13. Eyes spangling
13
Eyes spangling
Do you know, my brethren, and from your own experience, what a truly Puritan sermon is? Do you know what it is that differentiates and exalts a genuine Puritan sermon above all other sermons? And can you trace in yourselves, and can you trace up to Puritan preaching, such a succession of spiritual blessings as John Bunyan traces here, and indeed traces all through his Grace Abounding? For the very title of this spiritual masterpiece of his may very well be taken as the title of every genuine Puritan sermon; that is to say: first, sin abounding, and then grace much more abounding. Besides, that is the supreme theme of the true Puritan pulpit, and of no other pulpit that I have ever sat under. The sermon that John Bunyan heard from the lips of a Puritan preacher when his comforting time was come was, as we say at college, an eminently Christological sermon. That is to say, it was a mystical, an evangelical, and an intensely experimental sermon.… It was the kind of sermon that was wont to be so much relished by our fathers and our mothers when, like John Bunyan, they were in deep spiritual distress and when their comforting time was again come to them.
Now after all that, was it any wonder that the very Name of Christ, as often as he read it in the Word of God, was made to spangle in John Bunyan’s eyes. “Spangle” is his own expressive word in this matter. And no wonder. For whose eyes would not spangle at that glorious Name? Whose eyes that were once opened truly to see him to whom that glorious Name belongs? I have often seen your own eyes spangling in this house and in your own house at home as I read that Name to you in the Gospels and in the Epistles. I saw some of your eyes spangling like the sun itself this forenoon and this afternoon as often as the Name of Christ fell again upon your open and hungry ears as you sat at his Table. How could it be otherwise? As John Bunyan says, you would be so many Philistines if your eyes did not spangle at that Name which is above every name. Far better be born and die without having eyes at all than have to give an account of two eyes that had never once spangled at the Name of Christ. You will need nothing more to secure you a great welcome and an abundant entrance on that Day than just the light and the love that will spangle in your eyes at your first sight of Christ.
*Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series (Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, [1908]), 244-45, 259-60.