Part 1
BUNYAN CHARACTERS:
FIRST SERIES
BEING LECTURES
DELIVERED IN
ST. GEORGE'S FREE CHURCH
EDINBURGH
ALEXANDER WHYTE, D.D.
CONTENTS
Page
Introductory
Evangelist
Obstinate
Pliable
Help
Mr. Worldly Wiseman
Goodwill, the Gatekeeper
The Interpreter
Passion
Patience
Simple, Sloth and Presumption
The Three Shining Ones at the Cross
Formalist and Hypocrisy
Timorous and Mistrust
Prudence
Charity
Shame
Talkative
Judge Hate-Good
Faithful in Vanity-Fair
By-Ends
Giant Despair
Knowledge
Experience
Watchful
Sincere
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 finelyconceived 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 notebook 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