Part 5
kind of secondary character in this dramatic book. We do not meet
with Shame directly; we only hear about him through the report of
Faithful. That first-class pilgrim was almost overcome of Shame, so
hot was their encounter; and it is the extraordinarily feeling, graphic,
and realistic account of their encounter that Faithful gives us that has
led me to take up Shame for our reproof and correction to-night.
Religion altogether, but especially all personal religion, said Shame to
Faithful, is an unmanly business. There is a certain touch of smallness
and pitifulness, he said, in all religion, but especially in experimental
religion. It brings a man into junctures and into companionships, and
it puts offices and endurances upon one such as try a man if he has
any greatness of spirit about him at all. This life on which you are
entering, said Shame, will cost you many a blush before you are done
with it. You will lay yourself open to many a scoff. The Puritan religion,
and all the ways of that religious fraternity, are peculiarly open to the
shafts of ridicule. Now, all that was quite true. There was no denying
the truth of what Shame said. And Faithful felt the truth of it all, and
felt it most keenly, as he confessed to Christian. The blood came into
my face as the fellow spake, and what he said for a time almost beat
me out of the upward way altogether. But in this dilemma also all true
Christians can fall back, as Faithful fell back, upon the example of their
Master. In this as in every other experience of temptation and
endurance, our Lord is the forerunner and the example of His people.
Our Lord was in all points tempted like as we are, and among all His
other temptations He was tempted to be ashamed of His work on
earth and of the life and the death His work led Him into. He must
have often felt ashamed at the treatment He received during His life of
humiliation, as it is well called; and He must often have felt ashamed
of His disciples: but all that is blotted out by the crowning shame of
the cross. We hang our worst criminals rather than behead or shoot
them, in order to heap up the utmost possible shame and disgrace
upon them, as well as to execute justice upon them. And what the
hangman's rope is in our day, all that the cross was in our Lord's day.
And, then, as if the cross itself was not shame enough, all the
circumstances connected with His cross were planned and carried out
so as to heap the utmost possible shame and humiliation upon His
head. Our prison warders have to watch the murderers in their cells
night and day, lest they should take their own life in order to escape
the hangman's rope; but our Lord, keenly as He felt His coming shame,
said to His horrified disciples, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, when
the Son of Man shall be mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted
on; and they shall scourge Him and put Him to death. Do you ever
think of your Lord in His shame? How they made a fool of Him, as we
say. How they took off His own clothes and put on Him now a red
cloak and now a white; how they put a sword of lath in His hand, and a
crown of thorns on His head; how they bowed the knee before Him,
and asked royal favours from Him; and then how they spat in His face,
and struck Him on the cheek, while the whole house rang with shouts
of laughter. And, then, the last indignity of man, how they stripped
Him naked and lashed His naked and bleeding body to a whipping-
post. And how they wagged their heads and put out their tongues at
Him when He was on the tree, and invited Him to come down and
preach to them now, and they would all become His disciples. Did not
Shame say the simple truth when he warned Faithful that religion had
always and from the beginning made its followers the ridicule of their
times? If you are really going to be a religious man, Shame went on,
you will have to carry about with you a very tender conscience, and a
more unmanly and miserable thing than a tender conscience I cannot
conceive. A tender conscience will cost you something, let me tell you,
to keep it. If nothing else, a tender conscience will all your life long expose you to the mockery and the contempt of all the brave spirits of
the time. That also is true. At any rate, a tender conscience will
undoubtedly compel its possessor to face the brave spirits of the time.
There is a good story told to this present point about Sir Robert Peel, a
Prime Minister of our Queen. When a young man, Peel was one of the
guests at a select dinner-party in the West-end of London. And after
the ladies had left the table the conversation of the gentlemen took a
turn such that it could not have taken as long as the ladies were
present. Peel took no share in the stories or the merriment that went
on, and, at last, he rose up and ordered his carriage, and, with a
burning face, left the room.
