Part 2
the day was darker, or what, we are not told, but both Christian and
Pliable were in a moment out of sight in the slough. They both
wallowed, says their plain-spoken historian, in the slough, only the
one of the two who had the burden on his back at every wallow went
deeper into the mire; when his neighbour, who had no such burden,
instead of coming to his assistance, got out of the slough at the same
side as he had entered it, and made with all his might for his own
house. But the man called Christian made what way he could, and still
tumbled on to the side of the slough that was farthest from his own
house, till a man called Help gave him his hand and set him upon
sound ground. Christiana, again, and Mercy and the boys found the
slough in a far worse condition than it had ever been found before.
And the reason was not that the country that drained into the slough
was worse, but that those who had the mending of the slough and the
keeping in repair of the steps had so bungled their work that they had marred the way instead of mending it. At the same time, by the tact
and good sense of Mercy, the whole party got over, Mercy remarking
to the mother of the boys, that if she had as good ground to hope for a
loving reception at the gate as Christiana had, no slough of despond
would discourage her, she said. To which the older woman made the
characteristic reply: 'You know your sore and I know mine, and we
shall both have enough evil to face before we come to our journey's
end.'
Now, I do not for a moment suppose that there is any one here
who can need to be told what the Slough of Despond in reality is.
Indeed, its very name sufficiently declares it. But if any one should still
be at a loss to understand this terrible experience of all the pilgrims,
the explanation offered by the good man who gave Christian his hand
may here be repeated. 'This miry slough,' he said, 'is such a place as
cannot be mended. This slough is the descent whither the scum and
filth that attends conviction of sin doth continually run, and therefore
it is called by the name of Despond, for still as the sinner is awakened
about his lost condition there ariseth in his soul many fears and
doubts and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get
together, and settle in this place, and this is the reason of the badness
of the ground.' That is the parable, with its interpretation; but there is
a passage in Grace Abounding which is no parable, and which may
even better than this so pictorial slough describe some men's
condition here. 'My original and inward pollution,' says Bunyan
himself in his autobiography, 'that, that was my plague and my
affliction; that, I say, at a dreadful rate was always putting itself forth
within me; that I had the guilt of to amazement; by reason of that I
was more loathsome in my own eyes than a toad; and I thought I was
so in God's eyes also. Sin and corruption would bubble up out of my
heart as naturally as water bubbles up out of a fountain. I thought now
that every one had a better heart than I had. I could have changed
heart with anybody. I thought none but the devil himself could
equalise me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. I fell,
therefore, at the sight of my own vileness, deeply into despair, for I
concluded that this condition in which I was in could not stand with a
life of grace. Sure, thought I, I am forsaken of God; sure I am given up
to the devil, and to a reprobate mind.'
'Let no man, then, count me a fable maker,
Nor made my name and credit a partaker
Of their derision: what is here in view,
Of mine own knowledge I dare say is true.'
Sometimes, as with Christian at the slough, a man's way in life is
all slashed up into sudden ditches and pitfalls out of the sins of his
youth. His sins, by God's grace, find him out, and under their arrest
and overthrow he begins to seek his way to a better life and a better
world; and then both the burden and the slough have their
explanation and fulfilment in his own life every day. But it is even
more dreadful than a slough in a man's way to have a slough in his
mind, as both Bunyan himself and Mr. Fearing, his exquisite creation,
had. After the awful-enough slough, filled with the guilt and fear of
actual sin, had been bridged and crossed and left behind, a still worse
slough of inward corruption and pollution rose up in John Bunyan's
soul and threatened to engulf him altogether. So terrible to Bunyan
was this experience, that he has not thought it possible to make a
parable of it, and so put it into the Pilgrim; he has kept it rather for the
plain, direct, unpictured, personal testimony of the Grace Abounding. I
do not know another passage anywhere to compare with the eighty-
fourth paragraph of Grace Abounding for hope and encouragement to
a great inward sinner under a great inward sanctification. I commend
that powerful passage to the appropriation of any man here who may
have stuck fast in the Slough of Despond to-day, and who could not on
that account come to the Lord's Table. Let him still struggle out at the
side of the slough farthest from his own house, and to-night, who can
tell, Help may come and give that man his hand. When the Slough of
Despond is drained, and its bottom laid bare, what a find of all kinds of
precious treasures shall be laid bare! Will you be able to lay claim to
any of it when the long-lost treasure-trove is distributed by command
of the King to its rightful owners?
'What are you doing there?' the man whose name was Help
demanded of Christian, as he still wallowed and plunged to the hither
side of the slough, 'and why did you not look for the steps?' And so
saying he set Christian's feet upon sound ground again, and showed him the nearest way to the gate. Help is one of the King's officers who
are planted all along the way to the Celestial City, in order to assist and
counsel all pilgrims. Evangelist was one of those officers; this Help is
another; Goodwill will be another, unless, indeed, he is more than a
mere officer; Interpreter will be another, and Greatheart, and so on.
All these are preachers and pastors and evangelists who correspond
to all those names and all their offices. Only some unhappy preachers
are better at pushing poor pilgrims into the slough, and pushing them
down to the bottom of it, than they are at helping a sinking pilgrim
out; while some other more happy preachers and pastors have their
manses built at the hither side of the slough and do nothing else all
their days but help pilgrims out of their slough and direct them to the
gate. And then there are multitudes of so-called ministers who eat the
King's bread who can neither push a proud sinner into the slough nor
help a prostrate sinner out of it; no, nor point him the way when he
has himself wallowed out. And then, there are men called ministers,
too, who also eat the King's bread, whose voice you never hear in
connection with such matters, unless it be to revile both the pilgrims
and their helpers, and all who run with fear and trembling up the
heavenly road. But our pilgrim was happy enough to meet with a
minister to whom he could look back all his remaining pilgrimage and
say: 'He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay,
and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. And he hath
put a new song in my mouth, even praise to our God.'
Now, as might have been expected, there is a great deal said about
all kinds of help in the Bible. After the help of God, of which the Bible
and especially the more experimental Psalms are full, this fine name is
then applied to many Scriptural persons, and on many Scriptural
occasions. The first woman whom God Almighty made bore from her
Maker to her husband this noble name. Her Father, so to speak, gave
her away under this noble name. And of all the sweet and noble names
that a woman bears, there is none so rich, so sweet, so lasting, and so
fruitful as just her first Divine name of a helpmeet. And how favoured
of God is that man to be accounted whose life still continues to draw
meet help out of his wife's fulness of help, till all her and his days
together he is able to say, I have of God a helpmeet indeed! For in how
many sloughs do many men lie till this daughter of Help gives them her hand, and out of how many more sloughs are they all their days by
her delivered and kept! Sweet, maidenly, and most sensible Mercy was
a great help to widow Christiana at the slough, and to her and her
sons all the way up to the river - a very present help in many a need to
her future mother-in-law and her pilgrim sons. Let every young man
seek his future wife of God, and let him seek her of her Divine Father
under that fine, homely, divine name. For God, who knoweth what we
have need of before we ask Him, likes nothing better than to make a
helpmeet for those who so ask Him, and still to bring the woman to
the man under that so spouse-like name.
