treatment this world gives to those whom it has its own
reasons to hate and assail.  They had the stocks and the pillory
and the shears in Bunyan's rude and uncivilised day, by means of
which many of the best men of that day were exposed to the insults
and brutalities of the mob.  The newspapers would be the pillory of
our day, were it not that, on the whole, the newspaper press is
conducted with such scrupulous fairness and with a love of truth
and justice such that no man need shrink from the path of duty
through fear of insult and injury.

But it is time to come to the encounter between Shame and Faithful
in the Valley of Humiliation.  Shame, properly speaking, is not one
of our Bunyan gallery of portraits at all.  Shame, at best, is but
a kind of secondary character in this dramatic book.  We do not
meet with Shame directly; we only hear about him through the report
of Faithful.  That first-class pilgrim was almost overcome of
Shame, so hot was their encounter; and it is the extraordinarily
feeling, graphic, and realistic account of their encounter that
Faithful gives us that has led me to take up Shame for our reproof
and correction to-night.

Religion altogether, but especially all personal religion, said
Shame to Faithful, is an unmanly business.  There is a certain
touch of smallness and pitifulness, he said, in all religion, but
especially in experimental religion.  It brings a man into
junctures and into companionships, and it puts offices and
endurances upon one such as try a man if he has any greatness of
spirit about him at all.  This life on which you are entering, said
Shame, will cost you many a blush before you are done with it.  You
will lay yourself open to many a scoff.  The Puritan religion, and
all the ways of that religious fraternity, are peculiarly open to
the shafts of ridicule.  Now, all that was quite true.  There was
no denying the truth of what Shame said.  And Faithful felt the
truth of it all, and felt it most keenly, as he confessed to
Christian.  The blood came into my face as the fellow spake, and
what he said for a time almost beat me out of the upward way
altogether.  But in this dilemma also all true Christians can fall
back, as Faithful fell back, upon the example of their Master.  In
this as in every other experience of temptation and endurance, our
Lord is the forerunner and the example of His people.  Our Lord was
in all points tempted like as we are, and among all His other
temptations He was tempted to be ashamed of His work on earth and
of the life and the death His work led Him into.  He must have
often felt ashamed at the treatment He received during His life of
humiliation, as it is well called; and He must often have felt
ashamed of His disciples:  but all that is blotted out by the
crowning shame of the cross.  We hang our worst criminals rather
than behead or shoot them, in order to heap up the utmost possible
shame and disgrace upon them, as well as to execute justice upon
them.  And what the hangman's rope is in our day, all that the
cross was in our Lord's day.  And, then, as if the cross itself was
not shame enough, all the circumstances connected with His cross
were planned and carried out so as to heap the utmost possible
shame and humiliation upon His head.  Our prison warders have to
watch the murderers in their cells night and day, lest they should
take their own life in order to escape the hangman's rope; but our
Lord, keenly as He felt His coming shame, said to His horrified
disciples, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, when the Son of Man shall
be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on; and they shall
scourge Him and put Him to death.  Do you ever think of your Lord
in His shame?  How they made a fool of Him, as we say.  How they
took off His own clothes and put on Him now a red cloak and now a
white; how they put a sword of lath in His hand, and a crown of
thorns on His head; how they bowed the knee before Him, and asked
royal favours from Him; and then how they spat in His face, and
struck Him on the cheek, while the whole house rang with shouts of
laughter.  And, then, the last indignity of man, how they stripped
Him naked and lashed His naked and bleeding body to a whipping-
post.  And how they wagged their heads and put out their tongues at
Him when He was on the tree, and invited Him to come down and
preach to them now, and they would all become His disciples.  Did
not Shame say the simple truth when he warned Faithful that
religion had always and from the beginning made its followers the
ridicule of their times?

If you are really going to be a religious man, Shame went on, you
will have to carry about with you a very tender conscience, and a
more unmanly and miserable thing than a tender conscience I cannot
conceive.  A tender conscience will cost you something, let me tell
you, to keep it.  If nothing else, a tender conscience will all
your life long expose you to the mockery and the contempt of all
the brave spirits of the time.  That also is true.  At any rate, a
tender conscience will undoubtedly compel its possessor to face the
brave spirits of the time.  There is a good story told to this
present point about Sir Robert Peel, a Prime Minister of our Queen.
When a young man, Peel was one of the guests at a select dinner-
party in the West-end of London.  And after the ladies had left the
table the conversation of the gentlemen took a turn such that it
could not have taken as long as the ladies were present.  Peel took
no share in the stories or the merriment that went on, and, at
last, he rose up and ordered his carriage, and, with a burning
face, left the room.  When he was challenged as to why he had
broken up the pleasant party so soon, he could only reply that his
conscience would not let him stay any longer.  No doubt Peel felt
the mocking laughter that he left behind him, but, as Shame said to
Faithful, the tenderness of the young statesman's conscience
compelled him to do as he did.  But we are not all Peels.  And
there are plenty of workshops and offices and dinner-tables in our
own city, where young men who would walk up to the cannon's mouth
without flinching have not had Peel's courage to protest against
indecency or to confess that they belonged to an evangelical
church.  If a church is only sufficiently unevangelical there is no
trial of conscience or of courage in confessing that you belong to
it.  But as Shame so ably and honestly said, that type of religion
that creates a tender conscience in its followers, and sets them to
watch their words and their ways, and makes them tie themselves up
from all hectoring liberty--to choose that religion, and to cleave
to it to the end, will make a young man the ridicule still of all
the brave spirits round about him.  Ambitious young men get
promotion and reward every day among us for desertions and
apostasies in religion, for which, if they had been guilty of the
like in war, they would have been shot.  'And so you are a Free
Churchman, I am told.'  That was all that was said.  But the sharp
youth understood without any more words, and he made his choice
accordingly; till it is becoming a positive surprise to find the
rising members of certain professions in certain churches.  The
Quakers have a proverb in England that a family carriage never
drives for two generations past the parish church door.  Of which
state of matters Shame showed himself a shrewd prophet two hundred
years ago when he said that but few of the rich and the mighty and
the wise remained long of Faithful's Puritan opinion unless they
were first persuaded to be fools, and to be of a voluntary fondness
to venture the loss of all.

And I will tell you two other things, said sharp-sighted and plain-
spoken Shame, that your present religion will compel you to do if
you adhere to it.  It will compel you from time to time to ask your
neighbour's forgiveness even for petty faults, and it will insist
with you that you make restitution when you have done the weak and
the friendless any hurt or any wrong.  And every manly mind will
tell you that life is not worth having on such humbling terms as
those are.  Whatever may be thought about Shame in other respects,
it cannot be denied that he had a sharp eye for the facts of life,
and a shrewd tongue in setting those facts forth.  He has hit the
blot exactly in the matter of our first duty to our neighbour; he
has put his finger on one of the matters where so many of us,
through a false shame, come short.  It costs us a tremendous
struggle with our pride to go to our neighbour and to ask his
forgiveness for a fault, petty fault or other.  Did you ever do it?
When did you do it last, to whom, and for what?  One Sabbath
morning, now many years ago, I had occasion to urge this elementary
evangelical duty on my people here, and I did it as plainly as I
could.  Next day one of my young men, who is now a devoted and
honoured elder, came to me and told me that he had done that
morning what his conscience yesterday told him in the church to do.
He had gone to a neighbour's place of business, had asked for an
interview, and had begged his neighbour's pardon.  I am sure
neither of those two men have forgotten that moment, and the
thought of it has often since nerved me to speak plainly about some
of their most unwelcome duties to my people.  Shame, no doubt,
pulled back my noble friend's hand when it was on the office bell,
but, like Faithful in the text, he shook him out of his company and
went in.  I spoke of the remarkable justice of the newspaper press
in the opening of these remarks.  And it so happens that, as I lay
down my pen to rest my hand after writing this sentence and lift a
London evening paper, I read this editorial note, set within the
well-known brackets at the end of an indignant and expostulatory
letter:  ['Our correspondent's complaint is just.  The paragraph
imputing bad motives should not have been admitted.']  I have no
doubt that editor felt some shame as he handed that apologetic note
to the printer.  But not to speak of any other recognition and
recompense, he has the recompense of the recognition of all
honourable-minded men who have read that honourable admission and
apology.

Shame was quite right in his scoff about restitution also.  For
restitution rings like a trumpet tone through the whole of the law
of Moses, and then the New Testament republishes that law if only
in the exquisite story of Zaccheus.  And, indeed, take it
altogether, I do not know where to find in the same space a finer
vindication of Puritan pulpit ethics than just in this taunting and
terrifying attack on Faithful.  There is no better test of true
religion both as it is preached and practised than just to ask for
and to grant forgiveness, and to offer and accept restitution.
Now, does your public and private life defend and adorn your
minister's pulpit in these two so practical matters?  Could your
minister point to you as a proof of the ethics of evangelical
teaching?  Can any one in this city speak up in defence of your
church and thus protest:  'Say what you like about that church and
its ministers, all I can say is, that its members know how to make
an apology; as, also, how to pay back with interest what they at
one time damaged or defrauded'?  Can any old creditor's widow or
orphan stand up for our doctrine and defend our discipline pointing
to you?  If you go on to be a Puritan, said Shame to Faithful, you
will have to ask your neighbour's forgiveness even for petty
faults, and you will have to make restitution with usury where you
have taken anything from any one, and how will you like that?

And what did you say to all this, my brother?  Say?  I could not
tell what to say at the first.  I felt my blood coming up into my
face at some of the things that Shame said and threatened.  But, at
last, I began to consider that that which is highly esteemed among
men is often had in abomination with God.  And I said to myself
again, Shame tells me what men do and what men think, but he has
told me nothing about what He thinks with Whom I shall soon have
alone to do.  Therefore, thought I, what God thinks and says is
wisest and best, let all the men of the world say what they will.
Let all false shame, then, depart from my heart, for how else shall
I look upon my Lord, and how shall He look upon me at His coming?



TALKATIVE



'A man full of talk.'--Zophar.
'Let thy words be few.'--The Preacher.
'The soul of religion is the practick part.'--Christian.

Since we all have a tongue, and since so much of our time is taken
up with talk, a simple catalogue of the sins of the tongue is
enough to terrify us.  The sins of the tongue take up a much larger
space in the Bible than we would believe till we have begun to
suffer from other men's tongues and especially from our own.  The
Bible speaks a great deal more and a great deal plainer about the
sins of the tongue than any of our pulpits dare to do.  In the
Psalms alone you would think that the psalmists scarcely suffer
from anything else worth speaking about but the evil tongues of
their friends and of their enemies.  The Book of Proverbs also is
full of the same lashing scourge.  And James the Just, in a passage
of terrible truth and power, tells us that we are already as good
as perfect men if we can bridle our tongue; and that, on the other
hand, if we do not bridle our tongue, all our seeming to be
religious is a sham and a self-deception,--that man's religion is
vain.

With many men and many women great talkativeness is a matter of
simple temperament and mental constitution.  And a talkative habit
would be a childlike and an innocent habit if the heart of talker
and the hearts of those to whom he talks so much were only full of
truth and love.  But our hearts and our neighbours' hearts being
what they are, in the multitude of words there wanteth not sin.  So
much of our talk is about our absent neighbours, and there are so
many misunderstandings, prejudices, ambitions, competitions,
oppositions, and all kinds of cross-interests between us and our
absent neighbours, that we cannot long talk about them till our
hearts have run our tongues into all manner of trespass.  Bishop
Butler discourses on the great dangers that beset a talkative
temperament with almost more than all his usual sagacity,
seriousness, and depth.  And those who care to see how the greatest
of our modern moralists deals with their besetting sin should lose
no time in possessing and mastering Butler's great discourse.  It
is a truly golden discourse, and it ought to be read at least once
a month by all the men and all the women who have tongues in their
heads.  Bishop Butler points out to his offending readers, in a way
they can never forget, the certain mischief they do to themselves
and to other people just by talking too much.  But there are far
worse sins that our tongues fall into than the bad enough sins that
spring out of impertinent and unrestrained loquacity.  There are
many times when our talk, long or short, is already simple and
downright evil.  It is ten to one, it is a hundred to one, that you
do not know and would not believe how much you fall every day and
in every conversation into one or other of the sins of the tongue.
If you would only begin to see and accept this, that every time you
speak or hear about your absent neighbour what you would not like
him to speak or hear about you, you are in that a talebearer, a
slanderer, a backbiter, or a liar,--when you begin to see and admit
that about yourself, you will not wonder at what the Bible says
with such bitter indignation about the diabolical sins of the
tongue.  If you would just begin to-night to watch yourselves--on
the way home from church, at home after the day is over, to-morrow
morning when the letters and the papers are opened, and so on,--how
instinctively, incessantly, irrepressibly you speak about the
absent in a way you would be astounded and horrified to be told
they were at that moment speaking about you, then you would soon be
wiser than all your teachers in the sins and in the government of
the tongue.  And you would seven times every day pluck out your
tongue before God till He gives it back to you clean and kind in
that land where all men shall love their neighbours, present and
absent, as themselves.

Take detraction for an example, one of the commonest, and, surely,
one of the most detestable of the sins of the tongue.  And the
etymology here, as in this whole region, is most instructive and
most impressive.  In detraction you DRAW AWAY something from your
neighbour that is most precious and most dear to him.  In
detraction you are a thief, and a thief of the falsest and
wickedest kind.  For your neighbour's purse is trash, while his
good name is far more precious to him than all his gold.  Some one
praises your neighbour in your hearing, his talents, his
performances, his character, his motives, or something else that
belongs to your neighbour.  Some one does that in your hearing who
either does not know you, or who wishes to torture and expose you,
and you fall straight into the snare thus set for you, and begin at
once to belittle, depreciate, detract from, and run down your
neighbour, who has been too much praised for your peace of mind and
your self-control.  You insinuate something to his disadvantage and
dishonour.  You quote some authority you have heard to his hurt.
And so on past all our power to picture you.  For detraction has a
thousand devices taught to it by the master of all such devices,
wherewith to drag down and defile the great and the good.  But with
all you can say or do, you cannot for many days get out of your
mind the heart-poisoning praise you heard spoken of your envied
neighbour.  Never praise any potter's pots in the hearing of
another potter, said the author of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Aristotle said potter's pots, but he really all the time was
thinking of a philosopher's books; only he said potter's pots to
draw off his readers' attention from himself.  Now, always remember
that ancient and wise advice.  Take care how you praise a potter's
pots, a philosopher's books, a woman's beauty, a speaker's speech,
a preacher's sermon to another potter, philosopher, woman, speaker,
or preacher; unless, indeed, you maliciously wish secretly to
torture them, or publicly to expose them, or, if their
sanctification is begun, to sanctify them to their most inward and
spiritual sanctification.

Backbiting, again, would seem at first sight to be a sin of the
teeth rather than of the tongue, only, no sharpest tooth can tear
you when your back is turned like your neighbour's evil tongue.
Pascal has many dreadful things about the corruption and misery of
man, but he has nothing that strikes its terrible barb deeper into
all our consciences than this, that if all our friends only knew
what we have said about them behind their back, we would not have
four friends in all the world.  Neither we would.  I know I would
not have one.  How many would you have?  And who would they be?
You cannot name them.  I defy you to name them.  They do not exist.
The tongue can no man tame.

'Giving of characters' also takes up a large part of our everyday
conversation.  We cannot well help characterising, describing, and
estimating one another.  But, as far as possible, when we see the
conversation again approaching that dangerous subject, we should
call to mind our past remorse; we should suppose our absent
neighbour present; we should imagine him in our place and ourselves
in his place, and so turn the rising talk into another channel.
For, the truth is, few of us are able to do justice to our
neighbour when we begin to discuss and describe him.  Generosity in
our talk is far easier for us than justice.  It was this incessant
giving of characters that our Lord had in His eye when He said in
His Sermon on the Mount, Judge not.  But our Lord might as well
never have uttered that warning word for all the attention we give
it.  For we go on judging one another and sentencing one another as
if we were entirely and in all things blameless ourselves, and as
if God had set us up in our blamelessness in His seat of judgment
over all our fellows.  How seldom do we hear any one say in a
public debate or in a private conversation, I don't know; or, It is
no matter of mine; or, I feel that I am not in possession of all
the facts; or, It may be so, but I must not judge.  We never hear
such things as these said.  No one pays the least attention to the
Preacher on the Mount.  And if any one says to us, I must not
judge, we never forgive him, because his humility and his obedience
so condemn all our ill-formed, prejudiced, rash, and ill-natured
judgments of our neighbour.  Since, therefore, so Butler sums up,
it is so hard for us to enter on our neighbour's character without
offending the law of Christ, we should learn to decline that kind
of conversation altogether, and determine to get over that strong
inclination most of us have, to be continually talking about the
concerns, the behaviour, and the deserts of our neighbours.