When he was challenged as to why he had broken up the pleasant
party so soon, he could only reply that his conscience would not let
him stay any longer. No doubt Peel felt the mocking laughter that he
left behind him, but, as Shame said to Faithful, the tenderness of the
young statesman's conscience compelled him to do as he did. But we
are not all Peels. And there are plenty of workshops and offices and
dinner-tables in our own city, where young men who would walk up
to the cannon's mouth without flinching have not had Peel's courage
to protest against indecency or to confess that they belonged to an
evangelical church. If a church is only sufficiently unevangelical there
is no trial of conscience or of courage in confessing that you belong to
it. But as Shame so ably and honestly said, that type of religion that
creates a tender conscience in its followers, and sets them to watch
their words and their ways, and makes them tie themselves up from
all hectoring liberty - to choose that religion, and to cleave to it to the
end, will make a young man the ridicule still of all the brave spirits
round about him. Ambitious young men get promotion and reward
every day among us for desertions and apostasies in religion, for
which, if they had been guilty of the like in war, they would have been
shot. 'And so you are a Free Churchman, I am told.' That was all that
was said. But the sharp youth understood without any more words,
and he made his choice accordingly; till it is becoming a positive
surprise to find the rising members of certain professions in certain
churches. The Quakers have a proverb in England that a family
carriage never drives for two generations past the parish church door.
Of which state of matters Shame showed himself a shrewd prophet two hundred years ago when he said that but few of the rich and the
mighty and the wise remained long of Faithful's Puritan opinion
unless they were first persuaded to be fools, and to be of a voluntary
fondness to venture the loss of all.
And I will tell you two other things, said sharp-sighted and plain-
spoken Shame, that your present religion will compel you to do if you
adhere to it. It will compel you from time to time to ask your
neighbour's forgiveness even for petty faults, and it will insist with
you that you make restitution when you have done the weak and the
friendless any hurt or any wrong. And every manly mind will tell you
that life is not worth having on such humbling terms as those are.
Whatever may be thought about Shame in other respects, it cannot be
denied that he had a sharp eye for the facts of life, and a shrewd
tongue in setting those facts forth. He has hit the blot exactly in the
matter of our first duty to our neighbour; he has put his finger on one
of the matters where so many of us, through a false shame, come
short. It costs us a tremendous struggle with our pride to go to our
neighbour and to ask his forgiveness for a fault, petty fault or other.
Did you ever do it? When did you do it last, to whom, and for what?
One Sabbath morning, now many years ago, I had occasion to urge this
elementary evangelical duty on my people here, and I did it as plainly
as I could. Next day one of my young men, who is now a devoted and
honoured elder, came to me and told me that he had done that
morning what his conscience yesterday told him in the church to do.
He had gone to a neighbour's place of business, had asked for an
interview, and had begged his neighbour's pardon. I am sure neither
of those two men have forgotten that moment, and the thought of it
has often since nerved me to speak plainly about some of their most
unwelcome duties to my people. Shame, no doubt, pulled back my
noble friend's hand when it was on the office bell, but, like Faithful in
the text, he shook him out of his company and went in. I spoke of the
remarkable justice of the newspaper press in the opening of these
remarks. And it so happens that, as I lay down my pen to rest my hand
after writing this sentence and lift a London evening paper, I read this
editorial note, set within the well-known brackets at the end of an
indignant and expostulatory letter: ['Our correspondent's complaint is
just. The paragraph imputing bad motives should not have been
admitted.'] I have no doubt that editor felt some shame as he handed
that apologetic note to the printer. But not to speak of any other
recognition and recompense, he has the recompense of the
recognition of all honourable-minded men who have read that
honourable admission and apology.
Shame was quite right in his scoff about restitution also. For
restitution rings like a trumpet tone through the whole of the law of
Moses, and then the New Testament republishes that law if only in the
exquisite story of Zaccheus. And, indeed, take it altogether, I do not
know where to find in the same space a finer vindication of Puritan
pulpit ethics than just in this taunting and terrifying attack on Faithful.