'What next I bring shall please thee, be assured,
Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self,
Thy wish exactly to thy heart's desire.'
And then when the apostle is making an enumeration of the various
offices and agencies in the New Testament church of his day, after
apostles and teachers and gifts of healing, he says, 'helps,' - assistants,
that is, succourers, especially of the sick and the aged and the poor.
And we do not read that either election or ordination was needed to
make any given member of the apostolic church a helper. But we do
read of helpers being found by the apostle among all classes and
conditions of that rich and living church; both sexes, all ages, and all
descriptions of church members bore this fine apostolic name. 'Salute
Urbane, our helper in Christ . . . Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my helpers
in Christ.' And both Paul and John and all the apostles were forward to
confess in their epistles how much they owed of their apostolic
success, as well as of their personal comfort and joy, to the helpers,
both men and women, their Lord had blessed them with.
Now, the most part of us here to-night have been at the Lord's Table
today. We kept our feet firm on the steps as we skirted or crossed the
slough that self-examination always fills and defiles for us before
every new communion. And before our Lord let us rise from His Table
this morning. He again said to us: 'Ye call Me Master and Lord, and ye
say well, for so I am. If I then have given you My hand, and have helped
you, ye ought also to help one another.' Who, then, any more will
withhold such help as it is in his power to give to a sinking brother?
And you do not need to go far afield seeking the slough of desponding,
despairing, drowning men. This whole world is full of such sloughs.
There is scarce sound ground enough in this world on which to build a
slough-watcher's tower. And after it is built, the very tower itself is
soon stained and blinded with the scudding slime. Where are your
eyes, and full of what? Do you not see sloughs full of sinking men at
your very door; ay, and inside of your best built and best kept house?
Your very next neighbour; nay, your own flesh and blood, if they have
nothing else of Greatheart's most troublesome pilgrim about them,
have at least this, that they carry about a slough with them in their
own mind and in their own heart. Have you only henceforth a heart
and a hand to help, and see if hundreds of sinking hearts do not cry
out your name, and hundreds of slimy hands grasp at your stretched-
out arm. Sloughs of all kinds of vice, open and secret; sloughs of
poverty, sloughs of youthful ignorance, temptation, and transgression;
sloughs of inward gloom, family disquiet and dispute; lonely grief; all
manner of sloughs, deep and miry, where no man would suspect them.
And how good, how like Christ Himself, and how well-pleasing to Him
to lay down steps for such sliding feet, and to lift out another and
another human soul upon sound and solid ground. 'Know ye what I
have done to you? For I have given you an example, that ye should do
as I have done to you. If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do
them.'
MR. WORLDLY-WISEMAN
'Wise in this world.' - Paul.
Mr. Worldly-Wiseman has a long history behind him on which we
cannot now enter at any length. As a child, the little worldling, it was
observed, took much after his secular father, but much more after his
scheming mother. He was already a self-seeking, self-satisfied youth;
and when he became a man and began business for himself, no man's
business flourished like his. 'Nothing of news,' says his biographer in
another place, 'nothing of doctrine, nothing of alteration or talk of
alteration could at any time be set on foot in the town but be sure Mr.
Worldly-Wiseman would be at the head or tail of it. But, to be sure, he
would always decline those he deemed to be the weakest, and stood
always with those, in his way of thinking, that he supposed were the
strongest side.' He was a man, it was often remarked, of but one book
also. Sunday and Saturday he was to be found deep in The Architect of
Fortune; or, Advancement in Life, a book written by its author so as to
'come home to all men's business and bosoms.' He drove over
scrupulously once a Sunday to the State church, of which he was one
of the most determined pillars. He had set his mind on being Lord
Mayor of the town before long, and he was determined that his eldest
son should be called Sir Worldly-Wiseman after him, and he chose his
church accordingly. Another of his biographers in this connection
wrote of him thus: 'Our Lord Mayor parted his religion betwixt his
conscience and his purse, and he went to church not to serve God, but
to please the king. The face of the law made him wear the mask of the
Gospel, which he used not as a means to save his soul, but his charges.'
Such, in a short word, was this 'sottish man' who crossed over the field
to meet with our pilgrim when he was walking solitary by himself
after his escape from the slough.
'How now, good fellow? Whither away after this burdened
manner?' What a contrast those two men were to one another in the
midst of that plain that day! Our pilgrim was full of the most laborious
going; sighs and groans rose out of his heart at every step; and then
his burden on his back, and his filthy, slimy rags all made him a picture
such that it was to any man's credit and praise that he should stop to
speak to him. And then, when our pilgrim looked up, he saw a
gentleman standing beside him to whom he was ashamed to speak.
For the gentleman had no burden on his back, and he did not go over the plain laboriously. There was not a spot or a speck, a rent or a
wrinkle on all his fine raiment. He could not have been better
appointed if he had just stepped out of the gate at the head of the way;
they can wear no cleaner garments than his in the Celestial City itself.
'How now, good fellow? Whither away after this burdened manner?' 'A
burdened manner, indeed, as ever I think poor creature had. And
whereas you ask me whither away, I tell you, sir, I am going to yonder
wicket gate before me; for there, as I am informed, I shall be put into a
way to be rid of my heavy burden.' 'Hast thou a wife and children?'
Yes; he is ashamed to say that he has. But he confesses that he cannot
to-day take the pleasure in them that he used to do. Since his sin so
came upon him, he is sometimes as if he had neither wife nor child
nor a house over his head. John Bunyan was of Samuel Rutherford's
terrible experience, - that our sins and our sinfulness poison all our
best enjoyments. We do not hear much of Rutherford's wife and
children, and that, no doubt, for the sufficient reason that he gives us
in his so open-minded letter. But Bunyan laments over his blind child
with a lament worthy to stand beside the lament of David over
Absalom, and again over Saul and Jonathan at Mount Gilboa. At the
same time, John Bunyan often felt sore and sad at heart that he could
not love and give all his heart to his wife and children as they
deserved to be loved and to have all his heart. He often felt guilty as he
looked on them and knew in himself that they did not have in him
such a father as, God knew, he wished he was, or ever in this world
could hope to be. 'Yes,' he said, 'but I cannot take the pleasure in them
that I would. I am sometimes as if I had none. My sin sometimes drives
me like a man bereft of his reason and clean demented.' 'Who bid thee
go this way to be rid of thy burden? I beshrew him for his counsel.