Now, it was all those vices of the tongue in full outbreak in the
day of James the Just that made that apostle, half in sorrow, half
in anger, demand of all his readers that they should henceforth
begin to bridle their tongues.  And, like all that most practical
apostle's counsels, that is a most impressive and memorable
commandment.  For, it is well known that all sane men who either
ride on or drive unruly horses, take good care to bridle their
horses well before they bring them out of their stable door.  And
then they keep their bridle-hand firm closed on the bridle-rein
till their horses are back in the stable again.  Especially and
particularly they keep a close eye and a firm hand on their horse's
bridle on all steep inclines and at all sharp angles and sudden
turns in the road; when sudden trains are passing and when stray
dogs are barking.  If the rider or the driver of a horse did not
look at nothing else but the bridle of his horse, both he and his
horse under him would soon be in the ditch,--as so many of us are
at the present moment because we have an untamed tongue in our
mouth on which we have not yet begun to put the bridle of truth and
justice and brotherly love.  Indeed, such woe and misery has an
untamed tongue wrought in other churches and in other and more
serious ages than ours, that special religious brotherhoods have
been banded together just on the special and strict engagement that
they would above all things put a bridle on their tongues.  'What
are the chief cares of a young convert?' asked such a convert at an
aged Carthusian.  'I said I will take heed to my ways that I
trespass not with my tongue,' replied the saintly father.  'Say no
more for the present,' interrupted the youthful beginner; 'I will
go home and practise that, and will come again when I have
performed it.'

Now, whatever faults that tall man had who took up so much of
Faithful's time and attention, he was a saint compared with the men
and the women who have just passed before us.  Talkative, as John
Bunyan so scornfully names that tall man, though he undoubtedly
takes up too much time and too much space in Bunyan's book, was not
a busybody in other men's matters at any rate.  Nobody could call
him a detractor or a backbiter or a talebearer or a liar.
Christian knew him well, and had known him long, but Christian was
not afraid to leave him alone with Faithful.  We all know men we
feel it unsafe to leave long alone with our friends.  We feel sure
that they will be talking about us, and that to our hurt, as soon
as our backs are about.  But to give that tall man his due, he was
not given with all his talk to tale-bearing or scandal or
detraction.  Had he been guilty of any of these things, Faithful
would soon have found him out, and would have left him to go to the
Celestial City by himself.  But, after talking for half a day with
Talkative, instead of finding out anything wrong in the tall man's
talk, Faithful was so taken and so struck with it, that he stepped
across to Christian and said, 'What a brave companion we have got!
Surely this man will make a most excellent pilgrim!'  'So I once
thought too,' said Christian, 'till I went to live beside him, and
have to do with him in the business of daily life.'  Yes, it is
near neighbourhood and the business of everyday life that try a
talking man.  If you go to a meeting for prayer, and hear some men
praying and speaking on religious subjects, you would say to
yourself, What a good man that is, and how happy must his wife and
children and servants and neighbours be with such an example always
before them, and with such an intercessor for them always with God!
But if you were to go home with that so devotional man, and try to
do business with him, and were compelled to cross him and go
against him, you would find out why Christian smiled so when
Faithful was so full of Talkative's praises.

But of all the religiously-loquacious men of our day, your
ministers are the chief.  For your ministers must talk in public,
and that often and at great length, whether they are truly
religious men at home or no.  It is their calling to talk to you
unceasingly about religious matters.  You chose them to be your
ministers because they could talk well.  You would not put up with
a minister who could not talk well on religious things.  You
estimate them by their talk.  You praise and pay them by their
talk.  And if they are to live, talk incessantly to you about
religion they must, and they do.  If any other man among us is not
a religious man, well, then, he can at least hold his tongue.
There is no necessity laid on him to speak in public about things
that he does not practise at home.  But we hard-bested ministers
must go on speaking continually about the most solemn things.  And
if we are not extraordinarily watchful over ourselves, and
extraordinarily and increasingly conscientious, if we are not
steadily growing in inwardness and insight and depth and real
spirituality of mind and life ourselves, we cannot escape,--our
calling in life will not let us escape,--becoming as sounding
brass.  There is an awful sentence in Butler that should be written
in letters of fire in every minister's conscience, to the effect
that continually going over religion in talk and making fine
pictures of it in the pulpit, creates a professional insensibility
to personal religion that is the everlasting ruin of multitudes of
eloquent ministers.  That is true.  We ministers all feel that to
be true.  Our miserable experience tells us that is only too true
of ourselves.  What a flood of demoralising talk has been poured
out from the pulpits of this one city to-day!--demoralising to
preachers and to hearers both, because not intended to be put in
practice.  How few of those who have talked and heard talk all this
day about divine truth and human duty, have made the least
beginning or the least resolve to live as they have spoken and
heard!  And, yet, all will in words again admit that the soul of
religion is the practick part, and that the tongue without the
heart and the life is but death and corruption.

Let us, then, this very night begin to do something practical after
all this talk about talk.  And let us all begin to do something in
the direct line of our present talk.  What a noble congregation of
evangelical Carthusians that would make us if we all put a bridle
on our tongue to-night before we left this house.  For we all have
neighbours, friends, enemies, against whom we every day sin with
our unbridled tongue.  We all have acquaintances we are ashamed to
meet, we have been so unkind and so unjust to them with our tongue.
We hang down our head when they shake our hand.  Yes, we know the
men quite well of whom Pascal speaks.  We know many men who would
never speak to us again if they only knew how, and how often, we
have spoken about them behind their back.  Well, let us sin against
them, and against ourselves, and against our Master's command and
example no more.  Let this night and this lecture on Talkative and
his kindred see the last of our sin against our ill-used neighbour.
Let us promise God and our own consciences to-night, that we shall
all this week put on a bridle about that man, and about that
subject, and in that place, and in that company.  Let us say, God
helping me, I shall for all this week not speak about that man at
all, anything either good or bad, nor on that subject, nor will I
let the conversation turn into that channel at all if I can help
it.  And God will surely help us, till, after weeks and years of
such prayer and such practice, we shall by slow degrees, and after
many defeats, be able to say with the Psalmist, 'I will take heed
to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue.  I will keep my mouth
with a bridle.  I will be dumb with silence.  I will hold my peace
even from good.'



JUDGE HATE-GOOD



'Hear, O heads of Jacob, and ye princes of the house of Israel . .
. who hate the good and love the evil.'--Micah.

The portrait of Judge Hate-good in The Pilgrim's Progress is but a
poor replica, as our artists say, of the portrait of Judge Jeffreys
in our English history books.  I am sure you have often read, with
astonishment at Bunyan's literary power, his wonderful account of
the trial of Faithful, when, as Bunyan says, he was brought forth
to his trial in order to his condemnation.  We have the whole
ecclesiastical jurisprudence of Charles and James Stuart put before
us in that single satirical sentence.  But, powerful as Bunyan's
whole picture of Judge Hate-good's court is, it is a tame and a
poor picture compared with what all the historians tell us of the
injustice and cruelty of the court of Judge Jeffreys.  Macaulay's
portrait of the Lord Chief Justice of England for ferocity and
fiendishness beats out of sight Bunyan's picture of that judge who
keeps Satan's own seal in Bunyan's Book.  Jeffreys was bred for his
future work at the bar of the Old Bailey, a bar already proverbial
for the licence of its tongue and for the coarseness of its cases.
Jeffreys served his apprenticeship for the service that our two
last Stuarts had in reserve for him so well, that he soon became,
so his beggared biographer describes him, the most consummate bully
that ever disgraced an English bench.  The boldest impudence when
he was a young advocate, and the most brutal ferocity when he was
an old judge, sat equally secure on the brazen forehead of George
Jeffreys.  The real and undoubted ability and scholarship of
Jeffreys only made his wickedness the more awful, and his whole
career the greater curse both to those whose tool he was, and to
those whose blood he drank daily.  Jeffreys drank brandy and sang
lewd songs all night, and he drank blood and cursed and swore on
the bench all day.  Just imagine the state of our English courts
when a judge could thus assail a poor wretch of a woman after
passing a cruel sentence upon her.  'Hangman,' shouted the ermined
brute, 'Hangman, pay particular attention to this lady.  Scourge
her soundly, man.  Scourge her till the blood runs.  It is the
Christmas season; a cold season for madam to strip in.  See,
therefore, man, that you warm her shoulders thoroughly.'  And you
all know who Richard Baxter was.  You have all read his seraphic
book, The Saints' Rest.  Well, besides being the Richard Baxter so
well known to our saintly fathers and mothers, he was also, and he
was emphatically, the peace-maker of the Puritan party.  Baxter's
political principles were of the most temperate and conciliatory,
and indeed, almost royalist kind.  He was a man of strong passions,
indeed, but all the strength and heat of his passions ran out into
his hatred of sin and his love of holiness, and an unsparing and
consuming care for the souls of his people.  Very Faithful himself
stood before the bar of Judge Jeffreys in the person of Richard
Baxter.  It took all the barefaced falsehood and scandalous
injustice of the crown prosecutors to draw out the sham indictment
that was read out in court against inoffensive Richard Baxter.  But
what was lacking in the charge of the crown was soon made up by the
abominable scurrility of the judge.  'You are a schismatical
knave,' roared out Jeffreys, as soon as Baxter was brought into
court.  'You are an old hypocritical villain.'  And then, clasping
his hands and turning up his eyes, he sang through his nose:  'O
Lord, we are Thy peculiar people:  we are Thy dear and only
people.'  'You old blockhead,' he again roared out, 'I will have
you whipped through the city at the tail of the cart.  By the grace
of God I will look after you, Richard.'  And the tiger would have
been as good as his word had not an overpowering sense of shame
compelled the other judges to protest and get Baxter's inhuman
sentence commuted to fine and imprisonment.  And so on, and so on.
But it was Jeffreys' 'Western Circuit,' as it was called, that
filled up the cup of his infamy--an infamy, say the historians,
that will last as long as the language and the history of England
last.  The only parallel to it is the infamy of a royal house and a
royal court that could welcome home and promote to honour such a
detestable miscreant as Jeffreys was.  But the slaughter in
Somerset was only over in order that a similar slaughter in London
might begin.  Let those who have a stomach for more blood and tears
follow out the hell upon earth that James Stuart and George
Jeffreys together let loose on the best life of England in their
now fast-shortening day.  Was Judge Jeffreys, some of you will ask
me, born and bred in hell?  Was the devil his father, and original
sin his mother?  Or, was he not the very devil himself come to
earth for a season in English flesh?  No, my brethren, not so.
Judge Jeffreys was one of ourselves.  Little George Jeffreys was
born and brought up in a happy English home.  He was baptised and
confirmed in an English church.  He took honours in an English
university.  He ate dinners, was called to the bar, conducted
cases, and took silk in an English court of justice.  And in the
ripeness of his years and of his services, he wore the honourable
ermine and sat upon the envied wool-sack of an English sovereign.
It would have been far less awful and far less alarming to think
of, had Judge Jeffreys been, as you supposed, a pure devil let
loose on the Church of Christ and the awakening liberty of England.
But some innocent soul will ask me next whether there has ever been
any other monster on the face of the earth like Judge Jeffreys; and
whether by any possibility there are any such monsters anywhere in
our own day.  Yes, truth compels me to reply.  Yes, there are,
plenty, too many.  Only their environment, nowadays, as our
naturalists say, does not permit them to grow to such strength and
dimensions as those of James Stuart, and George Jeffreys, his
favourite judge.  At the same time, be not deceived by your own
deceitful heart, nor by any other deceiver's smooth speeches.
Judge Jeffreys is in yourself, only circumstances have not yet let
him fully show himself in you.  Still, if you look close enough and
deep enough into your own hearts, you will see the same wicked
light glancing sometimes there that used so to terrify Judge
Jeffreys' prisoners when they saw it in his wicked eyes.  If you
lay your ear close enough to your own heart, you will sometimes
hear something of that same hiss with which that human serpent
sentenced to torture and to death the men and the women who would
not submit to his command.  The same savage laughter also will
sometimes all but escape your lips as you think of how your enemy
has been made to suffer in body and in estate.  O yes, the very
same hell-broth that ran for blood in Judge Jeffreys' heart is in
all our hearts also; and those who have the least of its poison
left in their hearts will be the foremost to confess its presence,
and to hate and condemn and bewail themselves on account of its
terrible dregs.

HATE-GOOD is an awful enough name for any human being to bear.
Those who really know what goodness is, and then, what hatred is,--
they will feel how awful a thing it is for any man to hate
goodness.  But there is something among us sinful men far more
awful than even that, and that is to hate God.  The carnal mind,
writes the apostle Paul to the Romans--and it is surely the most
terrible sentence that often terrible enough apostle ever wrote--
the carnal mind is enmity against God.  And Dr. John Owen
annotating on that sentence is equally terrible.  The carnal mind,
he says, has 'chosen a great enemy indeed.'  And having mentioned
John Owen, will you let me once more beseech all students of
divinity, that is, all students, amongst other things, of the
desperate depravity of the human heart, to read John Owen's sixth
volume till they have it by heart,--by a broken, believing heart.
Owen On Indwelling Sin is one of the greatest works of the great
Puritan period.  It is a really great, and as we nowadays say, a
truly scientific work to the bargain.  But all that by the way.
Yes, this carnal heart that is still left in every one of us has
chosen a great enemy, and it would need both strong and faithful
allies in order to fight him.  The hatred that His Son also met
with when He was in this world is one of the most hateful pages of
this hateful world's hateful history.  He knew His own heart
towards His enemies, and thus He was able to say to the Searcher of
Hearts with His dying breath, They hated Me without a cause.  Truly
our hatred is hottest when it is most unjust.

'Look to yourselves,' wrote the apostle John to the elect lady and
her children.  Yes; let us all look sharply and suspiciously to
ourselves in this matter now in hand, and we shall not need John
Owen nor anybody else to discover to us the hatred and the
hatefulness of our own hearts.  Look to yourselves, and the work of
the law will soon be fulfilled in you.  Homo homini lupus, taught
an old philosopher who had studied moral philosophy not in books so
much as in his own heart.  'Is no man naturally good?' asked
innocent Lady Macleod of Dunvegan Castle at her guest, Dr. Samuel
Johnson.  'No, madam, no more than a wolf.'  That is quite past all
question with all those who either in natural morals or in revealed
religion look to and know and characterise themselves.  We have all
an inborn propensity to dislike one another, and a very small
provocation will suddenly blow that banked-up furnace into a flame.
It is ever present with me, says self-examining Paul, and hence its
so sudden and so destructive outbreaks.  So the written or the
printed name of our enemy, his image in our mind, his passing step,
his figure out of the window; his wife, his child, his carriage,
his cart in the street, anything, everything will stir up our heart
at the man we do not like.  And the whole of our so honest Bible,
our present text, and the illustrations of our text in Judge
Jeffreys' and Judge Hate-good's courts, all go to show that the
better a man is the more sometimes will we hate him.  Good men,
better men than we are, men who in public life and in private life
pursue great and good ends, of necessity cross and go counter to us
in our pursuit of small, selfish, evil ends, and of necessity we
hate them.  For, cross a selfish sinner sufficiently and you have a
very devil--as many good men, if they knew it, have in us.  Again,
good men who come into contact with us cannot help seeing our bad
lives, our tempers, our selfishness, our public and private vices;
and we see that they see us, and we cannot love those whose averted
eye so goes to our conscience.  And not only in the hatred of good
men, but if you know of God how to watch yourselves, you will find
yourselves out every day also in the hatred of good movements, good
causes, good institutions, and good works.  There are doctors who
would far rather hear of their rival's patient expiring in his
hands than hear their rival's success trumpeted through all the
town.  There are ministers, also, who would rather that the masses
of the city and the country sank yet deeper into improvidence and
drink and neglect of ordinances than that they were rescued by any
other church than their own.  They hate to hear of the successes of
another church.  There are party politicians who would rather that
the ship of the state ran on the rocks both in her home and her
foreign policy than that the opposite party should steer her amid a
nation's cheers into harbour.  And so of good news.  I will stake
the divine truth of this evening's Scriptures, and of their
historical and imaginative illustrations, on the feelings, if you
know how to observe, detect, characterise, and confess them,--the
feelings, I say, that will rise in your heart to-morrow morning
when you read what is good news to other men, even to good men, and
to the families and family interests of good men.  It does not
matter one atom into what profession, office, occupation, interest
you track the corrupt heart of man, as sure as a substance casts a
shadow, so sure will you find your own selfish heart hating
goodness when the goodness does not serve or flatter you.

