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 eightyfourth 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 stretchedout 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 thirtyfifth 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 singlehearted 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 fellowpilgrim 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, selfsatisfied 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, middleaged, 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 standingroom 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 selfsufficiency. 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