There is not a more troublesome and dangerous way in the world
than this is to which he hath directed thee. And besides, though I used
to have some of the same burden when I was young, not since I settled
in that town,' pointing to the town of Carnal-Policy over the plain,
'have I been at any time troubled in that way.' And then he went on to
describe and denounce the way to the Celestial City, and he did it like a
man who had been all over it, and had come back again. His alarming
description of the upward way reads to us like a page out of Job, or
Jeremiah, or David, or Paul. 'Hear me,' he says, 'for I am older than thou. Thou art like to meet with in the way which thou goest
wearisomeness, painfulness, hunger, perils, nakedness, sword, lions,
dragons, darkness, and in a word, death, and what not.' You would
think that you were reading the eighth of the Romans at the thirty-
fifth verse; only Mr. Worldly-Wiseman does not go on to finish the
chapter. He does not go on to add, 'I am persuaded that neither death,
nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall
be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ
our Lord.' No; Worldly-Wiseman never reads the Romans, and he
never hears a sermon on that chapter when he goes to church.
Mr. Worldly-Wiseman became positively eloquent and impressive
and all but convincing as he went so graphically and cumulatively over
all the sorrows that attended on the way to which this pilgrim was
now setting his face. But, staggering as it all was, the man in rags and
slime only smiled a sad and sobbing smile in answer, and said: 'Why,
sir, this burden upon my back is far more terrible to me than all the
things which you have mentioned; nay, methinks I care not what I
meet with in the way, so be I can also meet with deliverance from my
burden.' This is what our Lord calls a pilgrim having the root of the
matter in himself. This poor soul had by this time so much
wearisomeness, painfulness, hunger, perils, nakedness, sword, lions,
dragons, darkness, death, and what not in himself, that all these
threatened things outside of himself were but so many bugbears and
hobgoblins wherewith to terrify children; they were but things to be
laughed at by every man who is in ernest in the way. 'I care not what
else I meet with if only I also meet with deliverance.'
There speaks the true pilgrim. There speaks the man who drew
down the Son of God to the cross for that man's deliverance. There
speaks the man, who, mire, and rags, and burdens and all, will yet be
found in the heaven of heavens where the chief of sinners shall see
their Deliverer face to face, and shall at last and for ever be like Him.
Peter examined Dante in heaven on faith, James examined him on
hope, and John took him through his catechism on love, and the seer
came out of the tent with a laurel crown on his brow. I do not know
who the examiner on sin will be, but, speaking for myself on this
matter, I would rather take my degree in that subject than in all the other subjects set for a sinner's examination on earth or in heaven.
For to know myself, and especially, as the wise man says, to know the
plague of my own heart, is the true and the only key to all other true
knowledge: God and man; the Redeemer and the devil; heaven and
hell; faith, hope, and charity; unbelief, despair, and malignity, and all
things of that kind else, all knowledge will come to that man who
knows himself, and to that man alone, and to that man in the exact
measure in which he does really know himself. Listen again to this
slough-stained, sin-burdened, sighing and sobbing pilgrim, who, in
spite of all these things - nay, in virtue of all these things - is as sure of
heaven and of the far end of heaven as if he were already enthroned
there. 'Wearisomeness,' he protests, 'painfulness, hunger, perils,
nakedness, sword, lions, dragons, darkness, death, and what not - why,
sir, this burden on my back is far more terrible to me than all these
things which you have mentioned; nay, methinks I care not what I
meet with in the way, so be I can also meet with deliverance from my
burden.'
O God! let this same mind be found in me and in all the men and
women for whose souls I shall have to answer at the day of judgment,
and I shall be content and safe before Thee. That strong outburst from
this so forfoughten man for a moment quite overawed Worldly-
Wiseman. He could not reply to an earnestness like this. He did not
understand it, and could not account for it. The only thing he ever was
in such earnestness as that about was his success in business and his
title that he and his wife were scheming for. But still, though silenced
by this unaccountable outburst of our pilgrim, Worldly-Wiseman's
enmity against the upward way, and especially against all the men and
all the books that made pilgrims take to that way, was not silenced.
'How camest thou by thy burden at first?' By reading this Book in my
hand.' Worldly-Wiseman did not fall foul of the Book indeed, but he
fell all the more foul of those who meddled with matters they had not
a head for. 'Leave these high and deep things for the ministers who are
paid to understand and explain them, and attend to matters more
within thy scope.' And then he went on to tell of a far better way to get
rid of the burden that meddlesome men brought on themselves by
reading that book too much - a far better and swifter way than
attempting the wicket-gate. 'Thou wilt never be settled in thy mind till thou art rid of that burden, nor canst thou enjoy the blessings of wife
and child as long as that burden lies so heavy upon thee.' That was so
true that it made the pilgrim look up. A gentleman who can speak in
that true style must know more than he says about such burdens as
this of mine; and, after all, he may be able, who knows, to give me
some good advice in my great straits. 'Pray, sir, open this secret to me,
for I sorely stand in need of good counsel.' Let him here who has no
such burden as this poor pilgrim had cast the first stone at Christian; I
cannot. If one who looked like a gentleman came to me to-night and
told me how I would on the spot get to a peace of conscience never to
be lost again, and how I would get a heart to-night that would never
any more plague and pollute me, I would be mightily tempted to forget
what all my former teachers had told me and try this new Gospel. And
especially if the gentleman said that the remedy was just at hand.
'Pray, sir,' said the breathless and spiritless man, 'wilt thou, then, open
this secret to me?'
The wit and the humour and the satire of the rest of the scene
must be fully enjoyed over the great book itself. The village named
Morality, hard by the hill; that judicious man Legality, who dwells in
the first house you come at after you have turned the hill; Civility, the
pretty young man that Legality hath to his son; the hospitality of the
village; the low rents and the cheap provisions, and all the charities
and amenities of the place, - all together make up such a picture as
you cannot get anywhere out of John Bunyan. And then the pilgrim's
stark folly in entering into Worldly-Wiseman's secret; his horror as
the hill began to thunder and lighten and threaten to fall upon him;
the sudden descent of Evangelist; and then the plain-spoken words
that passed between the preacher and the pilgrim, - don't say again
that the poorest of the Puritans were without letters, or that they had
not their own esoteric writings full of fun and frolic; don't say that
again till you are a pilgrim yourself, and have our John Bunyan for one
of your classics by heart.