Now, though they will never be many, yet there must be some men
among us, one here and another there, who have so looked at and
found out themselves.  I can well believe that some men here came
up to this house to-night trembling in their heart all the way.
They felt the very advertisement go through them like a knife:
they felt that they were summoned up hither almost by name as to
judgment.  For they feel every day, though they have never told
their feelings to any, that they have this horrible heart deep-
seated within them to love evil and to hate good.  They gnash their
teeth at themselves as they catch themselves rejoicing in iniquity.
They feel their hearts expanding, and they know that their faces
shine, when you tell them evil tidings.  They sicken and lose heart
and sit solitary when you carry to them a good report.  They feel
as John Bunyan felt, that no one but the devil can equal them in
pollution of heart.  And their wonder sometimes is that the
Searcher of Hearts does not drive them down where devils dwell and
hate God and man and one another.  They look around them when the
penitential psalm is being sung, and they smile bitterly to
themselves.  O people of God, they say, you do not know what you
are saying.  Leave that psalm to me.  I can sing it.  I can tell to
God what He knows about sin, and about sin in the heart.  Stand
away back from me, that man says, for I am a leper.  The chief of
sinners is beside you.  A whited sepulchre stands open beside you.-
-Stop now, O hating and hateful man, and let me speak for a single
moment before we separate.  Before you say any more about yourself,
and before you leave the house of God, lift up your broken heart
and with all your might bless God that He has opened your eyes and
taught you how to look at yourself and how to hate yourself.  There
are hundreds of honest Christian men and women in this house at
this moment to whom God has not done as, in His free grace, He has
done to you.  For He has not only begun a good work in you, but He
has begun that special and peculiar work which, when it goes on to
perfection, makes a great and an eminent saint of God.  To know
your own heart as you evidently know it, and to hate it as you say
you hate it, and to hunger after a clean heart as, with every
breath, you hunger,--all that, if you would only believe it, sets
you, or will yet set you, high up among the people of God.  Be
comforted; it is your bounden duty to be comforted.  God deserves
it at your hands that you be more than comforted amid such
unmistakable signs of His eminent grace to you.  And be patient
under your exceptional sanctification.  Rome was not built in a
day.  You cannot reverse the awful law of your sanctification.  You
cannot be saved by Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit without seeing
yourself, and you cannot see yourself without hating yourself, and
you cannot begin to hate yourself without all your hatred
henceforth turning against yourself.  You are deep in the red-hot
bosom of the refiner's fire.  And when you are once sufficiently
tried by the Divine Refiner of Souls, He will in His own good time
and way bring you out as gold.  Be patient, therefore, till the
coming of the Lord.  And say continually amid all your increasing
knowledge of yourself, and amid all your increasing hatred of
yourself, 'As for me, I will behold Thy face in righteousness; I
shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness.'



FAITHFUL IN VANITY FAIR {2}



'Be thou faithful.'--Rev. 2. 10.

The breadth of John Bunyan's mind, the largeness of his heart, and
the tolerance of his temper all come excellently out in his fine
portrait of Faithful.  New beginners in personal religion, when
they first take up The Pilgrim's Progress in earnest, always try to
find out something in themselves that shall somewhat correspond to
the recorded experience of Christian, the chief pilgrim.  And they
are afraid that all is not right with them unless they, like him,
have had, to begin with, a heavy burden on their back.  They look
for something in their religious life that shall answer to the
Slough of Despond also, to the Hill Difficulty, to the House
Beautiful, and, especially and indispensably, to the place somewhat
ascending with a cross upon it and an open sepulchre beneath it.
And because they cannot always find all these things in themselves
in the exact order and in the full power in which they are told of
Christian in Bunyan's book, they begin to have doubts about
themselves as to whether they are true pilgrims at all.  But here
is Faithful, with whom Christian held such sweet and confidential
discourse, and yet he had come through not a single one of all
these things.  The two pilgrims had come from the same City of
Destruction indeed, and they had met at the gate of Vanity and
passed through Vanity Fair together, but, till they embraced one
another again in the Celestial City, that was absolutely all the
experience they had in common.  Faithful had never had any such
burden on his back as that was which had for so long crushed
Christian to the earth.  And the all but complete absence of such a
burden may have helped to let Faithful get over the Slough of
Despond dry shod.  He had the good lot to escape Sinai also and the
Hill Difficulty, and his passing by the House Beautiful and not
making the acquaintance of Discretion and Prudence and Charity may
have had something to do with the fact that one named Wanton had
like to have done him such a mischief.  His remarkable experiences,
however, with Adam the First, with Moses, and then with the Man
with holes in His hands, all that makes up a page in Faithful's
autobiography we could ill have spared.  His encounter with Shame
also, and soon afterwards with Talkative, are classical passages in
his so individual history.  Altogether, it would be almost
impossible for us to imagine two pilgrims talking so heartily
together, and yet so completely unlike one another.  A very
important lesson surely as to how we should abstain from measuring
other men by ourselves, as well as ourselves by other men; an
excellent lesson also as to how we should learn to allow for all
possible varieties among good men, both in their opinions, their
experiences, and their attainments.  True Puritan as the author of
The Pilgrim's Progress is, he is no Procrustes.  He does not cut
down all his pilgrims to one size, nor does he clip them all into
one pattern.  They are all thinking men, but they are not all men
of one way of thinking.  John Bunyan is as fresh as Nature herself,
and as free and full as Holy Scripture herself in the variety, in
the individuality, and even in the idiosyncrasy of his spiritual
portrait gallery.

Vanity Fair is one of John Bunyan's universally-admitted
masterpieces.  The very name of the fair is one of his happiest
strokes.  Thackeray's famous book owes half its popularity to the
happy name he borrowed from John Bunyan.  Thackeray's author's
heart must have leaped in his bosom when Vanity Fair struck him as
a title for his great satire.  'Then I saw in my dream that when
they were got out of the wilderness they presently saw a town
before them, and the name of that town is Vanity, and at that town
there is a fair kept called Vanity Fair.  The fair is kept all the
year long, and it beareth the name of Vanity Fair, because the town
where it is kept is lighter than Vanity.  And, also, because all
that is sold there is vanity.  As is the saying of the wise, All
that cometh is vanity.  The fair is no new erected business, but a
thing of ancient standing:  I will show you the original of it.
About five thousand years ago there were pilgrims walking to the
Celestial City, as these two honest persons now are, and Beelzebub,
Apollyon, and Legion, with their companions, perceiving that by the
path that the pilgrims made, that their way to the city lay through
this town of Vanity, they contrived there to set up a fair:  a fair
wherein should be sold all sorts of vanity, and that it should last
all the year long.  Therefore at this fair are all such merchandise
sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments,
titles, countries, kingdoms, pleasures, and delights of all sorts,
as wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood,
bodies, souls, silver, gold, precious stones, and what not.  And,
moreover, at this fair at all times there is to be seen juggling,
cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of
every kind.'  And then our author goes on to tell us the names of
the various streets and rows where such and such wares are vended.
And from that again he goes on to tell how the Prince of princes
Himself went at one time through this same fair, and that upon a
fair day too, and how the lord of the fair himself came and took
Him from street to street to try to get Him induced to cheapen and
buy some of the vain merchandise.  But as it turned out He had no
mind to the merchandise in question, and He therefore passed
through the town without laying out so much as one farthing upon
its vanities.  The fair, therefore, you will see, is of long
standing and a very great fair.  Now, our two pilgrims had heard of
all that, they remembered also what Evangelist had told them about
the fair, and so they buttoned up their pockets and pushed through
the booths in the hope of getting out at the upper gate before any
one had time to speak to them.  But that was not possible, for they
were soon set upon by the men of the fair, who cried after them:
'Hail, strangers, look here, what will you buy?'  'We buy the truth
only,' said Faithful, 'and we do not see any of that article of
merchandise set out on any of your stalls.'  And from that began a
hubbub that ended in a riot, and the riot in the apprehension and
shutting up in a public cage of the two innocent pilgrims.  Lord
Hate-good was the judge on the bench of Vanity in the day of their
trial, and the three witnesses who appeared in the witness-box
against the two prisoners were Envy, Superstition, and Pickthank.
The twelve jurymen who sat on their case were Mr. Blindman, Mr. No-
good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr.
High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Liar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, and
Mr. Implacable,--Mr. Blindman to be the foreman.  And it was before
these men that Faithful was brought forth to his trial in order to
his condemnation.  And very soon after his trial Faithful came to
his end.  'Now I saw that there stood behind the multitude a
chariot and a couple of horses waiting for Faithful, who (so soon
as his adversaries had despatched him) was taken up into it, and
straightway was carried up through the clouds, with sound of
trumpet, the nearest way to the Celestial gate.'

Now, I cannot tell you how it was, I cannot account for it to
myself, but it is nevertheless absolutely true that as I was
reading my author last week and was meditating my present
exposition, it came somehow into my mind, and I could not get it
out of my mind, that there is a great and a close similarity
between John Bunyan's Vanity Fair and a general election.  And, all
I could do to keep the whole thing out of my mind, one similarity
after another would leap up into my mind and would not be put out
of it.  I protest that I did not go out to seek for such
similarities, but the more I frowned on them the thicker they came.
And then the further question arose as to whether I should write
them down or no; and then much more, as to whether I should set
them out before my people or no.  As you will easily believe, I was
immediately in a real strait as to what I should do.  I saw on the
one side what would be sure to be said by ill-natured people and
people of a hasty judgment.  And I saw with much more anxiety what
would be felt even when they restrained themselves from saying it
by timid and cautious and scrupulous people.  I had the full fear
of all such judges before my eyes; but, somehow, something kept
this before my eyes also, that, as Evangelist met the two pilgrims
just as they were entering the fair, so, for anything I knew to the
contrary, it might be of God, that I also, in my own way, should
warn my people of the real and special danger that their souls will
be in for the next fortnight.  And as I thought of it a procession
of people passed before me all bearing to this day the stains and
scars they had taken on their hearts and their lives and their
characters at former general elections.  And, like Evangelist, I
felt a divine desire taking possession of me to do all I could to
pull my people out of gun-shot of the devil at this election.  And,
then, when I read again how both the pilgrims thanked Evangelist
for his exhortation, and told him withal that they would have him
speak further to them about the dangers of the way, I said at last
to myself, that the thanks of one true Christian saved in anything
and in any measure from the gun of the devil are far more to be
attended to by a minister than the blame and the neglect of a
hundred who do not know their hour of temptation and will not be
told it.  And so I took my pen and set down some similarities
between Vanity Fair and the approaching election, with some lessons
to those who are not altogether beyond being taught.

Well, then, in the first place, the only way to the Celestial City
ran through Vanity Fair; by no possibility could the advancing
pilgrims escape the temptations and the dangers of the fatal fair.
He that will go to the Celestial City and yet not go through Vanity
Fair must needs go out of the world.  And so it is with the
temptations and trials of the next ten days.  We cannot get past
them.  They are laid down right across our way.  And to many men
now in this house the next ten days will be a time of simply
terrible temptation.  If I had been quite sure that all my people
saw that and felt that, I would not have introduced here to-night
what some of them, judging too hastily, will certainly call this so
secular and unseemly subject.  But I am so afraid that many not
untrue, and in other things most earnest men amongst us, do not yet
know sufficiently the weakness and the evil of their own hearts,
that I wish much, if they will allow me, to put them on their
guard.  ''Tis hard,' said Contrite, who was a householder and had a
vote in the town of Vanity, ''tis hard keeping our hearts and our
spirits in any good order when we are in a cumbered condition.  And
you may be sure that we are full of hurry at fair-time.  He that
lives in such a place as this is, and that has to do with such as
we have to do with, has need of an item to caution him to take heed
every hour of the day.'  Now, if all my people, and all this day's
communicants, were only contrite enough, I would leave them to the
hurry of the approaching election with much more comfort.  But as
it is, I wish to give them such an item as I am able to caution
them for the next ten days.  Let them know, then, that their way
for the next fortnight lies, I will not say through a fair of
jugglings and cheatings, carried on by apes and knaves, but, to
speak without figure, their way certainly lies through what will be
to many of them a season of the greatest temptation to the very
worst of all possible sins--to anger and bitterness and ill-will;
to no end of evil-thinking and evil-speaking; to the breaking up of
life-long friendships; and to widespread and lasting damage to the
cause of Christ, which is the cause of truth and love, meekness and
a heavenly mind.  Now, amid all that, as Evangelist said to the two
pilgrims, look well to your own hearts.  Let none of all these evil
things enter your heart from the outside, and let none of all these
evil things come out of your hearts from the inside.  Set your
faces like a flint from the beginning against all evil-speaking and
evil-thinking.  Let your own election to the kingdom of heaven be
always before you, and walk worthy of it; and amid all the hurry of
things seen and temporal, believe steadfastly concerning the things
that are eternal, and walk worthy of them.

'We buy the truth and we sell it not again for anything,' was the
reply of the two pilgrims to every stall-keeper as they passed up
the fair, and this it was that made them to be so hated and hunted
down by the men of the fair.  And, in like manner, there is nothing
more difficult to get hold of at an election time than just the
very truth.  All the truth on any question is not very likely to be
found put forward in the programme of any man or any party, and,
even if it were, a general election is not the best time for you to
find it out.  'I design the search after truth to be the one
business of my life,' wrote the future Bishop Butler at the age of
twenty-one.  And whether you are to be a member of Parliament or a
silent voter for a member of Parliament, you, too, must love truth
and search for her as for hid treasure from your youth up.  You
must search for all kinds of truth,--historical, political,
scientific, and religious,--with much reading, much observation,
and much reflection.  And those who have searched longest and dug
deepest will always be found to be the most temperate, patient, and
forbearing with those who have not yet found the truth.  I do not
know who first said it, but he was a true disciple of Socrates and
Plato who first said it.  'Plato,' he said, 'is my friend, and
Socrates is my friend, but the truth is much more my friend.'
There is a thrill of enthusiasm, admiration and hope that goes
through the whole country and comes down out of history as often as
we hear or read of some public man parting with all his own past,
as well as with all his leaders and patrons and allies and
colleagues in the present, and taking his solitary way out after
the truth.  Many may call that man Quixotic, visionary,
unpractical, imprudent, and he may be all that and more, but to
follow conscience and the love of truth even when they are for the
time leading him wrong is noble, and is every way far better both
for himself and for the cause he serves, than if he were always
found following his leaders loyally and even walking in the way of
righteousness with the love of self and the love of party at bottom
ruling his heart.  How healthful and how refreshing at an election
time it is to hear a speech replete with the love of the truth,
full knowledge of the subject, and with the dignity, the good
temper, the respect for opponents, and the love of fair play that
full knowledge of the whole subject is so well fitted to bring with
it!  And next to hearing such a speaker is the pleasure of meeting
such a hearer or such a reader at such a time.  Now, I want such
readers and such hearers, if not such speakers, to be found all the
next fortnight among my office-bearers and my people.  Be sure you
say to some of your political opponents something like this:- 'I do
not profess to read all the speeches that fill the papers at
present.  I do not read all the utterances made even on my own
side, and much less all the utterances made on your side.  But
there is one of your speakers I always read, and I almost always
find him instructive and impressive, a gentleman, if not a
Christian.  He is fair, temperate, frank, bold, and independent;
and, to my mind at least, he always throws light on these so
perplexing questions.'  Now, if you have the intelligence and the
integrity and the fair-mindedness to say something like that to a
member of the opposite party you have poured oil on the waters of
party; nay, you are in that a wily politician, for you have almost,
just in saying that, won over your friend to your own side.  So
noble is the love of truth, and so potent is the high-principled
pursuit and the fearless proclamation of the truth.

A general election is a trying time to all kinds of public men, but
it is perhaps most trying of all to Christian ministers.  Unless
they are to disfranchise themselves and are to detach and shut
themselves in from all interest in public affairs altogether, an
election time is to our ministers, beyond any other class of
citizens perhaps, a peculiarly trying time.  How they are to escape
the Scylla of cowardice and the contempt of all free and true men
on the one hand, and the Charybdis of pride and self-will and scorn
of other men's opinions and wishes on the other, is no easy dilemma
to our ministers.  Some happily constituted and happily
circumstanced ministers manage to get through life, and even
through political life, without taking or giving a wound in all
their way.  They are so wise and so watchful; they are so
inoffensive, unprovoking, and conciliatory; and even where they are
not always all that, they have around them sometimes a people who
are so patient and tolerant and full of the old-fashioned respect
for their minister that they do not attempt to interfere with him.
Then, again, some ministers preach so well, and perform all their
pastoral work so well, that they make it unsafe and impossible for
the most censorious and intolerant of their people to find fault
with them.  But all our ministers are not like that.  And all our
congregations are not like that.  And those of our ministers who
are not like that must just be left to bear that which their past
unwisdom or misfortune has brought upon them.  Only, if they have
profited by their past mistakes or misfortunes, a means of grace,
and an opportunity of better playing the man is again at their
doors.  I am sure you will all join with me in the prayer that all
our ministers, as well as all their people, may come well out of
the approaching election.

There is yet one other class of public men, if I may call them so,
many of whom come almost worse out of an election time than even
our ministers, and that class is composed of those, who, to
continue the language of Vanity Fair, keep the cages of the fair.
I wish I had to-night, what I have not, the ear of the conductors
of our public journals.  For, what an omnipotence in God's
providence to this generation for good or evil is theirs!  If they
would only all consider well at election times, and at all times,
who they put into their cages and for what reason; if they would
only all ask what can that man's motives be for throwing such dirt
at his neighbour; if they would only all set aside all the letters
they will get during the next fortnight that are avowedly composed
on the old principle of calumniating boldly in the certainty that
some of it will stick, what a service they would do to the cause of
love and truth and justice, which is, surely, after all, their own
cause also!  The very best papers sin sadly in this respect when
their conductors are full for the time of party passion.  And it is
inexpressibly sad when a reader sees great journals to which he
owes a lifelong debt of gratitude absolutely poisoned under his
very eyes with the malignant spirit of untruthful partisanship.
But so long as our public cages are so kept, let those who are
exposed in them resolve to imitate Christian and Faithful, who
behaved themselves amid all their ill-usage yet more wisely, and
received all the ignominy and shame that was cast upon them with so
much meekness and patience that it actually won to their side
several of the men of the fair.