There is no better test of true religion both as it is preached and
practised than just to ask for and to grant forgiveness, and to offer and
accept restitution. Now, does your public and private life defend and
adorn your minister's pulpit in these two so practical matters? Could
your minister point to you as a proof of the ethics of evangelical
teaching? Can any one in this city speak up in defence of your church
and thus protest: 'Say what you like about that church and its
ministers, all I can say is, that its members know how to make an
apology; as, also, how to pay back with interest what they at one time
damaged or defrauded'? Can any old creditor's widow or orphan
stand up for our doctrine and defend our discipline pointing to you? If
you go on to be a Puritan, said Shame to Faithful, you will have to ask
your neighbour's forgiveness even for petty faults, and you will have
to make restitution with usury where you have taken anything from
any one, and how will you like that? And what did you say to all this,
my brother? Say? I could not tell what to say at the first. I felt my blood
coming up into my face at some of the things that Shame said and
threatened. But, at last, I began to consider that that which is highly
esteemed among men is often had in abomination with God. And I
said to myself again, Shame tells me what men do and what men think,
but he has told me nothing about what He thinks with Whom I shall
soon have alone to do. Therefore, thought I, what God thinks and says
is wisest and best, let all the men of the world say what they will. Let
all false shame, then, depart from my heart, for how else shall I look
upon my Lord, and how shall He look upon me at His coming?
TALKATIVE
'A man full of talk.' - Zophar.
'Let thy words be few.' - The Preacher.
'The soul of religion is the practick part.' - Christian.
Since we all have a tongue, and since so much of our time is taken
up with talk, a simple catalogue of the sins of the tongue is enough to
terrify us. The sins of the tongue take up a much larger space in the
Bible than we would believe till we have begun to suffer from other
men's tongues and especially from our own. The Bible speaks a great
deal more and a great deal plainer about the sins of the tongue than
any of our pulpits dare to do. In the Psalms alone you would think that
the psalmists scarcely suffer from anything else worth speaking about
but the evil tongues of their friends and of their enemies. The Book of
Proverbs also is full of the same lashing scourge. And James the Just, in
a passage of terrible truth and power, tells us that we are already as
good as perfect men if we can bridle our tongue; and that, on the other
hand, if we do not bridle our tongue, all our seeming to be religious is
a sham and a self-deception, - that man's religion is vain.
With many men and many women great talkativeness is a matter
of simple temperament and mental constitution. And a talkative habit
would be a childlike and an innocent habit if the heart of talker and
the hearts of those to whom he talks so much were only full of truth
and love. But our hearts and our neighbours' hearts being what they
are, in the multitude of words there wanteth not sin. So much of our
talk is about our absent neighbours, and there are so many
misunderstandings, prejudices, ambitions, competitions, oppositions,
and all kinds of cross-interests between us and our absent
neighbours, that we cannot long talk about them till our hearts have
run our tongues into all manner of trespass. Bishop Butler discourses
on the great dangers that beset a talkative temperament with almost
more than all his usual sagacity, seriousness, and depth. And those
who care to see how the greatest of our modern moralists deals with
their besetting sin should lose no time in possessing and mastering
Butler's great discourse. It is a truly golden discourse, and it ought to
be read at least once a month by all the men and all the women who
have tongues in their heads. Bishop Butler points out to his offending
readers, in a way they can never forget, the certain mischief they do to
themselves and to other people just by talking too much. But there are far worse sins that our tongues fall into than the bad enough sins that
spring out of impertinent and unrestrained loquacity. There are many
times when our talk, long or short, is already simple and downright
evil.
It is ten to one, it is a hundred to one, that you do not know and
would not believe how much you fall every day and in every
conversation into one or other of the sins of the tongue. If you would
only begin to see and accept this, that every time you speak or hear
about your absent neighbour what you would not like him to speak or
hear about you, you are in that a talebearer, a slanderer, a backbiter, or
a liar, - when you begin to see and admit that about yourself, you will
not wonder at what the Bible says with such bitter indignation about
the diabolical sins of the tongue. If you would just begin to-night to
watch yourselves - on the way home from church, at home after the
day is over, to-morrow morning when the letters and the papers are
opened, and so on, - how instinctively, incessantly, irrepressibly you
speak about the absent in a way you would be astounded and
horrified to be told they were at that moment speaking about you,
then you would soon be wiser than all your teachers in the sins and in
the government of the tongue. And you would seven times every day
pluck out your tongue before God till He gives it back to you clean and
kind in that land where all men shall love their neighbours, present
and absent, as themselves.