We are near an end, but before you depart, stand still a little, as
Evangelist said to Christian, that I may show you the words of God.
And first, watch yourselves well, for you all have a large piece of this
worldly-wise man in yourselves. You all take something of some
ancestor, remote or immediate, who was wise only for this world. Yes, to be sure, for you still decline as they did, and desert as they did,
those you deem to be the weakest, and stand with those that you
suppose to be the strongest side. The Architect of Fortune is perhaps
too strong meat for your stomach; but still, if you ever light upon its
powerful pages, you will surely blush in secret to see yourself turned
so completely inside out. You may not have chosen your church wholly
with an eye to your shop; but you must admit that you see as good and
better men than you are doing that every day. And it is a sure sign to
you that you do not yet know the plague of your own heart, unless you
know yourself to be a man more set upon the position and the praise
that this world gives than you yet are on the position and the praise
that come from God only. Set a watch on your own worldly heart.
Watch and pray, lest you also enter into all Worldly-Wiseman's
temptation. This is one of the words of God to you.
Another word of God is this. The way of the cross, said severe
Evangelist, is odious to every worldly-wise man; while, all the time, it
is the only way there is, and there never will be any other way to
eternal life. The only way to life is the way of the cross. There are two
crosses, indeed, on the way to the Celestial City; there is, first, the
Cross of Christ, once for you, and then there is your cross daily for
Christ, and it takes both crosses to secure and to assure any man that
he is on the right road, and that he will come at last to the right end.
'The Christian's great conquest over the world,' says William Law, 'is
all contained in the mystery of Christ upon the cross. And true
Christianity is nothing else but an entire and absolute conformity to
that spirit which Christ showed in the mysterious sacrifice of Himself
upon the cross. Every man is only so far a Christian as he partakes of
this same spirit of Christ - the same suffering spirit, the same sacrifice
of himself, the same renunciation of the world, the same humility and
meekness, the same patient bearing of injuries, reproaches, and
contempts, the same dying to all the greatness, honours, and
happiness of this world that Christ showed on the cross. We also are
to suffer, to be crucified, to die, to rise with Christ, or else His
crucifixion, His death, and His resurrection will profit us nothing. 'This
is the second word of God unto thee. And the third thing to-night is
this, that though thy sin be very great, though thou hast a past life
round thy neck enough to sink thee for ever out of the sight of God and all good men; a youth of sensuality now long and closely cloaked over
with an after life of worldly prosperity, worldly decency, and worldly
religion, all which only makes thee that whited sepulchre that Christ
has in His eye when He speaks of thee with such a severe and dreadful
countenance; yet if thou confess thyself to be all the whited sepulchre
He sees thee to be, and yet knock at His gate in all thy rags and slime,
He will immediately lay aside that severe countenance and will show
thee all His goodwill. Notwithstanding all that thou hast done, and all
thou still art, He will not deny His own words, or do otherwise than at
once fulfil them all to thee. Ask, then, and it shall be given thee; seek,
and thou shalt find; knock, and it shall be opened unto thee. And with
a great goodwill, He will say to those that stand by Him, Take away the
filthy garments from him. And to thee He will say, Behold, I have
caused all thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with
change of raiment.
GOODWILL, THE GATEKEEPER
'Goodwill.' - Luke 2:14.
'So in process of time Christian got up to the gate. Now there was
written over the gate, Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. He
knocked, therefore, more than once or twice, saying, May I now enter
here? when at last there came a grave person to the gate, named
Goodwill, who asked him who was there?' The gravity of the
gatekeeper was the first thing that struck the pilgrim. And it was the
same thing that so struck some of the men who saw most of our Lord
that they handed down to their children the true tradition that He was
often seen in tears, but that no one had ever seen or heard Him laugh.
The prophecy in the prophet concerning our Lord was fulfilled to the
letter. He was indeed a man of sorrows, and He early and all His life
long had a close acquaintance with grief. Our Lord had come into this
world on a very sad errand. We are so stupefied and besotted with sin,
that we have no conception how sad an errand our Lord had been sent
on, and how sad a task He soon discovered it to be. To be a man
without sin, a man hating sin, and hating nothing else but sin, and yet
to have to spend all His days in a world lying in sin, and in the end to
have all that world of sin laid upon Him till He was Himself made sin, -
how sad a task was that! Great, no doubt, as was the joy that was set
before our Lord, and sure as He was of one day entering on that joy,
yet the daily sight of so much sin in all men around Him, and the cross
and the shame that lay right before Him, made Him, in spite of the
future joy, all the Man of Sorrow Isaiah had said He would be, and
made light-mindedness and laughter impossible to our Lord, - as it is,
indeed, to all men among ourselves who have anything of His mind
about this present world and the sin of this world, they also are men
of sorrow, and of His sorrow. They, too, are acquainted with grief.
Their tears, like His, will never be wiped off in this world. They will
not laugh with all their heart till they laugh where He now laughs.
Then it will be said of them, too, that they began to be merry. 'What
was the matter with you that you did laugh in your sleep last night?
asked Christiana of Mercy in the morning. I suppose you were in a
dream. So I was, said Mercy, but are you sure that I laughed? Yes, you
laughed heartily; but, prithee, Mercy, tell me thy dream. Well, I
dreamed that I was in a solitary place and all alone, and was there
bemoaning the hardness of my heart, when methought I saw one
coming with wings towards me. So he came directly to me, and said,
Mercy, what aileth thee? Now, when he heard my complaint, he said,
Peace be to thee. He also wiped mine eyes with his handkerchief, and
clad me in silver and gold; he put a chain about my neck also, and
earrings in mine ears, and a beautiful crown upon my head. So he
went up. I followed him till we came to a golden gate; and I thought I
saw your husband there. But did I laugh? Laugh! ay, and well you
might, to see yourself so well.'