My brethren, this is the last time this season that I shall be able
to speak to you from this pulpit; and, perhaps, the last time
altogether.  But, if it so turns out, I shall not repent that the
last time I spoke to you, and that, too, immediately after the
communion table, the burden of my message was the burden of my
Master's message after the first communion table.  'If ye know
these things, happy are ye if ye do them.  A new commandment I give
unto you, that ye love one another.  By this shall all men know
that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.  Herein
is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit, so shall ye be My
disciples.  These things have I spoken unto you that in Me ye might
have peace.  In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good
cheer, I have overcome the world.  Know ye what I have done unto
you?  Ye call Me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I am.'



BY-ENDS



'Ye seek Me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did
eat of the loaves.'--Our Lord.

In no part of John Bunyan's ingenious book is his strong sense and
his sarcastic and humorous vein better displayed than just in his
description of By-ends, and in the full and particular account he
gives of the kinsfolk and affinity of By-ends.  Is there another
single stroke in all sacred literature better fitted at once to
teach the gayest and to make the gravest smile than just John
Bunyan's sketch of By-ends' great-grandfather, the founder of the
egoistical family of Fairspeech, who was, to begin with, but a
waterman who always looked one way and rowed another?  By-ends'
wife also is a true helpmate to her husband.  She was my Lady
Feigning's favourite daughter, under whose nurture and example the
young lady had early come to a quite extraordinary pitch of good
breeding; and now that she was a married woman, she and her husband
had, so their biographer tells us, two firm points of family
religion in which they were always agreed and according to which
they brought up all their children, namely, never to strive too
much against wind and tide, and always to watch when Religion was
walking on the sunny side of the street in his silver slippers, and
then at once to cross over and take his arm.  But abundantly
amusing and entertaining as John Bunyan is at the expense of By-
ends and his family and friends, he has far other aims in view than
the amusement and entertainment of his readers.  Bunyan uses all
his great gifts of insight and sense and humour and scorn so as to
mark unmistakably the road and to guide the progress of his
reader's soul to God, his chiefest end and his everlasting portion.

It was no small part of our Lord's life of humiliation on the
earth,--much more so than His being born in a low condition and
being made under the law,--to have to go about all His days among
men, knowing in every case and on every occasion what was in man.
It was a real humiliation to our Lord to see those watermen of the
sea of Tiberias sweating at their oars as they rowed round and
round the lake after Him; and His humiliation came still more home
to Him as often as He saw His own disciples disputing and pressing
who should get closest to Him while for a short season He walked in
the sunshine; just as it was His estate of exaltation already
begun, when He could enter into Himself and see to the bottom of
His own heart, till He was able to say that it was His very meat
and drink to do His father's will, and to finish the work His
Father had given Him to do.  The men of Capernaum went out after
our Lord in their boats because they had eaten of the multiplied
loaves and hoped to do so again.  Zebedee's children had forsaken
all and followed our Lord, because they counted to sit the one on
His right hand and the other on His left hand in His soon-coming
kingdom.  The pain and the shame all that cost our Lord, we can
only remotely imagine.  But as for Himself, our Lord never once had
to blush in secret at His own motives.  He never once had to hang
down His head at the discovery of His own selfish aims and by-ends.
Happy man!  The thought of what He should eat or what He should
drink or wherewithal He should be clothed never troubled His head.
The thought of success, as His poor-spirited disciples counted
success, the thought of honour and power and praise, never once
rose in His heart.  All these things, and all things like them, had
no attraction for Him; they awoke nothing but indifference and
contempt in him.  But to please His Father and to hear from time to
time His Father's voice saying that He was well pleased with His
beloved Son,--that was better than life to our Lord.  To find out
and follow every new day His Father's mind and will, and to finish
every night another part of His Father's appointed work,--that was
more than His necessary food to our Lord.  The great schoolmen, as
they meditated on these deep matters, had a saying to the effect
that all created things take their true goodness or their true evil
from the end they aim at.  And thus it was that our Lord, aiming
only at His Father's ends and never at His own, both manifested and
attained to a Divine goodness, just as the greedy crowds of Galilee
and the disputatious disciples, as long and as far as they made
their belly or their honour their end and aim, to that extent fell
short of all true goodness, all true satisfaction, and all true
acceptance.

By-ends was so called because he was full of low, mean, selfish
motives, and of nothing else.  All that this wretched creature did,
he did with a single eye to himself.  The best things that he did
became bad things in his self-seeking hands.  His very religion
stank in those men's nostrils who knew what was in his heart.  By-
ends was one of our Lord's whited sepulchres.  And so deep, so
pervading, and so abiding is this corrupt taint in human nature,
that long after a man has had his attention called to it, and is
far on to a clean escape from it, he still--nay, he all the more--
languishes and faints and is ready to die under it.  Just hear what
two great servants of God have said on this humiliating and
degrading matter.  Writing on this subject with all his wonted
depth and solemnity, Hooker says, 'Even in the good things that we
do, how many defects are there intermingled!  For God in that which
is done, respecteth especially the mind and intention of the doer.
Cut off, then, all those things wherein we have regarded our own
glory, those things which we do to please men, or to satisfy our
own liking, those things which we do with any by-respect, and not
sincerely and purely for the love of God, and a small score will
serve for the number of our righteous deeds.  Let the holiest and
best things we do be considered.  We are never better affected to
God than when we pray; yet, when we pray, how are our affections
many times distracted!  How little reverence do we show to that God
unto whom we speak!  How little remorse of our own miseries!  How
little taste of the sweet influence of His tender mercy do we feel!
The little fruit we have in holiness, it is, God knoweth, corrupt
and unsound; we put no confidence at all in it, we challenge
nothing in the world for it, we dare not call God to a reckoning as
if we had Him in our debt-books; our continued suit to Him is, and
must be, to bear with our infirmities, and to pardon our offences.'
And Thomas Shepard, a divine of a very different school, as we say,
but a saint and a scholar equal to the best, and indeed with few to
equal him, thus writes in his Spiritual Experiences:- 'On Sabbath
morning I saw that I had a secret eye to my own name in all that I
did, for which I judged myself worthy of death.  On another
Sabbath, when I came home, I saw the deep hypocrisy of my heart,
that in my ministry I sought to comfort and quicken others, that
the glory might reflect on me as well as on God.  On the evening
before the sacrament I saw that mine own ends were to procure
honour, pleasure, gain to myself, and not to the Lord, and I saw
how impossible it was for me to seek the Lord for Himself, and to
lay up all my honour and all my pleasures in Him.  On Sabbath-day,
when the Lord had given me some comfortable enlargements, I
searched my heart and found my sin.  I saw that though I did to
some extent seek Christ's glory, yet I sought it not alone, but my
own glory too.  After my Wednesday sermon I saw the pride of my
heart acting thus, that presently my heart would look out and ask
whether I had done well or ill.  Hereupon I saw my vileness to make
men's opinions my rule.  The Lord thus gave me some glimpse of
myself and a good day that was to me.'  One would think that this
was By-ends himself climbed up into the ministry.  And so it was.
And yet David Brainerd could write on his deathbed about Thomas
Shepard in this way.  'He valued nothing in religion that was not
done to the glory of God, and, oh! that others would lay the stress
of religion here also.  His method of examining his ends and aims
and the temper of his mind both before and after preaching, is an
excellent example for all who bear the sacred character.  By this
means they are like to gain a large acquaintance with their own
hearts, as it is evident he had with his.'

But it is not those who bear the sacred character of the ministry
alone who are full of by-ends.  We all are.  You all are.  And
there is not one all-reaching, all-exposing, and all-humbling way
of salvation appointed for ministers, and another, a more external,
superficial, easy, and self-satisfied way for their people.  No.
Not only must the ambitious and disputing disciples enter into
themselves and become witnesses and judges and executioners within
themselves before they can be saved or be of any use in the
salvation of others--not only they, but the fishermen of the Lake
of Tiberias, they also must open their hearts to these stabbing
words of Christ, and see how true it is that they had followed Him
for loaves and fishes, and not for His grace and His truth.  And
only when they had seen and submitted to that humiliating self-
discovery would their true acquaintance with Christ and their true
search after Him begin.  Come, then, all my brethren, and not
ministers only, waken up to the tremendous importance of that which
you have utterly neglected, it may be ostentatiously neglected, up
to this hour,--the true nature, the true character, of your motives
and your ends.  Enter into yourselves.  Be not strangers and
foreigners to yourselves.  Let not the day of judgment be any
surprise to you.  Witness against, judge, and execute yourselves,
and that especially because of your by-aims and by-ends.  Take up
the touchstone of truth and lay it upon your most secret heart.  Do
not be afraid to discover how double-minded and deceitful your
heart is.  Hunt your heart down.  Track it to its most secret lair.
Put its true name, and continue to put its true name, upon the main
motive of your life.  Extort an answer by boot and by wheel, only
extort an answer from the inner man of the heart, to the torturing
question as to what is his treasure, his hope, his deepest wish,
his daily dream.  Watch not against any outward enemy, keep all
your eyes and all your ears to your own thoughts.  God keeps His
awful eye on your thoughts.  His eye goes at every glance to that
great depth in you.  Even His all-seeing eye can go no deeper into
you than to your secret thoughts.  Go you as deep as God goes, and
you will be a wise man; go as deep and as often as He does, and
then you will soon come to see eye to eye with God, not only about
your own thoughts, but about His thoughts too, and about everything
else.  Till you begin to watch your own thoughts, and to watch them
especially in their aims and their ends, you will have no idea what
that moral and spiritual life is that all God's saints live; that
life that Christ lived, and which He this night summons you all to
enter henceforth upon.

It is such a happy fact that it cannot be too often told, that in
the things of the soul really and truly to know and feel the
disease is to have already entered on the remedy.  You will not
feel, indeed, that you have entered on the remedy; but that does
not much matter so long as you really have.  And there is nothing
more certain among all the certainties of divine things than that
he who feels himself to be in death and hell with his heart so full
of by-ends is all the time as far from death and hell as any one
can be who is still on this side of heaven.  When a man's whole
will and desire is set on God, as is now and then the case, that
man is perilously near a sudden and an abundant entrance into that
life and that presence where his heart has for so long been.  When
a man is half mad with his own heart, as Thomas Shepard for one
was, that stranger on the earth is at last within a step of that
happy coast where all wishes end.  Watch that man.  Take a last
look at that man.  He will soon be taken out of your sight.  Ere
ever he is himself aware, he will be rapt up into that life where
saints and angels seek not their own will, labour not for their own
profit or promotion, listen not for their own praises, but find
their blessedness, the half of which had not here been told them,
in glorifying God and in enjoying Him for ever.

You must all have heard the name of a book that has helped many a
saint now in glory to the examination and the keeping of his own
heart.  I refer to Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Dying.  Take two
or three of Taylor's excellent rules with you as you go down from
God's house to-night.  'If you would really live a holy life and
die a holy death,' says Taylor, 'learn to reflect in your every
action on your secret end in it; consider with yourself why you do
it, and what you propound to yourself for your reward.  Pray
importunately that all your purposes and all your motives may be
sanctified.  Renew and rekindle your purest purposes by such
ejaculations as these:  "Not unto us, O God, not unto us, but to
Thy name be all the praise.  I am in this Thy servant; let all the
gain be Thine."  In great and eminent actions let there be a
special and peculiar act of resignation or oblation made to God;
and in smaller and more frequent actions fail not to secure a pious
habitual intention.'  And so on.  And above all, I will add, labour
and pray till you feel in your heart that you love God with a
supreme and an ever-growing love.  And, far as that may be above
you as yet, impress your heart with the assurance that such a love
is possible to you also, and that you can never be safe or happy
till you attain to that love.  Other men once as far from the
supreme love of God as you are have afterwards attained to it; and
so will you if you continue to set it before yourself.  Think often
on God; read the best books about God; call continually upon God;
hold an intimate communion with God, till you feel that you also
actually and certainly love God.  And though you begin with loving
God because He first loved you, you will, beginning with that, rise
far above that till you come to love Him for what He is in Himself
as well as for what He has done for you.  'I have done this in
order to have a seat in the Academy,' said a young man, handing the
solution of a problem to an old philosopher.  'Sir,' was the reply,
'with such dispositions you will never earn a seat there.  Science
must be loved for its own sake, and not for any advantage to be
derived from it.'  And much more is that true of the highest of all
the sciences, the knowledge and the love of God.  Love Him, then,
till you arrive at loving Him for Himself, and then you shall be
for ever delivered from all self-love and by-ends, and shall both
glorify and enjoy God for ever.  As all they now do who engaged
their hearts on earth to the service and the love and the enjoyment
of God is such psalms and prayers as these:  'Whom have I in heaven
but Thee? and there is no one on earth that I desire beside Thee.
How excellent is Thy loving-kindness, O God!  The children of men
shall put their trust under the shadow of Thy wings.  For with Thee
is the fountain of life, and in Thy light shall we see light.  As
for me, I will behold Thy face in righteousness:  I shall be
satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness.  Thou wilt show me the
path of life; in Thy presence is fullness of joy, and at Thy right
hand there are pleasures for evermore.'



GIANT DESPAIR



'A wounded spirit who can bear?'--Solomon.

Every schoolboy has Giant Despair by heart.  The rough road after
the meadow of lilies, the stile into By-Path-Meadow, the night
coming on, the thunder and the lightning and the waters rising
amain, Giant Despair's apprehension of Christian and Hopeful, their
dreadful bed in his dungeon from Wednesday morning till Saturday
night, how they were famished with hunger and beaten with a
grievous crab-tree cudgel till they were not able to turn, with
many other sufferings too many and too terrible to be told which
they endured till Saturday about midnight, when they began to pray,
and continued in prayer till almost break of day;--John Bunyan is
surely the best story-teller in all the world.  And, then, over and
above that, as often as a boy reads Giant Despair and his dungeon
to his father and mother, the two hearers are like Christian and
Hopeful when the Delectable shepherds showed them what had happened
to some who once went in at By-Path stile:  the two pilgrims looked
one upon another with tears gushing out, but yet said nothing to
the shepherds.

John Bunyan's own experience enters deeply into these terrible
pages.  In composing these terrible pages, Bunyan writes straight
and bold out of his own heart and conscience.  The black and bitter
essence of a whole black and bitter volume is crushed into these
four or five bitter pages.  Last week I went over Grace Abounding
again, and marked the passages in which its author describes his
own experiences of doubt, diffidence, and despair, till I gave over
counting the passages, they are so many.  I had intended to
illustrate the passage before us to-night out of the kindred
materials that I knew were so abundant in Bunyan's terrible
autobiography, but I had to give up that idea.  It would have taken
two or three lectures to itself to tell all that Bunyan suffered
all his life long from an easily-wounded spirit.  The whole book is
just Giant Despair and his dungeon, with a gleam here and there of
that sunshiny weather that threw the giant into one of his fits, in
which he always lost for the time the use of his limbs.  Return
often, my brethren, to that masterpiece, Grace Abounding to the
Chief of Sinners.  I have read it a hundred times, but last week it
was as fresh and powerful and consoling as ever to my sin-wounded
spirit.

Let me select some of the incidents that offer occasion for a
comment or two.

1.  And, in the first place, take notice, and lay well to heart,
how sudden, and almost instantaneous, is the fall of Christian and
Hopeful from the very gate of heaven to the very gate of hell.  All
the Sabbath and the Monday and the Tuesday before that fatal
Wednesday, the two pilgrims had walked with great delight on the
banks of a very pleasant river; that river, in fact, which David
the King called the river of God, and John, the river of the water
of life.  They drank also of the water of the river, which was
pleasant and enlivening to their weary spirits.  On either side of
the river was there a meadow curiously beautified with lilies, and
it was green all the year long.  In this meadow they lay down and
slept, for here they might lie down and sleep safely.  When they
awoke they gathered again of the fruits of the trees, and drank
again of the water of the river, and then lay down again to sleep.
Thus they did several days and nights.  Now, could you have
believed it that two such men as our pilgrims were could be in the
enjoyment of all that the first half of the week, and then by their
own doing should be in Giant Despair's deepest dungeon before the
end of the same week?  And yet so it was.  And all that is written
for the solemn warning of those who are at any time in great
enlargement and refreshment and joy in their spiritual life.  It is
intended for all those who are at any time revelling in a season of
revival:  those, for example, who are just come home from Keswick
or Dunblane, as well as for all those who at home have just made
the discovery of some great master of the spiritual life, and who
are almost beside themselves with their delight in their divine
author.  If they are new beginners they will not take this warning
well, nor will even all old pilgrims lay it aright to heart; but
there it is as plain as the plainest, simplest, and most practical
writer in our language could put it.


Behold ye how these crystal streams do glide
To comfort pilgrims by the highway side;
The meadows green, besides their fragrant smell,
Yield dainties for them:  And he that can tell
What pleasant fruits, yea leaves, these trees do yield,
Will soon sell all that he may buy this field.


Thus the two pilgrims sang:  only, adds our author in a
parenthesis, they were not, as yet, at their journey's end.

