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Bunyan Characters: First Series

by Alexander Whyte D.D.

September, 1999 [Etext #1885]

Project Gutenberg Etext Bunyan Characters: First Series by Whyte

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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 tha