But to return and begin again. Goodwill, who opened the gate,
was, as we saw, a person of a very grave and commanding aspect; so
much so, that in his sudden joy our pilgrim was a good deal overawed
as he looked on the countenance of the man who stood in the gate,
and it was some time afterwards before he understood why he wore
such a grave and almost sad aspect. But afterwards, as he went up the
way, and sometimes returned in thought to the wicket-gate, he came
to see very good reason why the keeper of that gate looked as he did
look. The site and situation of the gate, for one thing, was of itself
enough to banish all light-mindedness from the man who was
stationed there. For the gatehouse stood just above the Slough of
Despond, and that itself filled the air of the place with a dampness and
a depression that could be felt. And then out of the downward
windows of the gate, the watcher's eye always fell on the City of
Destruction in the distance, and on her sister cities sitting like her
daughters round about her. And that also made mirth and hilarity
impossible at that gate. And then the kind of characters who came
knocking all hours of the day and the night at that gate. Goodwill
never saw a happy face or heard a cheerful voice from one year's end
to the other. And when any one so far forgot himself as to put on an
untimely confidence and self-satisfaction, the gatekeeper would soon
put him through such questions as quickly sobered him if he had
anything at all of the root of the matter in him. Terror, horror, despair,
remorse, chased men and women up to that gate. They would often
fall before his threshold more dead than alive. And then, after the gate
was opened and the pilgrims pulled in, the gate had only opened on a
path of such painfulness, toil, and terrible risk, that at whatever
window Goodwill looked out, he always saw enough to make him and
keep him a grave, if not a sad, man. It was, as he sometimes said, his meat and his drink to keep the gate open for pilgrims; but the class of
men who came calling themselves pilgrims; the condition they came
in; the past, that in spite of all both he and they could do, still came in
through his gate after them, and went up all the way with them; their
ignorance of the way, on which he could only start them; the
multitudes who started, and the handfuls who held on; the many who
for a time ran well, but afterwards left their bones to bleach by the
wayside; and all the impossible-to-be-told troubles, dangers, sorrows,
shipwrecks that certainly lay before the most steadfast and single-
hearted pilgrim - all that was more than enough to give the man at the
gate his grave and anxious aspect.
Not that his great gravity, with all the causes of it, ever made him
a melancholy, a morose, a despairing, or even a desponding man. Far
from that. The man of sorrows Himself sometimes rejoiced in spirit.
Not sometimes only, but often He lifted up His heart and thanked His
Father for the work His Father had given Him to do, and for the
success that had been granted to Him in the doing of it. And as often
as He looked forward to the time when he should finish His work and
receive His discharge, and return to His Father's house, at the thought
of that He straightway forgot all His present sorrows. And somewhat
so was it with Goodwill at his gate. No man could be but at bottom
happy, and even joyful, who had a post like his to occupy, a gate like
his to keep, and, altogether, a work like his to do. No man with his
name and his nature can ever in any circumstances be really unhappy.
'Happiness is the bloom that always lies on a life of true goodness,'
and this gatehouse was full of the happiness that follows on and
always dwells with true goodness. Goodwill cannot have more
happiness till he shuts in his last pilgrim into the Celestial City, and
then himself enters in after him as a shepherd after a lost sheep.
The happy, heavenly, divine disposition of the gatekeeper was such,
that it overflowed from the pilgrim who stood beside him and
descended upon his wife and children who remained behind him in
the doomed city. So full of love was the gatekeeper's heart, that it ran
out upon Obstinate and Pliable also. His heart was so large and so
hospitable, that he was not satisfied with one pilgrim received and
assisted that day. How is it, he asked, that you have come here alone?
Did any of your neighbours know of your coming? And why did he
who came so far not come through? Alas, poor man, said Goodwill, is
the celestial glory of so little esteem with him that he counteth it not
worth running the hazards of a few difficulties to obtain it? Our
pilgrim got a lifelong lesson in goodwill to all men at that gate that
day. The gatekeeper showed such deep and patient and genuine
interest in all the pilgrim's past history, and in all his family and
personal affairs, that Christian all his days could never show
impatience, or haste, or lack of interest in the most long-winded and
egotistical pilgrim he ever met. He always remembered, when he was
becoming impatient, how much of his precious time and of his loving
attention his old friend Goodwill had given to him. Our pilgrim got
tired of talking about himself long before Goodwill had ceased to ask
questions and to listen to the answers. So much was Christian taken
with the courtesy and the kindness of Goodwill, that had it not been
for his crushing burden, he would have offered to remain in Goodwill's
house to run his errands, to light his fires, and to sweep his floors. So
much was he taken captive with Goodwill's extraordinary kindness
and unwearied attention. And since he could not remain at the gate,
but must go on to the city of all goodwill itself, our pilgrim set himself
all his days to copy this gatekeeper when he met with any fellow-
pilgrim who had any story that he wished to tell. And many were the
lonely and forgotten souls that Christian cheered and helped on, not
by his gold or his silver, nor by anything else, but just by his open ear.
To listen with patience and with attention to a fellow-pilgrim's wrongs
and sorrows, and even his smallest interests, said this Christian to
himself, is just what Goodwill so winningly did to me.
With all his goodwill the grave gatekeeper could not say that the
way to the Celestial City was other than a narrow, a stringent, and a
heart-searching way. 'Come,' he said, 'and I will tell thee the way thou
must go.' There are many wide ways to hell, and many there be who
crowd them, but there is only one way to heaven, and you will
sometimes think you must have gone off it, there are so few
companions; sometimes there will be only one footprint, with here
and there a stream of blood, and always as you proceed, it becomes
more and more narrow, till it strips a man bare, and sometimes
threatens to close upon him and crush him to the earth altogether. Our
Lord in as many words tells us all that. Strive, He says, strive every day. For many shall seek to enter into the way of salvation, but
because they do not early enough, and long enough, and painfully
enough strive, they come short, and are shut out. Have you, then,
anything in your religious life that Christ will at last accept as the
striving He intended and demanded? Does your religion cause you any
real effort - Christ calls it agony? Have you ever had, do you ever have,
anything that He would so describe? What cross do you every day take
up? In what thing do you every day deny yourself? Name it. Put your
finger on it. Write it in cipher on the margin of your Bible. Would the
most liberal judgment be able to say of you that you have any fear and
trembling in the work of your salvation? If not, I am afraid there must
be some mistake somewhere. There must be great guilt somewhere.