2.  'Now, I beheld in my dream that they had not journeyed far when
the river and the way for a time parted.  At which the two pilgrims
were not a little sorry.'  The two pilgrims could not perhaps be
expected to break forth into dancing and singing at the parting of
the river and the way, even though they had recollected at that
moment what the brother of the Lord says about our counting it all
joy when we fall into divers temptations.  But it would not have
been too much to expect from such experienced pilgrims as they by
this time were, that they should have suspected and checked and
commanded their sorrow.  They should have said something like this
to one another:  Well, it would have been very pleasant had it been
our King's will and way with us that we should have finished the
rest of our pilgrimage among the apples and the lilies and on the
soft and fragrant bank of the river; but we believe that it must in
some as yet hidden way be better for us that the river and our road
should part from one another at least for a season.  Come, brother,
and let us go on till we find out our Master's deep and loving
mind.  But, instead of saying that, Christian and Hopeful soon
became like the children of Israel as they journeyed from Mount
Hor, their soul was much discouraged because of the way.  And
always as they went on they wished for a softer and a better way.
And it was so that they very soon came to the very thing they so
much wished for.  For, what is that on the left hand of the hard
road but a stile, and over the stile a meadow as soft to the feet
as the meadow of lilies itself?  ''Tis just according to my wish,'
said Christian; 'here is the easiest going.  Come, good Hopeful,
and let us go over.'  Hopeful:  'But how if the path should lead us
out of the way?'  'That's not like,' said the other; 'look, doth it
not go along by the wayside?'  So Hopeful, being persuaded by his
fellow, went after him over the stile.

Call to mind, all you who are delivered and restored pilgrims, that
same stile that once seduced you.  To keep that stile ever before
you is at once a safe and a seemly occupation of mind for any one
who has made your mistakes and come through your chastisements.
Christian's eyes all his after-days filled with tears, and he
turned away his face and blushed scarlet, as often as he suddenly
came upon any opening in a wall at all like that opening he here
persuaded Hopeful to climb through.  It is too much to expect that
those who are just mounting the stile, and have just caught sight
of the smooth path beyond it, will let themselves be pulled back
into the hard and narrow way by any persuasion of ours.  Christian
put down Hopeful's objection till Hopeful broke out bitterly when
the thunder was roaring over his head and he was wading about among
the dark waters:  'Oh that I had kept myself in my way!'  Are you a
little sorry to-night that the river and the way are parting in
your life?  Is your soul discouraged in you because of the soreness
of the way?  And as you go do you still wish for some better way
than the strait way?  And have you just espied a stile on the left
hand of your narrow and flinty path, and on looking over it is
there a pleasant meadow?  And does your companion point out to your
satisfaction, and, almost to your good conscience, that the soft
road runs right along the hard road, only over the stile and
outside the fence?  Then, good-bye.  For it is all over with you.
We shall meet you again, please God; but when we meet you again,
your mind and memory will be full of shame and remorse and
suffering enough to keep you in songs of repentance for all the
rest of your life on earth.  Farewell!


The Pilgrims now, to gratify the flesh,
Will seek its ease; but oh! how they afresh
Do thereby plunge themselves new grieves into:
Who seek to please the flesh themselves undo.


3.  The two transgressors had not gone far on their own way when
night came on and with the night a very great darkness.  But what
soon added to the horror of their condition was that they heard a
man fall into a deep pit right before them, and it sounded to them
as if he was dashed to pieces by his fall.  So they called to know
the matter, but there was none to answer, only they heard a
groaning.  Then said Hopeful:  Where are we now?  Then was his
fellow silent, as mistrusting that he had led Hopeful out of the
way.  Now, all that also is true to the very life, and has been
taken down by Bunyan from the very life.  We have all heard men
falling and heard them groaning just a little before us after we
had left the strait road.  They had just gone a little farther
wrong than we had as yet gone,--just a very little farther; in some
cases, indeed, not so far, when they fell and were dashed to pieces
with their fall.  It was well for us at that dreadful moment that
we heard the same voice saying to us for our encouragement as said
to the two trembling transgressors:  'Let thine heart be toward the
highway, even the way that thou wentest; turn again.'  Now, what is
it in which you are at this moment going off the right road?  What
is that life of disobedience or self-indulgence that you are just
entering on?  Keep your ears open and you will hear hundreds of men
and women falling and being dashed to pieces before you and all
around you.  Are you falling of late too much under the power of
your bodily appetites?  It is not one man, nor two, well known to
you, who have fallen never to rise again out of that horrible pit.
Are you well enough aware that you are being led into bad company?
Or, is your companion, who is not a bad man in anything else,
leading you, in this and in that, into what at any rate is bad for
you?  You will soon, unless you cut off your companion like a right
hand, be found saying with misguided and overruled Hopeful:  Oh
that I had kept me to my right way!  And so on in all manner of sin
and trespass.  Those who have ears to hear such things hear every
day one man after another falling through lust or pride or malice
or idleness or infidelity, till there is none to answer.

4.  'All hope abandon' was the writing that Dante read over the
door of hell.  And the two prisoners all but abandoned all hope
when they found themselves in Giant Despair's dungeon.  Only,
Christian, the elder man, had the most distress because their being
where they now were lay mostly at his door.  All this part of the
history also is written in Bunyan's very heart's blood.  'I found
it hard work,' he tells us of himself, 'to pray to God because
despair was swallowing me up.  I thought I was as with a tempest
driven away from God.  About this time I did light on that dreadful
story of that miserable mortal, Francis Spira, a book that was to
my troubled spirit as salt when rubbed into a fresh wound; every
groan of that man with all the rest of his actions in his dolours,
as his tears, his prayers, his gnashing of teeth, his wringing of
hands, was as knives and daggers in my soul, especially that
sentence of his was frightful to me:  "Man knows the beginning of
sin, but who bounds the issues thereof?"'  We never read anything
like Spira's experience and Grace Abounding and Giant Despair's
dungeon in the books of our day.  And why not, do you think?  Is
there less sin among us modern men, or did such writers as John
Bunyan overdraw and exaggerate the sinfulness of sin?  Were they
wrong in holding so fast as they did hold that death and hell are
the sure wages of sin?  Has divine justice become less fearful than
it used to be to those who rush against it, or is it that we are so
much better men?  Is our faith stronger and more victorious over
doubt and fear?  Is it that our hope is better anchored?  Whatever
the reason is, there can be no question but that we walk in a
liberty that our fathers did not always walk in.  Whether or no our
liberty is not recklessness and licentiousness is another matter.
Whether or no it would be a better sign of us if we were better
acquainted with doubt and dejection and diffidence, and even
despair, is a question it would only do us good to put to
ourselves.  When we properly attend to these matters we shall find
out that, the holier a man is, the more liable he is to the
assaults of doubt and fear and even despair.  We have whole psalms
of despair, so deep was David's sense of sin, so high were his
views of God's holiness and justice, and so full of diffidence was
his wounded heart.  And David's Son, when our sin was laid upon
Him, felt the curse and the horror of His state so much that His
sweat was in drops of blood, and His cry in the darkness was that
His God had forsaken Him.  And when our spirits are wounded with
our sins, as the spirits of all God's great saints have always been
wounded, we too shall feel ourselves more at home with David and
with Asaph, with Spira even, and with Bunyan.  Despair is not good,
but it is infinitely better than indifference.  'It is a common
saying,' says South, 'and an observation in divinity, that where
despair has slain its thousands, presumption has slain its ten
thousands.  The agonies of the former are indeed more terrible, but
the securities of the latter are far more fatal.'

5.  'I will,' says Paul to Timothy, 'that men pray everywhere,
lifting up holy hands without doubting.' And, just as Paul would
have it, Christian and Hopeful began to lift up their hands even in
the dungeon of Doubting Castle.  'Well,' we read, 'on Saturday
night about midnight they began to pray, and continued in prayer
till almost break of day.  Now, before it was day, good Christian,
as one half amazed, broke out in this passionate speech:  "What a
fool," quoth he, "am I thus to lie in a stinking dungeon when I may
as well walk at liberty; I have a key in my bosom, called Promise,
that will, I am persuaded, open any lock in all Doubting Castle."
Then said Hopeful:  "That's good news, good brother; pluck it out
of thy bosom and try."'  Then Christian pulled the key out of his
bosom and the bolt gave back, and Christian and Hopeful both came
out, and you may be sure they were soon out of the giant's
jurisdiction.

Now, I do not know that I can do better at this point, and in
closing, than just to tell you about some of that bunch of keys
that John Bunyan found from time to time in his own bosom, and
which made all his prison doors one after another fly open at their
touch.  'About ten o'clock one day, as I was walking under a hedge,
full of sorrow and guilt, God knows, and bemoaning myself for my
hard hap, suddenly this sentence bolted in upon me:  The blood of
Christ remits all guilt.  Again, when I was fleeing from the face
of God, for I did flee from His face, that is, my mind and spirit
fled before Him; for by reason of His highness I could not endure;
then would the text cry:  Return unto Me; it would cry with a very
great voice:  Return unto me, for I have redeemed thee.  And this
would make me look over my shoulder behind me to see if I could
discern that this God of grace did follow me with a pardon in His
hand.  Again, the next day, at evening, being under many fears, I
went to seek the Lord, and as I prayed, I cried, with strong cries:
O Lord, I beseech Thee, show me that Thou hast loved me with an
everlasting love.  I had no sooner said it but, with sweetness,
this returned upon me as an echo or sounding-again, I have loved
thee with an everlasting love.  Now, I went to bed at quiet; also,
when I awaked the next morning it was fresh upon my soul and I
believed it . . . Again, as I was then before the Lord, that
Scripture fastened on my heart:  O man, great is thy faith, even as
if one had clapped me on the back as I was on my knees before God .
. . At another time I remember I was again much under this
question:  Whether the blood of Christ was sufficient to save my
soul?  In which doubt I continued from morning till about seven or
eight at night, and at last, when I was, as it were, quite worn out
with fear, these words did sound suddenly within my heart:  He is
able.  Methought this word ABLE was spoke so loud unto me and gave
such a justle to my fear and doubt as I never had all my life
either before that or after . . . Again, one morning, when I was at
prayer and trembling under fear, that piece of a sentence dashed in
upon me:  My grace is sufficient.  At this, methought:  Oh, how
good a thing it is for God to send His word! . . . Again, one day
as I was in a meeting of God's people, full of sadness and terror,
for my fears were again strong upon me, and as I was thinking that
my soul was never the better, these words did with great power
suddenly break in upon me:  My grace is sufficient for thee, My
grace is sufficient for thee, three times together; and, oh!
methought that every word was a mighty word unto me; as MY, and
GRACE, and SUFFICIENT, and FOR THEE.  These words were then, and
sometimes still are, far bigger words than others are.  Again, one
day as I was passing in the field, and that, too, with some dashes
in my conscience, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul:  Thy
righteousness is in heaven.  And methought withal I saw, with the
eyes of my soul, Jesus Christ at God's right hand.  I saw also,
moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my
righteousness better, nor my bad frame that made my righteousness
worse, for my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever . . . Again, oh, what did I see in
that blessed sixth of John:  Him that cometh to Me I will in nowise
cast out.  I should in those days often flounce toward that promise
as horses do toward sound ground that yet stick in the mire.  Oh!
many a pull hath my heart had with Satan for this blessed sixth of
John . . . And, again, as I was thus in a muse, that Scripture also
came with great power upon my spirit:  Not by works of
righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He
saved us.  Now was I got on high:  I saw my self within the arms of
Grace and Mercy, and though I was before afraid to think of a dying
hour, yet now I cried:  Let me die.  Now death was lovely and
beautiful in my sight; for I saw that we shall never live indeed
till we be gone to the other world.  Heirs of God, methought, heirs
of God!  God himself is the portion of His saints.  This did
sweetly revive my spirit, and help me to hope in God; which when I
had with comfort mused on a while, that word fell with great weight
upon my mind:  Oh Death, where is thy sting?  Oh Grave, where is
thy victory?  At this I became both well in body and mind at once,
for my sickness did presently vanish, and I walked comfortably in
my work for God again.'

Such were some of the many keys by the use of which God let John
Bunyan so often out of despair into full assurance and out of
darkness into light.  Which of the promises have been of such help
to you?  Over what Scriptures have you ever cried out:  Oh, how
good a thing it is for God to send me His word!  Which are the
biggest words in all the Bible to you?  To what promise did you
ever flounce as a horse flounces when he is sticking in the mire?
And has any word of God so made God your God that even death
itself, since it alone separates you from His presence, is lovely
and beautiful in your eyes?  Have you a cluster of such keys in
your bosom?  If you have, take them all out to-night and go over
them again with thanksgiving before you sleep.



KNOWLEDGE



'I will give you pastors after Mine own heart, which shall feed you
with knowledge and understanding.'

The Delectable Mountains rise out of the heart of Immanuel's Land.
This fine range of far-rolling hills falls away on the one side
toward the plain of Destruction, and on the other side toward the
land of Beulah and the Celestial City, and the way to the Celestial
City runs like a bee-line over these well-watered pastures.
Standing on a clear day on the highest peak of the Delectable
Mountains, if you have good eyes you can see the hill Difficulty in
the far-back distance with a perpetual mist clinging to its base
and climbing up its sides, which mist the shepherds say to you
rises all the year round off the Slough of Despond, while, beyond
that again the heavy smoke of the city of Destruction and the town
of Stupidity shuts in the whole horizon.  And then, when you turn
your back on all that, in favourable states of the weather you can
see here and there the shimmer of that river over which there is no
bridge; and, then again, so high above the river that it seems to
be a city standing in heaven rather than upon the earth, you will
see the high towers and shining palace roofs and broad battlements
of the New Jerusalem itself.  The two travellers should have spent
the past three days among the sights of the Delectable Mountains;
and they would have done so had not the elder traveller misled the
younger.  But now that they were set free and fairly on the right
road again, the way they had spent the past three days and three
nights made the gardens and the orchards and the pastures that ran
round the bottom and climbed up the sides of the Delectable
Mountains delectable beyond all description to them.

Now, there were on the tops of those mountains certain shepherds
feeding their flocks, and they stood by the highway side.  The two
travellers therefore went up to the shepherds, and leaning upon
their staves (as is common with weary travellers when they stand to
talk with any by the way), they asked:  Whose delectable mountains
are these? and whose be the sheep that feed upon them?  These
mountains, replied the shepherds, are Immanuel's Land, and they are
within sight of the city; the sheep also are His, and He laid down
His life for them.  After some more talk like this by the wayside,
the shepherds, being pleased with the pilgrims, looked very
lovingly upon them and said:  Welcome to the Delectable Mountains.
The shepherds then, whose names were Knowledge, Experience,
Watchful, and Sincere, took them by the hand to lead them to their
tents, and made them partake of what was ready at present.  They
said, moreover:  We would that you should stay with us a while to
be acquainted with us, and yet more to solace yourselves with the
cheer of these Delectable Mountains.  Then the travellers told them
they were content to stay; and so they went to rest that night
because it was now very late.  The four shepherds lived all summer-
time in a lodge of tents well up among their sheep, while their
wives and families had their homes all the year round in the land
of Beulah.  The four men formed a happy fraternity, and they worked
among and watched over their Master's sheep with one united mind.
What one of those shepherds could not so well do in the tent or in
the fold or out on the hillside, some of the others better did.
And what one of them could do to any perfection all the others by
one consent left that to him to do.  You would have thought that
they were made by a perfect miracle to fit into one another, so
harmoniously did they live and work together, and such was the bond
of brotherly love that held them together.  At the same time, there
was one of the happy quaternity who, from his years on the hills,
and his services in times of trial and danger, and one thing and
another, fell always, and with the finest humility too, into the
foremost place, and his name, as you have already heard, was
Knowledge.  Old Mr. Know-all the children in the villages below ran
after him and named him as they clustered round his staff and hid
in the great folds of his shepherd's coat.

Now, in all this John Bunyan speaks as a child to children; but, of
such children as John Bunyan and his readers is the kingdom of
heaven.  My very youngest hearer here to-night knows quite well,
or, at any rate, shrewdly suspects, that Knowledge was not a
shepherd going about with his staff among woolly sheep; nor would
the simplest-minded reader of John Bunyan's book go to seek the
Delectable Mountains and Immanuel's Land in any geographer's atlas,
or on any schoolroom map.  Oh, no.  I do not need to stop to tell
the most guileless of my hearers that old Knowledge was not a
shepherd whose sheep were four-footed creatures, but a minister of
the gospel, whose sheep are men, women, and children.  Nor are the
Delectable Mountains any range of hills and valleys of grass and
herbs in England or Scotland.  The prophet Ezekiel calls them the
mountains of Israel; but by that you all know that he had in his
mind something far better than any earthly mountain.  That prophet
of Israel had in his mind the church of God with its synagogues and
its sacraments, with all the grace and truth that all these things
conveyed from God to the children of Israel.  As David also sang in
the twenty-third Psalm:  'The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not
want.  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me
beside the still waters.'

Knowledge, then, is a minister; but every congregation has not such
a minister set over it as Knowledge is.  All our college-bred and
ordained men are not ministers like Knowledge.  This excellent
minister takes his excellent name from his great talents and his
great attainments.  And while all his great talents are his
Master's gift to him, his great attainments are all his own to lay
out in his Master's service.  To begin with, his Master had given
His highly-favoured servant a good understanding and a good memory,
and many good and suitable opportunities.  Now, a good
understanding is a grand endowment for a minister, and his
ministerial office will all his days afford him opportunity for the
best understanding he can bring to it.  The Christian ministry,
first and last, has had a noble roll of men of a strong
understanding.  The author of the book now open before us was a man
of a strong understanding.  John Bunyan had a fine imagination,
with great gifts of eloquent, tender, and most heart-winning
utterance, but in his case also all that was bottomed in a strong
English understanding.  Then, again, a good memory is indispensable
to a minister of knowledge.  You must be content to take a second,
a third, or even a lower place still if your Master has withheld
from you a good memory.  Dr. Goodwin has a passage on this point
that I have often turned up when I had again forgotten it.  'Thou
mayest have a weak memory, perhaps, yet if it can and doth remember
good things as well and better than other things, then it is a
sanctified memory, and the defilement of thy memory is healed
though the imperfection of it is not; and, though thou art to be
humbled for it as a misery, yet thou art not to be discouraged; for
God doth not hate thee for it, but pities thee; and the like holds
good and may be said as to the want of other like gifts.'  You
cannot be a man of a commanding knowledge anywhere, and you must be
content to take a very subordinate and second place, even in the
ministry, unless you have both a good understanding and a good
memory; but then, at the last day your Master will not call you and
your congregation to an account for what He has not committed to
your stewardship.  And on that day that will be something.  But not
only must ministers of knowledge have a good mind and a good
memory; they must also be the most industrious of men.  Other men
may squander and kill their time as they please, but a minister had
as good kill himself at once out of the way of better men unless he
is to hoard his hours like gold and jewels.  He must read only the
best books, and he must read them with the 'pain of attention.'  He
must read nothing that is not the best.  He has not the time.  And
if he is poor and remote and has not many books, he will have
Butler, and let him read Butler's Preface to his Sermons till he
has it by heart.  The best books are always few, and they must be
read over and over again when other men are reading the 'great
number of books and papers of amusement that come daily in their
way, and which most perfectly fall in with their idle way of
reading and considering things.'  And, then, such a minister must
store up what he reads, if not in a good memory, then in some other
pigeon-hole that he has made for himself outside of himself, since
his Master has not seen fit to furnish him with such a repository
within himself.  And, then, after all that,--for a good minister is
not made yet,--understanding and memory and industry must all be
sanctified by secret prayer many times every day, and then laid out
every day in the instruction, impression, and comfort of his
people.  And, then, that privileged people will be as happy in
possessing that man for their minister as the sheep of Immanuel's
Land were in having Knowledge set over them for their shepherd.
They will never look up without being fed.  They will every
Sabbath-day be led by green pastures and still waters.  And when
they sing of the mercies of the Lord to them and to their children,
and forget not all His benefits, among the best of their benefits
they will not forget to hold up and bless their minister.

But, then, there is, nowadays, so much sound knowledge to be
gained, not to speak of so many books and papers of mere pastime
and amusement, that it may well be asked by a young man who is to
be a minister whether he is indeed called to be like that great
student who took all knowledge for his province.  Yes, indeed, he
is.  For, if the minister and interpreter of nature is to lay all
possible knowledge under contribution, what must not the minister
of Jesus Christ and the interpreter of Scripture and providence and
experience and the human heart be able to make the sanctified use
of?  Yes, all kinds and all degrees of knowledge, to be called
knowledge, belong by right and obligation to his office who is the
minister and interpreter of Him Who made all things, Who is the
Heir of all things, and by Whom all things consist.  At the same
time, since the human mind has its limits, and since human life has
its limits, a minister of all men must make up his mind to limit
himself to the best knowledge; the knowledge, that is, that chiefly
concerns him,--the knowledge of God so far as God has made Himself
known, and the knowledge of Christ.  He must be a student of his
Bible night and day and all his days.  If he has not the strength
of understanding and memory to read his Bible easily in the
original Hebrew and Greek, let him all the more make up for that by
reading it the oftener and the deeper in English.  Let him not only
read his Bible deeply for his sermons and prayers, lectures and
addresses, let him do that all day every day of the week, and then
read it all night, and every night of the week, for his own soul.
Let every minister know his Bible down to the bottom, and with his
Bible his own heart.  He who so knows his Bible and with it his own
heart has almost books enough.  All else is but ostentatious
apparatus.  When a minister has neither understanding nor memory
wherewith to feed his flock, let him look deep enough into his
Bible and into his own heart, and then begin out of them to write
and speak.  And, then, for the outside knowledge of the passing day
he will read the newspapers, and though he gives up all the morning
to the newspapers, and returns to them again in the evening, his
conscience will not upbraid him if he reads as Jonathan Edwards
read the newsletters of his day,--to see how the kingdom of heaven
is prospering in the earth, and to pray for its prosperity.  And,
then, by that time, and when he has got that length, all other
kinds of knowledge will have fallen into its own place, and will
have taken its own proper proportion of his time and his thought.
He was a man of a great understanding and a great memory and great
industry who said that he had taken all knowledge for his province.
But he was a far wiser man who said that knowledge is not our
proper happiness.  Our province, he went on to say, is virtue and
religion, life and manners:  the science of improving the temper
and making the heart better.  This is the field assigned us to
cultivate:  how much it has lain neglected is indeed astonishing.

Now, my brethren, two dangers, two simply terrible dangers, arise
to every one of you out of all this matter of your ministers and
their knowledge.  1. The first danger is,--to be frank with you on
this subject,--that you are yourselves so ignorant on all the
matters that a minister has to do with, that you do not know one
minister from another, a good minister from one who is really no
minister at all.  Now, I will put it to you, on what principle and
for what reason did you choose your present minister, if, indeed,
you did choose him?  Was it because you were assured by people you
could trust that he was a minister of knowledge and knew his own
business?  Or was it that when you went to worship with him for
yourself you have not been able ever since to tear yourself away
from him, nor has any one else been able to tear you away, though
some have tried?  When you first came to the city, did you give,
can you remember, some real anxiety, rising sometimes into prayer,
as to who your minister among so many ministers was to be?  Or did
you choose him and your present seat in his church because of some
real or supposed worldly interest of yours you thought you could
further by taking your letter of introduction to him?  Had you
heard while yet at home, had your father and mother talked of such
things to you, that rich men, and men of place and power, political
men and men high in society, sat in that church and took notice of
who attended it and who did not?  Do you, down to this day, know
one church from another so far as spiritual and soul-saving
knowledge is concerned?  Do you know that two big buildings, called
churches, may stand in the same street, and have men, called
ministers, carrying on certain services in them from week to week,
and yet, for all the purposes for which Christ came and died and
rose again and gave ministers to His church, these two churches and
their ministers are farther asunder than the two poles?  Do you
understand what I am saying?  Do you understand what I have been
saying all night, or are you one of those of whom the prophet
speaks in blame and in pity as being destroyed for lack of
knowledge?  Well, that is your first danger, that you are so
ignorant, and as a consequence, so careless, as not to know one
minister from another.

2.  And your second danger in connection with your minister is,
that you have, and may have long had, a good minister, but that you
still remain yourself a bad man.  My brethren, be you all sure of
it, there is a special and a fearful danger in having a specially
good minister.  Think twice, and make up your mind well, before you
call a specially good minister, or become a communicant, or even an
adherent under a specially good minister.  If two bad men go down
together to the pit, and the one has had a good minister, as, God
have mercy on us, sometimes happens, and the other has only had one
who had the name of a minister, the evangelised reprobate will lie
in a deeper bed in hell, and will spend a more remorseful eternity
on it than will the other.  No man among you, minister or no
minister, good minister or bad, will be able to sin with impunity.
But he who sins on and on after good preaching will be beaten with
many stripes.  'Woe unto thee, Chorazin!  Woe unto thee, Bethsaida!
For if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in
Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and
ashes.  But I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and
Sidon at the day of judgment than for you.'  'Thou that hast
knowledge,' says a powerful old preacher, 'canst not sin so cheap
as another that is ignorant.  Places of much knowledge'--he was
preaching in the university pulpit of Oxford--'and plentiful in the
means of grace are dear places for a man to sin in.  To be drunken
or unclean after a powerful sermon, and after the Holy Ghost has
enlightened thee, is more than to have so sinned twenty times
before.  Thou mightest have sinned ten times more and been damned
less.  For does not Jesus Christ the Judge say to thee, This is thy
condemnation, that so much light has come to thee?'  And, taking
the then way of execution as a sufficiently awful illustration, the
old Oxford Puritan goes on to say that to sin against light is the
highest step of the ladder before turning off.  And, again, that if
there are worms in hell that die not, it is surely gospel light
that breeds them.



EXPERIENCE



'My heart had great experience.'--The Preacher.
'I will give them pastors after Mine own heart.'

Experience, the excellent shepherd of the Delectable Mountains, had
a brother in the army, and he was an equally excellent soldier.
The two brothers--they were twin-brothers--had been brought up
together till they were grown-up men in the same town of Mansoul.
All the Experience family, indeed, had from time immemorial hailed
from that populous and important town, and their family tree ran
away back beyond the oldest extant history.  The two brothers,
while in all other things as like as two twin-brothers could be, at
the same time very early in life began to exhibit very different
talents and tastes and dispositions; till, when we meet with them
in their full manhood, the one is a soldier in the army and the
other a shepherd on the Delectable Mountains.  The soldier-brother
is thus described in one of the military histories of his day:  'A
man of conduct and of valour, and a person prudent in matters.  A
comely person, moreover, well-spoken in negotiations, and very
successful in undertakings.  His colours were the white colours of
Mansoul and his scutcheon was the dead lion and the dead bear.'

The shepherd-brother, on the other hand, is thus pictured out to us
by one who has seen him.  A traveller who has visited the
Delectable Mountains, and has met and talked with the shepherds,
thus describes Experience in his excellent itinerary:  'Knowledge,'
he says, 'I found to be the sage of the company, spare in build,
high of forehead, worn in age, and his tranquil gait touched with
abstractedness.  While Experience was more firmly knit in form and
face, with a shrewd kindly eye and a happy readiness in his
bearing, and all his hard-earned wisdom evidently on foot within
him as a capability for work and for control.'  This, then, was the
second of the four shepherds, who fed Immanuel's sheep on the
Delectable Mountains.

But here again to-night, and in the case of Experience, just as
last Sabbath night and in the case of Knowledge, in all this John
Bunyan speaks to children,--only the children here are the children
of the kingdom of heaven.  The veriest child who reads the
Delectable Mountains begins to suspect before he is done that
Knowledge and Experience are not after all two real and true
shepherds going their rounds with their staves and their wallets
and their wheeling dogs.  Yes, though the little fellow cannot put
his suspicions into proper words for you, all the same he has his
suspicions that he is being deceived by you and your Sabbath book;
and, ten to one, from that sceptical day he will not read much more
of John Bunyan till in after-life he takes up John Bunyan never for
a single Sabbath again to lay him down.  Yes, let the truth be told
at once, Experience is simply a minister, and not a real shepherd
at all; a minister of the gospel, a preacher, and a pastor; but,
then, he is a preacher and a pastor of no ordinary kind, but of the
selectest and very best kind.

1.  Now, my brethren, to plunge at once out of the parable and into
the interpretation, I observe, in the first place, that pastors who
are indeed to be pastors after God's own heart have all to pass
into their pastorate through the school of experience.  Preaching
after God's own heart, and pastoral work of the same divine
pattern, cannot be taught in any other school than the school of
experience.  Poets may be born and not made, but not pastors nor
preachers.  Nay, do not all our best poets first learn in their
sufferings what afterwards they teach us in their songs?  At any
rate, that is certainly the case with preachers and pastors.  As my
own old minister once said to me in a conversation on this very
subject, 'Even God Himself cannot inspire an experience.'  No.  For
if He could He would surely have done so in the case of His own
Son, to Whom in the gift of the Holy Ghost He gave all that He
could give and all that His Son could receive.  But an experience
cannot in the very nature of things be either bestowed on the one
hand or received and appropriated on the other.  An experience in
the unalterable nature of the thing itself must be undergone.  The
Holy Ghost Himself after He has been bestowed and received has to
be experimented upon, and taken into this and that need, trial,
cross, and care of life.  He is not sent to spare us our
experiences, but to carry us through them.  And thus it is (to keep
for a moment in sight of the highest illustration we have of this
law of experience), thus it is, I say, that the apostle has it in
his Epistle to the Hebrews that though Christ Himself were a Son,
yet learned He obedience by the things that He suffered.  And being
by experience made perfect He then went on to do such and such
things for us.  Why, for instance, for one thing, why do you think
was our Lord able to speak with such extraordinary point,
impressiveness, and assurance about prayer; about the absolute
necessity and certainty of secret, importunate, persevering prayer
having, sooner or later, in one shape or other, and in the best
possible shape, its answer?  Why but because of His own experience?
Why but because His own closet, hilltop, all-night, and up-before-
the-day prayers had all been at last heard and better heard than He
had been able to ask?  We can quite well read between the lines in
all our Lord's parables and in all the passages of His sermons
about prayer.  The unmistakable traces of otherwise untold
enterprises and successes, agonies and victories of prayer, are to
be seen in every such sermon of His.  And so, in like manner, in
all that He says to His disciples about the sweetness of
submission, resignation, and self-denial, as also about the
nourishment for His soul that He got out of every hard act of
obedience,--and so on.  There is running through all our Lord's
doctrinal and homiletical teaching that note of reality and of
certitude that can only come to any teaching out of the long and
deep and intense experience of the teacher.  And as the Master was,
so are all His ministers.  When I read, for instance, what William
Law says about the heart-searching and heart-cleansing efficacy of
intercessory prayer in the case of him who continues all his life
so to pray, and carries such prayer through all the experiences and
all the relationships of life, I do not need you to tell me where
that great man of God made that great discovery.  I know that he
made it in his own closet, and on his own knees, and in his own
evil heart.  And so, also, when I come nearer home.  Whenever I
hear a single unconventional, immediate, penetrating, overawing
petition or confession in a minister's pulpit prayer or in his
family worship, I do not need to be told out of what prayer-book he
took that.  I know without his telling me that my minister has
been, all unknown to me till now, at that same school of prayer to
which his Master was put in the days of His flesh, and out of which
He brought the experiences that He afterwards put into the Friend
at midnight, and the Importunate widow, as also into the Egg and
the scorpion, the Bread and the stone, the Knocking and the
opening, the Seeking and the finding.


His children thus most dear to Him,
Their heavenly Father trains,
Through all the hard experience led
Of sorrows and of pains.


And if His children, then ten times more the tutors and governors
of His children,--the pastors and the preachers He prepares for His
people.

2.  Again, though I will not put those two collegiate shepherds
against one another, yet, in order to bring out the whole truth on
this matter, I will risk so far as to say that where we cannot have
both Knowledge and Experience, by all means let us have Experience.
Yes, I declare to you that if I were choosing a minister for
myself, and could not have both the book-knowledge and the
experience of the Christian life in one and the same man; and could
not have two ministers, one with all the talents and another with
all the experiences; I would say that, much as I like an able and
learned sermon from an able and learned man, I would rather have
less learning and more experience.  And, then, no wonder that such
pastors and preachers are few.  For how costly must a thoroughly
good minister's experience be to him!  What a quantity and what a
quality of experience is needed to take a raw, light-minded,
ignorant, and self-satisfied youth and transform him into the
pastor, the tried and trusted friend of the tempted, the sorrow-
laden, and the shipwrecked hearts and lives in his congregation!
What years and years of the selectest experiences are needed to
teach the average divinity student to know himself, to track out
and run to earth his own heart, and thus to lay open and read other
men's hearts to their self-deceived owners in the light of his own.
A matter, moreover, that he gets not one word of help toward in all
his college curriculum.  David was able to say in his old age that
he fed the flock of God in Israel according to the integrity of his
heart, and guided them by the skilfulness of his hands.  But what
years and years of shortcoming and failure in private and in public
life lie behind that fine word 'integrity'! as also what stumbles
and what blunders behind that other fine word 'skilfulness'!  But,
then, how a lightest touch of a preacher's own dear-bought
experience skilfully let fall brightens up an obscure scripture!
How it sends a thrill through a prayer!  How it wings an arrow to
the conscience!  How it sheds abroad balm upon the heart!  Let no
minister, then, lose heart when he is sent back to the school of
experience.  He knows in theory that tribulation worketh patience,
and patience experience, but it is not theory, but experience, that
makes a minister after God's own heart.  I sometimes wish that I
may live to see a chair of Experimental Religion set up in all our
colleges.  I fear it is a dream, and that it must have been
pronounced impracticable long ago by our wisest heads.  Still, all
the same, that does not prevent me from again and again indulging
my dream.  I indulge my fond dream again as often as I look back on
my own tremendous mistakes in the management of my own personal and
ministerial life, as well as sometimes see some signs of the same
mistakes in some other ministers.  In my dream for the Church of
the future I see the programme of lectures in the Experimental
Class and the accompanying examinations.  I see the class library,
and I envy the students.  I am present at the weekly book-day, and
at the periodical addresses delivered to the class by those town
and country ministers who have been most skilful in their pastorate
and most successful in the conversion and in the character of their
people.  And, unless I wholly deceive myself, I see, not all the
class--that will never be till the millennium--but here and there
twos and threes, and more men than that, who will throw their whole
hearts into the work of such a class till they come out of the hall
in experimental religion like Sir Proteus in the play:


Their years but young, but their experience old,
Their heads unmellowed, but their judgment ripe.