At your parents' door, or at your minister's, or, if their hands are clean,
then at your own. Christ has made it plain to a proverb, and John
Bunyan has made it a nursery and a schoolboy story, that the way to
heaven is steep and narrow and lonely and perilous. And that,
remember, not a few of the first miles of the way, but all the way, and
even through the dark valley itself. 'Almost all that is said in the New
Testament of men's watching, giving earnest heed to themselves,
running the race that is set before them, striving and agonising,
fighting, putting on the whole armour of God, pressing forward,
reaching forth, crying to God day and night; I say, almost all that we
have in the New Testament on these subjects is spoken and directed to
the saints. Where those things are applied to sinners seeking salvation
once, they are spoken of the saints' prosecution of their salvation ten
times' (Jonathan Edwards). If you have a life at all like that, you will be
sorely tempted to think that such suffering and struggle, increasing
rather than diminishing as life goes on, is a sign that you are so bad as
not to be a true Christian at all. You will be tempted to think and say
so. But all the time the truth is, that he who has not that labouring,
striving, agonising, fearing, and trembling in himself, knows nothing at
all about the religion of Christ and the way to heaven; and if he thinks
he does, then that but proves him a hypocrite, a self-deceived, self-
satisfied hypocrite; there is not an ounce of a true Christian in him.
Says Samuel Rutherford on this matter: 'Christ commandeth His
hearers to a strict and narrow way, in mortifying heart-lusts, in loving
our enemy, in feeding him when he is hungry, in suffering for Christ's sake and the gospel's, in bearing His cross, in denying ourselves, in
becoming humble as children, in being to all men and at all times
meek and lowly in heart.'
Let any man lay all that intelligently and imaginatively alongside
of his own daily life. Let him name some such heart-lust. Let him name
also some enemy, and ask himself what it is to love that man, and to
feed him in his hunger; what it is in which he is called to suffer for
Christ's sake and the gospel's, in his reputation, in his property, in his
business, in his feelings. Let him put his finger on something in which
he is every day to deny himself, and to be humble and teachable, and
to keep himself out of sight like a little child; and if that man does not
find out how narrow and heart-searching the way to heaven is, he will
be the first who has so found his way thither. No, no; be not deceived.
Deceive not yourself, and let no man deceive you. God is not mocked,
neither are His true saints. 'Would to God I were back in my pulpit but
for one Sabbath,' said a dying minister in Aberdeen. 'What would you
do?' asked a brother minister at his bedside. 'I would preach to the
people the difficulty of salvation,' he said. All which things are told, not
for purposes of debate or defiance, but to comfort and instruct God's
true people who are finding salvation far more difficult than anybody
had ever told them it would be. Comfort My people, saith your God.
Speak comfortably to My people. Come, said Goodwill, and I will teach
thee about the way thou must go. Look before thee, dost thou see that
narrow way? That is the way thou must go. And then thou mayest
always distinguish the right way from the wrong. The wrong is
crooked and wide, and the right is straight as a rule can make it, -
straight and narrow.
Goodwill said all that in order to direct and to comfort the
pilgrim; but that was not all that this good man said with that end. For,
when Christian asked him if he could not help him off with his burden
that was upon his back, he told him: 'As to thy burden, be content to
bear it until thou comest to the place of deliverance, for there it will
fall from thy back of itself.' Get you into the straight and narrow way,
says Goodwill, with his much experience of the ways and fortunes of
true pilgrims; get you sure into the right way, and leave your burden
to God.
He appoints the place of deliverance, and it lies before thee. The place of thy deliverance cannot be behind thee, and it is not in my
house, else thy burden would have been already off. But it is before
thee. Be earnest, therefore, in the way. Look not behind thee. Go not
into any crooked way; and one day, before you know, and when you
are not pulling at it, your burden will fall off of itself. Be content to
bear it till then, says bold and honest Goodwill, speaking so true to
pilgrim experience. Yes; be content, O ye people of God, crying with
this pilgrim for release from your burden of guilt, and no less those of
you who are calling with Paul for release from the still more bitter and
crushing burden made up of combined guilt and corruption. Be
content till the place and the time of deliverance; nay, even under your
burden and your bonds be glad, as Paul was, and go up the narrow
way, still chanting to yourself, I thank God through Jesus Christ our
Lord. It is only becoming that a great sinner should tarry the Lord's
leisure; all the more that the greatest sinner may be sure the Lord will
come, and will not tarry. The time is long, but the thing is sure.
And now two lessons from Goodwill's gate: -
The gate was shut when Christian came up to it, and no one was
visible anywhere about it. The only thing visible was the writing over
the gate which told all pilgrims to knock. Now, when we come up to
the same gate we are disappointed and discouraged that the
gatekeeper is not standing already upon his doorstep and his arms
round our neck. We knelt to-day in secret prayer, and there was only
our bed or our chair visible before us. There was no human being,
much less to all appearance any Divine Presence, in the place. And we
prayed a short, indeed, but a not unearnest prayer, and then we rose
up and came away disappointed because no one appeared. But look at
him who is now inheriting the promises. He knocked, says his history,
more than once or twice. That is to say, he did not content himself
with praying one or two seconds and then giving over, but he
continued in prayer till the gatekeeper came. And as he knocked, he
said, so loud and so impatient that all those in the gatehouse could
hear him,
'May I now enter here? Will he within
Open to sorry me, though I have been
A wandering rebel? Then shall I
Not fail to sing his lasting praise on high.'
'We make no objections against any,' said Goodwill;
'notwithstanding all that they have done before they come hither, they
are in no wise cast out.' He told me all things that ever I did, said the
woman of Samaria, telling her neighbours about our Lord's
conversation with her. And, somehow, there was something in the
gatekeeper's words that called back to Christian, if not all the things
he had ever done, yet from among them the worst things he had ever
done. They all rose up black as hell before his eyes as the gatekeeper
did not name them at all, but only said 'notwithstanding all that thou
hast done.' Christian never felt his past life so black, or his burden so
heavy, or his heart so broken, as when Goodwill just said that one
word 'notwithstanding.' 'We make no objections against any;
notwithstanding all that they have done before they come hither, they
are in no wise cast out.'
THE INTERPRETER
'An interpreter, one among a thousand.' - Elihu.
We come to-night to the Interpreter's House. And since every
minister of the gospel is an interpreter, and every evangelical church
is an interpreter's house, let us gather up some of the precious lessons
to ministers and to people with which this passage of the Pilgrim's
Progress so much abounds.
In the first place, then, I observe that the House of the Interpreter
stands just beyond the Wicket Gate. In the whole topography of the
Pilgrim's Progress there lies many a deep lesson. The church that Mr.
Worldly-Wiseman supported, and on the communion roll of which he
was so determined to have our pilgrim's so unprepared name, stood
far down on the other side of Goodwill's gate. It was a fine building,
and it had an eloquent man for its minister, and the whole service was
an attraction and an enjoyment to all the people of the place; but our
Interpreter was never asked to show any of his significant things
there; and, indeed, neither minister nor people would have
understood him had he ever done so. And had any of the parishioners
from below the gate ever by any chance stumbled into the
Interpreter's house, his most significant rooms would have had no
significance to them. Both he and his house would have been a
mystery and an offence to Worldly-Wiseman, his minister, and his
fellow-worshippers. John Bunyan has the clear warrant both of Jesus
Christ and the Apostle Paul for the place on which he has planted the
Interpreter's house. 'It is given to you,' said our Lord to His disciples,
'to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to them it is not
given.' And Paul tells us that 'the natural man receiveth not the things
of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he
know them, because they are spiritually discerned.' And, accordingly,
no reader of the Pilgrim's Progress will really understand what he
sees in the Interpreter's House, unless he is already a man of a
spiritual mind. Intelligent children enjoy the pictures and the people
that are set before them in this illustrated house, but they must
become the children of God, and must be well on in the life of God,
before they will be able to say that the house next the gate has been a
profitable and a helpful house to them. All that is displayed here - all
the furniture and all the vessels, all the ornaments and all the
employments and all the people of the Interpreter's House - is fitted and intended to be profitable as well as interesting to pilgrims only.
No man has any real interest in the things of this house, or will take
any abiding profit out of it, till he is fairly started on the upward road.
In his former life, and while still on the other side of the gate, our
pilgrim had no interest in such things as he is now to see and hear;
and if he had seen and heard them in his former life, he would not,
with all the Interpreter's explanation, have understood them. As here
among ourselves to-night, they who will understand and delight in the
things they hear in this house to-night are those only who have really
begun to live a religious life. The realities of true religion are now the
most real things in life - to them; they love divine things now; and
since they began to love divine things, you cannot entertain them
better than by exhibiting and explaining divine things to them. There
is no house in all the earth, after the gate itself, that is more dear to
the true pilgrim heart than just the Interpreter's House. 'I was glad
when it was said to me, Let us go into the house of the Lord. Peace be
within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.'
And besides being built on the very best spot in all the land for its
owner's purposes, every several room in that great house was
furnished and fitted up for the entertainment and instruction of
pilgrims. Every inch of that capacious and many-chambered house
was given up to the delectation of pilgrims. The public rooms were
thrown open for their convenience and use at all hours of the day and
night, and the private rooms were kept retired and secluded for such
as sought retirement and seclusion. There were dark rooms also with
iron cages in them, till Christian and his companions came out of
those terrible places, bringing with them an everlasting caution to
watchfulness and a sober mind. There were rooms also given up to
vile and sordid uses. One room there was full of straws and sticks and
dust, with an old man who did nothing else day nor night but wade
about among the straws and sticks and dust, and rake it all into little
heaps, and then sit watching lest any one should overturn them. And
then, strange to tell it, and not easy to get to the full significance of it,
the bravest room in all the house had absolutely nothing in it but a
huge, ugly, poisonous spider hanging to the wall with her hands. 'Is
there but one spider in all this spacious room?' asked the Interpreter.
And the water stood in Christiana's eyes; she had come by this time thus far on her journey also. She was a woman of a quick
apprehension, and the water stood in her eyes at the Interpreter's
question, and she said: 'Yes, Lord, there is here more than one. Yea,
and spiders whose venom is far more destructive than that which is in
her.' The Interpreter then looked pleasantly on her, and said: 'Thou
hast said the truth.' This made Mercy blush, and the boys to cover
their faces, for they all began now to understand the riddle. 'This is to
show you,' said the Interpreter, 'that however full of the venom of sin
you may be, yet you may, by the hand of faith, lay hold of, and dwell in
the best room that belongs to the King's House above.' Then they all
seemed to be glad, but the water stood in their eyes. A wall also stood
apart on the grounds of the house with an always dying fire on one
side of it, while a man on the other side of the wall continually fed the
fire through hidden openings in the wall. A whole palace stood also on
the grounds, the inspection of which so kindled our pilgrim's heart,
that he refused to stay here any longer, or to see any more sights - so
much had he already seen of the evil of sin and of the blessedness of
salvation.
Not that he had seen as yet the half of what that house held for
the instruction of pilgrims. Only, time would fail us to visit the hen and
her chickens; the butcher killing a sheep and pulling her skin over her
ears, and she lying still under his hands and taking her death
patiently; also the garden with the flowers all diverse in stature, and
quality, and colour, and smell, and virtue, and some better than some,
and all where the gardener had set them, there they stand, and
quarrel not with one another. The robin-red-breast also, so pretty of
note and colour and carriage, but instead of bread and crumbs, and
such like harmless matter, with a great spider in his mouth. A tree
also, whose inside was rotten, and yet it grew and had leaves. So they
went on their way and sang:
'This place hath been our second stage,
Here have we heard and seen
Those good things that from age to age
To others hid have been.
The butcher, garden, and the field,
The robin and his bait,
Also the rotten tree, doth yield
Me argument of weight;
To move me for to watch and pray,
To strive to be sincere,
To take my cross up day by day,
And serve the Lord with few.'
The significant rooms of that divine house instruct us also that all the
lessons requisite for our salvation are not to be found in any one
scripture or in any one sermon, but that all that is required by any
pilgrim or any company of pilgrims should all be found in every
minister's ministry as he leads his flock on from one Sabbath-day to
another, rightly dividing the word of truth. Our ministers should have
something in their successive sermons for everybody. Something for
the children, something for the slow-witted and the dull of
understanding, and something specially suited for those who are of a
quick apprehension; something at one time to make the people smile,
at another time to make them blush, and at another time to make the
water stand in their eyes.
And, then, the Interpreter's life was as full of work as his house
was of entertainment and instruction. Not only so, but his life, it was
well known, had been quite as full of work before he had a house to
work for as ever it had been since. The Interpreter did nothing else
but continually preside over his house and all that was in it and
around it, and it was all gone over and seen to with his own eyes and
hands every day. He had been present at the laying of every stone and
beam of that solid and spacious house of his. There was not a pin nor a
loop of its furniture, there was not a picture on its walls, nor a bird nor
a beast in its woods and gardens, that he did not know all about and
could not hold discourse about. And then, after he had taken you all
over his house, with its significant rooms and woods and gardens, he
was full all supper-time of all wise saws and witty proverbs. 'One leak
will sink a ship,' he said that night, 'and one sin will destroy a sinner.'