It is quite true, that, as my old minister shrewdly said to me,
even the Holy Ghost cannot inspire an experience.  No.  But a class
of genuine experimental divinity would surely help to foster and
develop an experience.  And, till the class is established, any
student who has the heart for it may lay in the best of the class
library for a few shillings.  Mr. Thin will tell you that there is
no literature that is such a drug in the market as the best books
of Experimental Divinity.  No wonder, then, that we make such slow
and short way in the skilfulness, success, and acceptance of our
preaching and our pastorate.

3.  But, at the same time, my brethren, all your ministers'
experience of personal religion will be lost upon you unless you
are yourselves attending the same school.  The salvation of the
soul, you must understand, is not offered to ministers only.
Ministers are not the only men who are, to begin with, dead in
trespasses and sins.  The Son of God did not die for ministers
only.  The Holy Ghost is not offered to ministers only.  A clean,
humble, holy heart is not to be the pursuit of ministers only.  It
is not to His ministers only that our Lord says, Take up My yoke
and learn of Me.  The daily cross is not the opportunity of
ministers only.  It is not to ministers only that tribulation
worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope.  It
was to all who had obtained like precious faith with their
ministers that Peter issued this exhortation that they were to give
all diligence to add to their faith virtue, and to virtue
knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance
patience,--and so on.  Now, my brethren, unless all that is on foot
in yourselves, as well as in your ministers, then their progress in
Christian experience will only every new Sabbath-day separate you
and your ministers further and further away from one another.  When
a minister is really making progress himself in the life of
religion that progress must come out, and ought to come out, both
in his preaching and in his prayers.  And, then, two results of all
that will immediately begin to manifest themselves among his
people.  Some of his people will visibly, and still more will
invisibly, make corresponding progress with their minister; while
some others, alas! will fall off in interest, in understanding, and
in sympathy till at last they drop off from his ministry
altogether.  That is an old law in the Church of God:  'like people
like priest,' and 'like priest like people.'  And while there are
various influences at work retarding and perplexing the immediate
operation of that law, at the same time, he who has eyes to see
such things in a congregation and in a community will easily see
Hosea's great law of congregational selection in operation every
day.  Like people gradually gravitate to like preachers.  You will
see, if you have the eyes, congregations gradually dissolving and
gradually being consolidated again under that great law.  You will
see friendships and families even breaking up and flying into
pieces; and, again, new families and new friendships being built up
on that very same law.  If you were to study the session books of
our city congregations in the light of that law, you would get
instruction.  If you just studied who lifted their lines, and why;
and, again, what other people came and left their lines, and why,
you would get instruction.  The shepherds in Israel did not need to
hunt up and herd their flocks like the shepherds in Scotland.  A
shepherd on the mountains of Israel had nothing more to do than
himself pass up into the pasture lands and then begin to sing a
psalm or offer a prayer, when, in an instant, his proper sheep were
all round about him.  The sheep knew their own shepherd's voice,
and they fled from the voice of a stranger.  And so it is with a
true preacher,--a preacher of experience, that is.  His own people
know no voice like his voice.  He does not need to bribe and
flatter and run after his people.  He may have, he usually has, but
few people as people go in our day, and the better the preacher
sometimes the smaller the flock.  It was so in our Master's case.
The multitude followed after the loaves but they fled from the
feeding doctrines, till He first tasted that dejection and that
sense of defeat which so many of His best servants are fed on in
this world.  Still, as our Lord did not tune His pulpit to the
taste of the loungers of Galilee, no more will a minister worth the
name do anything else but press deeper and deeper into the depths
of truth and life, till, as was the case with his Master, his
followers, though few, will be all the more worth having.  The
Delectable Mountains are wide and roomy.  They roll far away both
before and behind.  Immanuel's Land is a large place, and there are
many other shepherds among those hills and valleys besides
Knowledge and Experience and Watchful and Sincere.  And each
several shepherd has, on the whole, his own sheep.  Knowledge has
his; Experience has his; Watchful has his; and Sincere has his; and
all the other here unnamed shepherds have all theirs also.  For,
always, like shepherd like sheep.  Yes.  Hosea must have been
something in Israel somewhat analogous to a session-clerk among
ourselves.  'Like priest like people' is certainly a digest of some
such experience.  Let some inquisitive beginner in Hebrew this
winter search out the prophet upon that matter, consulting Mr.
Hutcheson and Dr. Pusey, and he will let me hear the result.

4.  Now, my brethren, in closing, we must all keep it clearly
before our minds, and that too every day we live, that God orders
and overrules this whole world, and, indeed, keeps it going very
much just that He may by means of it make unceasing experiment upon
His people.  Experiment, you know, results in experience.  There is
no other way by which any man can attain to a religious experience
but by undergoing temptation, trial, tribulation:- experiment.  And
it gives a divine dignity to all things, great and small, good and
bad, when we see them all taken up into God's hand, in order that
by means of them He may make for Himself an experienced people.
Human life on this earth, when viewed under this aspect, is one
vast workshop.  And all the shafts and wheels and pulleys; all the
crushing hammers, and all the whirling knives; all the furnaces and
smelting-pots; all the graving tools and smoothing irons, are all
so many divinely-designed and divinely-worked instruments all
directed in upon this one result,--our being deeply experienced in
the ways of God till we are for ever fashioned into His nature and
likeness.  Our faith in the unseen world and in our unseen God and
Saviour is at one time put to the experiment.  At another time it
is our love to Him; the reality of it, and the strength of it.  At
another time it is our submission and our resignation to His will.
At another time it is our humility, or our meekness, or our
capacity for self-denial, or our will and ability to forgive an
injury, or our perseverance in still unanswered prayer; and so on
the ever-shifting but never-ceasing experiment goes.  I do beseech
you, my brethren, take that true view of life home with you again
this night.  This true view of life, namely, that experience in the
divine life can only come to you through your being much
experimented upon.  Meet all your trials and tribulations and
temptations, then, under this assurance, that all things will work
together for good to you also if you are only rightly exercised by
means of them.  Nothing else but this growing experience and this
settling assurance will be able to support you under the sudden
ills of life; but this will do it.  This, when you begin by
experience to see that all this life, and all the good and all the
ill of this life, are all under this splendid divine law,--that
your tribulations also are indeed working within you a patience,
and your patience an experience, and your experience a hope that
maketh not ashamed.



WATCHFUL



'Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of
Israel.'--The word of the Lord to Ezekiel.

'They watch for your souls.'--The Apostle to the Hebrews.

There were four shepherds who had the care of Immanuel's sheep on
the Delectable Mountains, and their names were Knowledge,
Experience, Watchful, and Sincere.  Now, in that very beautiful
episode of his great allegory, John Bunyan is doing his very utmost
to impress upon all his ministerial readers how much there is that
goes to the making of a good minister, and how much every good
minister has to do.  Each several minister must do all that in him
lies, from the day of his ordination to the day of his death, to be
all to his people that those four shepherds were to Immanuel's
sheep.  He is to labour, in season and out of season, to be a
minister of the ripest possible knowledge, the deepest and widest
possible experience, the most sleepless watchfulness, and the most
absolute and scrupulous sincerity.  Now, enough has perhaps been
said already about a minister's knowledge and his experience;
enough, certainly, and more than enough for some of us to hope half
to carry out; and, therefore, I shall at once go on to take up
Watchful, and to supply, so far as I am able, the plainest possible
interpretation of this part of Bunyan's parable.

1.  Every true minister, then, watches, in the words of the
apostle, for the souls of his people.  An ordinary minister's
everyday work embraces many duties and offers many opportunities,
but through all his duties and through all his opportunities there
runs this high and distinctive duty of watching for the souls of
his people.  A minister may be a great scholar, he may have taken
all sacred learning for his province, he may be a profound and a
scientific theologian, he may be an able church leader, he may be a
universally consulted authority on ecclesiastical law, he may be a
skilful and successful debater in church courts, he may even be a
great pulpit orator, holding thousands entranced by his impassioned
eloquence; but a true successor of the prophets of the Old
Testament and of the apostles of the New Testament he is not,
unless he watches for the souls of men.  All these endowments, and
all these occupations, right and necessary as, in their own places,
they all are,--great talents, great learning, great publicity,
great popularity,--all tend, unless they are taken great care of,
to lead their possessors away from all time for, and from all
sympathy with, the watchfulness of the New Testament minister.
Watching over a flock brings to you none of the exhilaration of
authority and influence, none of the intoxication of publicity and
applause.  Your experiences are the quite opposite of all these
things when you are watching over your flock.  Your work among your
flock is all done in distant and lonely places, on hillsides, among
woods and thickets, and in cloudy and dark days.  You spend your
strength among sick and dying and wandering sheep, among wolves and
weasels, and what not, of that verminous kind.  At the same time,
all good pastors are not so obscure and forgotten as all that.
Some exceptionally able and exceptionally devoted and self-
forgetful men manage to combine both extremes of a minister's
duties and opportunities in themselves.  Our own Sir Henry
Moncreiff was a pattern pastor.  There was no better pastor in
Edinburgh in his day than dear Sir Henry was; and yet, at the same
time, everybody knows what an incomparable ecclesiastical casuist
Sir Henry was.  Mr. Moody, again, is a great preacher, preaching to
tens of thousands of hearers at a time; but, at the same time, Mr.
Moody is one of the most skilful and attentive pastors that ever
took individual souls in hand and kept them over many years in
mind.  But these are completely exceptional men, and what I want to
say to commonplace and limited and everyday men like myself is
this, that watching for the souls of our people, one by one, day in
and day out,--that, above everything else, that, and nothing else,-
-makes any man a pastor of the apostolic type.  An able man may
know all about the history, the habitat, the various species, the
breeds, the diseases, and the prices of sheep, and yet be nothing
at all of a true shepherd.  And so may a minister.

2.  Pastoral visitation, combined with personal dealing, is by far
the best way of watching for souls.  I well remember when I first
began my ministry in this congregation, how much I was impressed
with what one of the ablest and best of our then ministers was
reported to have testified on his deathbed.  Calling back to his
bedside a young minister who had come to see him, the dying man
said:  'Prepare for the pulpit; above everything else you do,
prepare for the pulpit.  Let me again repeat it, should it at any
time stand with you between visiting a death-bed and preparing for
the pulpit, prepare for the pulpit.'  I was immensely impressed
with that dying injunction when it was repeated to me, but I have
lived,--I do not say to put my preparation for the pulpit, such as
it is, second to my more pastoral work in my week's thoughts, but--
to put my visiting in the very front rank and beside my pulpit.
'We never were accustomed to much visiting,' said my elders to me
in their solicitude for their young minister when he was first left
alone with this whole charge; 'only appear in your own pulpit twice
on Sabbath:  keep as much at home as possible:  we were never used
to much visiting, and we do not look for it.'  Well, that was most
kindly intended; but it was much more kind than wise.  For I have
lived to learn that no congregation will continue to prosper, or,
if other more consolidated and less exacting congregations, at any
rate not this congregation, without constant pastoral attention.
And remember, I do not complain of that.  Far, far from that.  For
I am as sure as I am of anything connected with a minister's life,
that a minister's own soul will prosper largely in the measure that
the souls of his people prosper through his pastoral work.  No
preaching, even if it were as good preaching as the apostle's
itself, can be left to make up for the neglect of pastoral
visitation and personal intercourse.  'I taught you from house to
house,' says Paul himself, when he was resigning the charge of the
church of Ephesus into the hands of the elders of Ephesus.  What
would we ministers not give for a descriptive report of an
afternoon's house-to-house visitation by the Apostle Paul!  Now in
a workshop, now at a sickbed, now with a Greek, now with a Jew,
and, in every case, not discussing politics and cursing the
weather, not living his holidays over again and hearing of all the
approaching marriages, but testifying to all men in his own
incomparably winning and commanding way repentance toward God and
faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ.  We city ministers call out and
complain that we have no time to visit our people in their own
houses; but that is all subterfuge.  If the whole truth were told
about the busiest of us, it is not so much want of time as want of
intention; it is want of set and indomitable purpose to do it; it
is want of method and of regularity such as all business men must
have; and it is want, above all, of laying out every hour of every
day under the Great Taskmaster's eye.  Many country ministers
again,--we, miserable men that we are, are never happy or well
placed,--complain continually that their people are so few, and so
scattered, and so ignorant, and so uninteresting, and so
unresponsive, that it is not worth their toil to go up and down in
remote places seeking after them.  It takes a whole day among bad
roads and wet bogs to visit a shepherd's wife and children, and two
or three bothies and pauper's hovels on the way home.  'On the
morrow,' so runs many an entry in Thomas Boston's Memoirs, 'I
visited the sick, and spent the afternoon in visiting others, and
found gross ignorance prevailing.  Nothing but stupidity prevailed;
till I saw that I had enough to do among my handful.  I had another
diet of catechising on Wednesday afternoon, and the discovery I
made of the ignorance of God and of themselves made me the more
satisfied with the smallness of my charge . . . Twice a year I
catechised the parish, and once a year I visited their families.
My method of visitation was this.  I made a particular application
of my doctrine in the pulpit to the family, exhorted them all to
lay all these things to heart, exhorted them also to secret prayer,
supposing they kept family worship, urged their relative duties
upon them,' etc. etc.  And then at his leaving Ettrick, he writes:
'Thus I parted with a people whose hearts were knit to me and mine
to them.  The last three or four years had been much blessed, and
had been made very comfortable to me, not in respect of my own
handful only, but others of the countryside also.'  Jonathan
Edwards called Thomas Boston 'that truly great divine.'  I am not
such a judge of divinity as Jonathan Edwards was, but I always call
Boston to myself that truly great pastor.  But my lazy and
deceitful heart says to me:  No praise to Boston, for he lived and
did his work in the quiet Forest of Ettrick.  True, so he did.
Well, then, look at the populous and busy town of Kidderminster.
And let me keep continually before my abashed conscience that hard-
working corpse Richard Baxter.  Absolutely on the same page on
which that dying man enters diseases and medicines enough to fill a
doctor's diary after a whole day in an incurable hospital, that
noble soul goes on to say:  'I preached before the wars twice each
Lord's Day, but after the wars but once, and once every Thursday,
besides occasional sermons.  Every Thursday evening my neighbours
that were most desirous, and had opportunity, met at my house.  Two
days every week my assistant and I myself took fourteen families
between us for private catechising and conference; he going through
the parish, and the town coming to me.  I first heard them recite
the words of the Catechism, and then examined them about the sense,
and lastly urged them, with all possible engaging reason and
vehemency, to answerable affection and practice.  If any of them
were stalled through ignorance or bashfulness, I forbore to press
them, but made them hearers, and turned all into instruction and
exhortation.  I spent about an hour with a family, and admitted no
others to be present, lest bashfulness should make it burdensome,
or any should talk of the weakness of others.'  And then he tells
how his people's necessity made him practise physic among them,
till he would have twenty at his door at once.  'All these my
employments were but my recreations, and, as it were, the work of
my spare hours.  For my writings were my chiefest daily labour.
And blessed be the God of mercies that brought me from the grave
and gave me, after wars and sickness, fourteen years' liberty in
such sweet employment!'  Let all ministers who would sit at home
over a pipe and a newspaper with a quiet conscience keep Boston's
Memoirs and Baxter's Reliquiae at arm's-length.

3.  Our young communicants' classes, and still more, those private
interviews that precede and finish up our young communicants'
classes, are by far our best opportunities as pastors.  I remember
Dr. Moody Stuart telling me long ago that he had found his young
communicants' classes to be the most fruitful opportunities of all
his ministry; as, also, next to them, times of baptism in families.
And every minister who tries to be a minister at all after Dr.
Moody Stuart's pattern, will tell you something of the same thing.
They get at the opening history of their young people's hearts
before their first communion.  They make shorthand entries and
secret memoranda at such a season like this:  'A. a rebuke to me.
He had for long been astonished at me that I did not speak to him
about his soul.  B. traced his conversion to the singing of 'The
sands of time are sinking' in this church last summer.  C. was
spoken to by a room-mate.  D. was to be married, and she died.  Of
E. I have great hope.  F., were she anywhere but at home, I would
have great hopes of her,'--and so on.  But, then, when a minister
takes boldness to turn over the pages of his young communicants'
roll for half a lifetime--ah me, ah me!  What was I doing to let
that so promising communicant go so far astray, and I never to go
after him?  And that other.  And that other.  And that other.  Till
we can read no more.  O God of mercy, when Thou inquirest after
blood, let me be hidden in the cleft of that Rock so deeply cleft
for unwatchful ministers!