And all their days the pilgrims remembered that word from the
Interpreter's lips, and they often said it to themselves as they thought
of their own besetting sin. Now, if it is indeed so, that every gospel minister is an interpreter, and every evangelical church an
interpreter's house, what an important passage this is for all those
who are proposing and preparing to be ministers. Let them reflect
upon it: what a house this is that the Interpreter dwells in; how early
and how long ago he began to lay out his grounds and to build his
house upon them; how complete in all its parts it is, and how he still
watches and labours to have it more complete. Understandest thou
what thou here readest? it is asked of all ministers, young and old, as
they turn over John Bunyan's pungent pages. And every new room,
every new bird, and beast, and herb, and flower makes us blush for
shame as we contrast our own insignificant and ill-furnished house
with the noble house of the Interpreter. Let all our students who have
not yet fatally destroyed themselves and lost their opportunity lay the
Interpreter's House well to heart. Let them be students not in idle
name only, as so many are, but in intense reality, as so few are. Let
them read everything that bears upon the Bible, and let them read
nothing that does not. They have not the time nor the permission. Let
them be content to be men of one book. Let them give themselves
wholly to the interpretation of divine truth as its riddles are set in
nature and in man, in scripture, in providence, and in spiritual
experience. Let them store their memories at college with all sacred
truth, and with all secular truth that can be made sacred. And if their
memories are weak and treacherous, let them be quiet under God's
will in that, and all the more labour to make up in other ways for that
defect, so that they may have always something to say to the purpose
when their future people come up to church hungry for instruction
and comfort and encouragement. Let them look around and see the
sin that sinks the ship of so many ministers; and let them begin while
yet their ship is in the yard and see that she is fitted up and furnished,
stored and stocked, so that she shall in spite of sure storms and
sunken rocks deliver her freight in the appointed haven. When they
are lying in bed of a Sabbath morning, let them forecast the day when
they shall have to give a strict account of their eight years of golden
opportunity among the churches, and the classes, and the societies,
and the libraries of our university seats. Let them be able to name
some great book, ay, more than one great book, they mastered, for
every year of their priceless and irredeemable student life. Let them all their days have old treasure-houses that they filled full with
scholarship and with literature and with all that will minister to a
congregation's many desires and necessities, collected and kept ready
from their student days. 'Meditate upon these things; give thyself
wholly up to them, that thy profiting may appear unto all.'
And then with a sly stroke at us old ministers, our significant
author points out to us how much better furnished the Interpreter's
House was by the time Christiana and the boys visited it compared
with that early time when Christian was entertained in it. Our pilgrim
got far more in the Interpreter's House of delight and instruction than
he could carry out of it, but that did not tempt the Interpreter to sit
down and content himself with taking all his future pilgrims into the
same room, and showing them the same pictures, and repeating to
them the same explanations. No, for he reflected that each coming
pilgrim would need some new significant room to himself, and
therefore, as soon as he got one pilgrim off his hands, he straightway
set about building and furnishing new rooms, putting up new
pictures, and replenishing his woods and his waters with new beasts
and birds and fishes. I am ashamed, he said, that I had so little to show
when I first opened my gates to receive pilgrims, and I do not know
why they came to me as they did. I was only a beginner in these things
when my first visitor came to my gates. Let every long-settled, middle-
aged, and even grey-headed minister read the life of the Interpreter at
this point and take courage and have hope. Let it teach us all to break
some new ground in the field of divine truth with every new year. Let
it teach us all to be students all our days. Let us buy, somehow, the
poorest and the oldest of us, some new and first-rate book every year.
Let us not indeed shut up altogether our old rooms if they ever had
anything significant in them, but let us add now a new wing to our
spiritual house, now a new picture to its walls, and now a new herb to
its gardens. 'Resolved,' wrote Jonathan Edwards, 'that as old men have
seldom any advantage of new discoveries, because these are beside a
way of thinking they have been long used to; resolved, therefore, if
ever I live to years, that I will be impartial to hear the reasons of all
pretended discoveries, and receive them, if rational, how long soever I
have been used to another way of thinking.'
The fickle, frivolous, volatile character of so many divinity
students is excellently hit off by Bunyan in our pilgrim's impatience to
be out of the Interpreter's House. No sooner had he seen one or two of
the significant rooms than this easily satisfied student was as eager to
get out of that house as he had been to get in. Twice over the wise and
learned Interpreter had to beg and beseech this ignorant and
impulsive pilgrim to stop and get another lesson in the religious life
before he left the great school-house. All our professors of divinity and
all our ministers understand the parable at this point only too well.
Their students are eager to get into their classes; like our pilgrim, they
have heard the fame of this and that teacher, and there is not standing-
room in the class for the first weeks of the session. But before
Christmas there is room enough for strangers, and long before the
session closes, half the students are counting the weeks and plotting
to petition the Assembly against the length and labour of the
curriculum. Was there ever a class that was as full and attentive at the
end of the session as it was at the beginning? Never since our poor
human nature was so stricken with laziness and shallowness and self-
sufficiency. But what is the chaff to the wheat? It is the wheat that
deserves and repays the husbandman's love and labour. When Plato
looked up from his desk in the Academy, after reading and expounding
one of his greatest Dialogues, he found only one student left in the
class-room, but then, that student was Aristotle. 'Now let me go,' said
Christian. 'Nay, stay,' said the Interpreter, 'till I have showed thee a
little more.' 'Sir, is it not time for me to go?' 'Do tarry till I show thee
just one thing more.'
'Here have I seen things rare and profitable, . . . Then let me be
Thankful, O good Interpreter, to thee.'
Sydney Smith, with his usual sagacity, says that the last vice of the
pulpit is to be uninteresting. Now, the Interpreter's House had this
prime virtue in it, that it was all interesting. Do not our children beg of
us on Sabbath nights to let them see the Interpreter's show once
more; it is so inexhaustibly and unfailingly interesting? It is only
stupid men and women who ever weary of it. But, 'profitable' was the
one and universal word with which all the pilgrims left the
Interpreter's House. 'Rare and pleasant,' they said, and sometimes
'dreadful;' but it was always 'profitable.' Now, how seldom do we hear
our people at the church door step down into the street saying,
'profitable'? If they said that oftener their ministers would study profit
more than they do. The people say 'able,' or 'not at all able'; 'eloquent,'
or 'stammering and stumbling'; 'excellent' in style and manner and
accent, or the opposite of all that; and their ministers, to please the
people and to earn their approval, labour after these approved things.
But if the people only said that the prayers and the preaching were
profitable and helpful, even when they too seldom are, then our
preachers would set the profit of the people far more before them
both in selecting and treating and delivering their Sabbath-day
subjects. A lady on one occasion said to her minister, 'Sir, your
preaching does my soul good.' And her minister never forgot the grave
and loving look with which that was said. Not only did he never forget
it, but often when selecting his subject, and treating it, and delivering