4.  And then, as Dr. Joseph Parker says, who says everything so
plainly and so powerfully:  'There is pastoral preaching as well as
pastoral visitation.  There is pastoral preaching; rich revelation
of divine truth; high, elevating treatment of the Christian
mysteries; and he is the pastor to me who does not come to my house
to drink and smoke and gossip and show his littleness, but who, out
of a rich experience, meets me with God's word at every turn of my
life, and speaks the something to me that I just at that moment
want.'  Let us not have less pastoral visitation in the time to
come, but let us have more and more of such pastoral preaching.

5.  But, my brethren, it is time for you, as John said to the elect
lady and her children, to look to yourselves.  The salvation of
your soul is precious, and its salvation is such a task, such a
battle, such a danger, and such a risk, that it will take all that
your most watchful minister can do, and all that you can do
yourself, and all that God can do for you, and yet your soul will
scarcely be saved after all.  You do not know what salvation is nor
what it costs.  You will not be saved in your sleep.  You will not
waken up at the last day and find yourself saved by the grace of
God and you not know it.  You will know it to your bitter cost
before your soul is saved from sin and death.  You and your
minister too.  And therefore it is that He Who is to judge your
soul at last says to you, as much as He says it to any of His
ministers, Watch!  What I say unto one I say unto all, Watch.
Watch and pray, lest you enter into temptation.  Look to yourself,
then, sinner.  In Christ's name, look to yourself and watch
yourself.  You have no enemy to fear but yourself.  No one can hurt
a hair of your head but yourself.  Have you found that out?  Have
you found yourself out?  Do you ever look in the direction of your
own heart?  Have you begun to watch what goes on in your own heart?
What is it to you what goes on in the world around you compared
with what goes on in the world within you?  Look, then, to
yourself.  Watch, above all watching, yourself.  Watch what it is
that moves you to do this or that.  Stop sometimes and ask yourself
why you do such and such a thing.  Did you ever hear of such a
thing as a motive in a human heart?  And did your minister,
watching for your soul, ever tell you that your soul will be lost
or saved, condemned or justified at the last day according to your
motives?  You never knew that!  You were never told that by your
minister!  Miserable pair!  What does he take up his Sabbaths with?
And what leads you to waste your Sabbaths and your soul on such a
stupid minister?  But, shepherd or no shepherd, minister or no
minister, look to yourself.  Look to yourself when you lie down and
when you rise up; when you go out and when you come in; when you
are in the society of men and when you are alone with your own
heart.  Look to yourself when men praise you, and look to yourself
when men blame you.  Look to yourself when you sit down to eat and
drink, and still more when you sit and speak about your absent
brother.  Look to yourself when you meet your enemy or your rival
in the street, when you pass his house, or hear or read his name.
Yes, you may well say so.  At that rate a man's life would be all
watching.  So it would.  And so it must.  And more than that, so it
is with some men not far from you who never told you how much you
have made them watch.  Did you never know all that till now?  Were
you never told that every Christian man, I do not mean every
communicant, but every truly and sincerely and genuinely Christian
man watches himself in that way?  For as the one essential and
distinguishing mark of a New Testament minister is not that he is
an able man, or a studious man, or an eloquent man, but that he is
a pastor and watches for souls, so it is the chiefest and the best
mark, and to himself the only safe and infallible mark, that any
man is a sincere and true Christian man, that he watches himself
always and in all things looks first and last to himself.



SINCERE



'In all things showing sincerity.'--Paul to Titus.

Charles Bennett has a delightful drawing of Sincere in Charles
Kingsley's beautiful edition of The Pilgrim's Progress.  You feel
that you could look all day into those clear eyes.  Your eyes would
begin to quail before you had looked long into the fourth
shepherd's deep eyes; but those eyes of his have no cause to quail
under yours.  This man has nothing to hide from you.  He never had.
He loves you, and his love to you is wholly without dissimulation.
He absolutely and unreservedly means and intends by you and yours
all that he has ever said to you and yours, and much more than he
has ever been able to say.  The owner of those deep blue eyes is as
true to you when he is among your enemies as he is true to the
truth itself when he is among your friends.  Mark also the
unobtrusive strength of his mouth, all suffused over as it is with
a most winning and reassuring sweetness.  The fourth shepherd of
the Delectable Mountains is one of the very best of Bennett's
excellent portraits.  But Mr. Kerr Bain's pen-and-ink portrait of
Sincere in his People of the Pilgrimage is even better than
Bennett's excellent drawing.  'Sincere is softer in outline and
feature than Watchful.  His eye is full-open and lucid, with a face
of mingled expressiveness and strength--a lovable, lowly, pure-
spirited man--candid, considerate, willing, cheerful--not speaking
many words, and never any but true words.'  Happy sheep that have
such a shepherd!  Happy people! if only any people in the Church of
Christ could have such a pastor.

It is surely too late, too late or too early, to begin to put tests
to a minister's sincerity after he has been licensed and called and
is now standing in the presence of his presbytery and surrounded
with his congregation.  It is a tremendous enough question to put
to any man at any time:  'Are not zeal for the honour of God, love
to Jesus Christ, and desire of saving souls your great motives and
chief inducement to enter into the function of the holy ministry?'
A man who does not understand what it is you are saying to him will
just make the same bow to these awful words that he makes to all
your other conventional questions.  But the older he grows in his
ministry, and the more he comes to discover the incurable plague of
his own heart, and with that the whole meaning and full weight of
your overwhelming words, the more will he shrink back from having
such questions addressed to him.  Fools will rush in where Moses
and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Peter and Paul feared to set their
foot.  Paul was to be satisfied if only he was let do the work of a
minister all his days and then was not at the end made a castaway.
And yet, writing to the same church, Paul says that his sincerity
among them had been such that he could hold up his ministerial life
like spotless linen between the eye of his conscience and the sun.
But all that was written and is to be read and understood as Paul's
ideal that he had honestly laboured after, rather than as an actual
attainment he had arrived at.  Great as Paul's attainments were in
humility, in purity of intention, and in simplicity and sincerity
of heart, yet the mind of Christ was not so given even to His most
gifted apostle, that he could seriously say that he had attained to
such utter ingenuity, simplicity, disengagement from himself, and
surrender to Christ, as to be able to face the sun with a spotless
ministry.  All he ever says at his boldest and best on that great
matter is to be read in the light of his universal law of personal
and apostolic imperfection--Not that I have attained, either am
already perfect; but I follow after.  And blessed be God that this
is all that He looks for in any of His ministers, that they follow
all their days after a more and more godly sincerity.  It was the
apostle's love of absolute sincerity,--and, especially, it was his
bitter hatred of all the remaining dregs of insincerity that he
from time to time detected in his own heart,--it was this that gave
him his good conscience before a God of pity and compassion, truth
and grace.  And with something of the same love of perfect
sincerity, accompanied with something of the same hatred of
insincerity and of ourselves on account of it, we, too, toward this
same God of pity and compassion, will hold up a conscience that
would fain be a good conscience.  And till it is a good conscience
we shall hold up with it a broken heart.  And that genuine love of
all sincerity, and that equally genuine hatred of all remaining
insincerity, will make all our ministerial work, as it made all
Paul's apostolic work, not only acceptable, but will also make its
very defects and defeats both acceptable and fruitful in the
estimation and result of God.  It so happens that I am reading for
my own private purposes at this moment an old book of 1641,
Drexilius On a Right Intention, and I cannot do better at this
point than share with you the page I am just reading.  'Not to be
too much troubled or daunted at any cross event,' he says, 'is the
happy state of his mind who has entered on any enterprise with a
pure and pious intention.  That great apostle James gained no more
than eight persons in all Spain when he was called to lay down his
head under Herod's sword.  And was not God ready to give the same
reward to James as to those who converted kings and whole kingdoms?
Surely He was.  For God does not give His ministers a charge as to
what they shall effect, but only as to what they shall intend to
effect.  Wherefore, when his art faileth a servant of God, when
nothing goes forward, when everything turneth to his ruin, even
when his hope is utterly void, he is scarce one whit troubled; for
this, saith he to himself, is not in my power, but in God's power
alone.  I have done what I could.  I have done what was fit for me
to do.  Fair and foul is all of God's disposing.'

And, then, this simplicity and purity of intention gives a minister
that fine combination of candour and considerateness which we saw
to exist together so harmoniously in the character of Sincere.
Such a minister is not tongue-tied with sinister and selfish
intentions.  His sincerity toward God gives him a masterful
position among his people.  His words of rebuke and warning go
straight to his people's consciences because they come straight out
of his own conscience.  His words are their own witness that he is
neither fearing his people nor fawning upon his people in speaking
to them.  And, then, such candour prepares the way for the utmost
considerateness when the proper time comes for considerateness.
Such a minister is patient with the stupid, and even with the
wicked and the injurious, because in all their stupidity and
wickedness and injuriousness they have only injured and
impoverished themselves.  And if God is full of patience and pity
for the ignorant and the evil and the out of the way, then His
sincere-hearted minister is of all men the very man to carry the
divine message of forgiveness and instruction to such sinners.
Yes, Mr. Bain must have seen Sincere closely and in a clear light
when he took down this fine feature of his character, that he is at
once candid and considerate--with a whole face of mingled
expressiveness and strength.

Writing about sincerity and a right intention in young ministers,
old Drexilius says:  'When I turn to clergymen, I would have sighs
and groans to speak for me.  For, alas! I am afraid that there be
found some which come into the ministry, not that they may obtain a
holy office in which to spend their life, but for worse ends.  To
enter the ministry with a naughty intention is to come straight to
destruction.  Let no minister think at any time of a better living,
but only at all times of a holier life.  Wherefore, O ministers and
spiritual men, consider and take heed.  There can be no safe guide
to your office but a right, sincere, pure intention.  Whosoever
cometh to it with any other conduct or companion must either return
to his former state of life, or here he shall certainly perish . .
. What is more commendable in a religious man than to be always in
action and to be exercised one while in teaching the ignorant,
another while in comforting such as are troubled in mind, sometimes
in making sermons, and sometimes in admonishing the sick?  But with
what secret malignity doth a wrong intention insinuate itself into
these very actions that are the most religious!  For ofttimes we
desire nothing else but to be doing.  We desire to become public,
not that we may profit many, but because we have not learned how to
be private.  We seek for divers employments, not that we may avoid
idleness, but that we may come into people's knowledge.  We despise
a small number of hearers, and such as are poor, simple, and
rustical, and let fly our endeavours at more eminent chairs, though
not in apparent pursuit; all which is the plain argument of a
corrupt intention.  O ye that wait upon religion, O ministers of
God, this is to sell most transcendent wares at a very low rate--
nay, this is to cast them, and yourselves too, into the fire.'

There are some outstanding temptations to insincerity in some
ministers that must be pointed out here.  (1) Ministers with a warm
rhetorical temperament are beset continually with the temptation to
pile up false fire on the altar; to dilate, that is, both in their
prayers and in their sermons, upon certain topics in a style that
is full of insincerity.  Ministers who have no real hold of divine
things in themselves will yet fill their pulpit hour with the most
florid and affecting pictures of sacred and even of evangelical
things.  This is what our shrewd and satirical people mean when
they say of us that So-and-so has a great SOUGH of the gospel in
his preaching, but the SOUGH only.  (2) Another kindred temptation
to even the best and truest of ministers is to make pulpit appeals
about the evil of sin and the necessity of a holy life that they
themselves do not feel and do not attempt to live up to.  Butler
has a terrible passage on the heart-hardening effects of making
pictures of virtue and never trying to put those pictures into
practice.  And readers of Newman will remember his powerful
application of this same temptation to literary men in his fine
sermon on Unreal Words.  (3) Another temptation is to affect an
interest in our people and a sympathy with them that we do not in
reality feel.  All human life is full of this temptation to double-
dealing and hypocrisy; but, then, it is large part of a minister's
office to feel with and for his people, and to give the tenderest
and the most sacred expression to that feeling.  And, unless he is
a man of a scrupulously sincere, true, and tender heart, his daily
duties will soon develop him into a solemn hypocrite.  And if he
feels only for his own people, and for them only when they become
and as long as they remain his own people, then his insincerity and
imposture is only the more abominable in the sight of God.  (4)
Archbishop Whately, with that strong English common sense and that
cultivated clear-headedness that almost make him a writer of
genius, points out a view of sincerity that it behoves ministers
especially to cultivate in themselves.  He tells us not only to act
always according to our convictions, but also to see that our
convictions are true and unbiassed convictions.  It is a very
superficial sincerity even when we actually believe what we profess
to believe.  But that is a far deeper and a far nobler sincerity
which watches with a strict and severe jealousy over the formation
of our beliefs and convictions.  Ministers must, first for
themselves and then for their people, live far deeper down than
other men.  They must be at home among the roots, not of actions
only, but much more of convictions.  We may act honestly enough out
of our present convictions and principles, while, all the time, our
convictions and our principles are vitiated at bottom by the
selfish ground they ultimately stand in.  Let ministers, then, to
begin with, live deep down among the roots of their opinions and
their beliefs.  Let them not only flee from being consciously
insincere and hypocritical men; let them keep their eye like the
eye of God continually on that deep ground of the soul where so
many men unknown to themselves deceive themselves.  And, thus
exercised, they shall be able out of a deep and clean heart to rise
far above that trimming and hedging and self-seeking and self-
sheltering in disputed and unpopular questions which is such a
temptation to all men, and is such a shame and scandal in a
minister.

Now, my good friends, we have kept all this time to the fourth
shepherd and to his noble name, but let us look in closing at some
of his sheep,--that is to say, at ourselves.  For is it not said in
the prophet:  Ye my flock, the flock of my pasture, are men, and I
am your God, saith the Lord God.  All, therefore, that has been
said about the sincerity and insincerity of ministers is to be said
equally of their people also in all their special and peculiar
walks of life.  Sincerity is as noble a virtue, and insincerity is
as detestable a vice, in a doctor, or a lawyer, or a schoolmaster,
or a merchant,--almost, if not altogether, as much so as in a
minister.  Your insincerity and hypocrisy in your daily intercourse
with your friends and neighbours is a miserable enough state of
mind, but at the root of all that there lies your radical
insincerity toward God and your own soul.  In his Christian
Perfection William Law introduces his readers to a character called
Julius, who goes regularly to prayers, and there confesses himself
to be a miserable sinner who has no health in him; and yet that
same Julius cannot bear to be informed of any imperfection or
suspected to be wanting in any kind or degree of virtue.  Now, Law
asks, can there be a stronger proof that Julius is wanting in the
sincerity of his devotions?  Is it not as plain as anything can be
that that man's confessions of sin are only words of course, a
certain civility of sacred speech in which his heart has not a
single atom of share?  Julius confesses himself to be in great
weakness, corruption, disorder, and infirmity, and yet he is
mortally angry with you if at any time you remotely and tenderly
hint that he may be just a shade wrong in his opinions, or one
hair's-breadth off what is square and correct in his actions.  Look
to yourself, Julius, and to your insincere heart.  Look to yourself
at all times, but above all other times at the times and in the
places of your devotions.  Ten to one, my hearer of to-night, you
may never have thought of that before.  And what would you think if
you were told that this Sincere shepherd was appointed us for this
evening's discourse, and that you were led up to this house, just
that you might have your attention turned to your many miserable
insincerities of all kinds, but especially to your so Julius-like
devotions?  'And Nathan said unto David, Thou art the man.  And
David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord.'

What, then, my truly miserable fellow-sinner and fellow-worshipper,
what are we to do?  Am I to give up preaching altogether because I
am continually carried on under the impulse of the pulpit far
beyond both my attainments and my intentions?  Am I to cease from
public prayer altogether because when engaged in it I am compelled
to utter words of contrition and confession and supplication that
little agree with the everyday temper and sensibility of my soul?
And am I wholly to eschew pastoral work because my heart is not so
absolutely clean and simple and sincere toward all my own people
and toward other ministers' people as it ought to be?  No!  Never!
Never!  Let me rather keep my heart of such earth and slag in the
hottest place of temptation, and then, such humiliating discoveries
as are there continually being made to me of myself will surely at
last empty me of all self-righteousness and self-sufficiency, and
make me at the end of my ministry, if not till then, the penitent
pastor of a penitent people.  And when thus penitent, then surely,
also somewhat more sincere in my designs and intentions, if not
even then in my attainments and performances.

'O Eternal God, Who hast made all things for man, and man for Thy
glory, sanctify my body and my soul, my thoughts and my intentions,
my words and my actions, that whatsoever I shall think or speak or
do may be by me designed to the glory of Thy name.  O God, turn my
necessities into virtue, and the works of nature into the works of
grace, by making them orderly, regular, temperate, subordinate, and
profitable to ends beyond their own proper efficacy.  And let no
pride or self-seeking, no covetousness or revenge, no impure
mixtures or unhandsome purposes, no little ends and low
imaginations, pollute my spirit or unhallow any of my words or
actions.  But let my body be the servant of my spirit, and both
soul and body servants of my Lord, that, doing all things for Thy
glory here, I may be made a partaker of Thy glory hereafter;
through Jesus Christ, my Lord.  Amen.'



Footnotes:

{1}  Delivered on the Sabbath before Communion.

{2}  Delivered June 26th, 1892, on the eve of a general election.