Take detraction for an example, one of the commonest, and,
surely, one of the most detestable of the sins of the tongue. And the
etymology here, as in this whole region, is most instructive and most
impressive. In detraction you draw away something from your
neighbour that is most precious and most dear to him. In detraction
you are a thief, and a thief of the falsest and wickedest kind. For your
neighbour's purse is trash, while his good name is far more precious
to him than all his gold. Some one praises your neighbour in your
hearing, his talents, his performances, his character, his motives, or
something else that belongs to your neighbour. Some one does that in
your hearing who either does not know you, or who wishes to torture
and expose you, and you fall straight into the snare thus set for you,
and begin at once to belittle, depreciate, detract from, and run down
your neighbour, who has been too much praised for your peace of mind and your self-control. You insinuate something to his
disadvantage and dishonour. You quote some authority you have
heard to his hurt. And so on past all our power to picture you.
For detraction has a thousand devices taught to it by the master of all
such devices, wherewith to drag down and defile the great and the
good. But with all you can say or do, you cannot for many days get out
of your mind the heart-poisoning praise you heard spoken of your
envied neighbour. Never praise any potter's pots in the hearing of
another potter, said the author of the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle
said potter's pots, but he really all the time was thinking of a
philosopher's books; only he said potter's pots to draw off his readers'
attention from himself. Now, always remember that ancient and wise
advice. Take care how you praise a potter's pots, a philosopher's
books, a woman's beauty, a speaker's speech, a preacher's sermon to
another potter, philosopher, woman, speaker, or preacher; unless,
indeed, you maliciously wish secretly to torture them, or publicly to
expose them, or, if their sanctification is begun, to sanctify them to
their most inward and spiritual sanctification.
Backbiting, again, would seem at first sight to be a sin of the teeth
rather than of the tongue, only, no sharpest tooth can tear you when
your back is turned like your neighbour's evil tongue. Pascal has many
dreadful things about the corruption and misery of man, but he has
nothing that strikes its terrible barb deeper into all our consciences
than this, that if all our friends only knew what we have said about
them behind their back, we would not have four friends in all the
world.
Neither we would. I know I would not have one. How many would
you have? And who would they be? You cannot name them. I defy you
to name them. They do not exist. The tongue can no man tame.
'Giving of characters' also takes up a large part of our everyday
conversation. We cannot well help characterising, describing, and
estimating one another. But, as far as possible, when we see the
conversation again approaching that dangerous subject, we should
call to mind our past remorse; we should suppose our absent
neighbour present; we should imagine him in our place and ourselves
in his place, and so turn the rising talk into another channel. For, the
truth is, few of us are able to do justice to our neighbour when we begin to discuss and describe him. Generosity in our talk is far easier
for us than justice. It was this incessant giving of characters that our
Lord had in His eye when He said in His Sermon on the Mount, Judge
not. But our Lord might as well never have uttered that warning word
for all the attention we give it.
For we go on judging one another and sentencing one another as
if we were entirely and in all things blameless ourselves, and as if God
had set us up in our blamelessness in His seat of judgment over all our
fellows. How seldom do we hear any one say in a public debate or in a
private conversation, I don't know; or, It is no matter of mine; or, I feel
that I am not in possession of all the facts; or, It may be so, but I must
not judge. We never hear such things as these said. No one pays the
least attention to the Preacher on the Mount. And if any one says to us,
I must not judge, we never forgive him, because his humility and his
obedience so condemn all our ill-formed, prejudiced, rash, and ill-
natured judgments of our neighbour. Since, therefore, so Butler sums
up, it is so hard for us to enter on our neighbour's character without
offending the law of Christ, we should learn to decline that kind of
conversation altogether, and determine to get over that strong
inclination most of us have, to be continually talking about the
concerns, the behaviour, and the deserts of our neighbours.
Now, it was all those vices of the tongue in full outbreak in the
day of James the Just that made that apostle, half in sorrow, half in
anger, demand of all his readers that they should henceforth begin to
bridle their tongues. And, like all that most practical apostle's
counsels, that is a most impressive and memorable commandment.
For, it is well known that all sane men who either ride on or drive
unruly horses, take good care to bridle their horses well before they
bring them out of their stable door. And then they keep their bridle-
hand firm closed on the bridle-rein till their horses are back in the
stable again. Especially and particularly they keep a close eye and a
firm hand on their horse's bridle on all steep inclines and at all sharp
angles and sudden turns in the road; when sudden trains are passing
and when stray dogs are barking. If the rider or the driver of a horse
did not look at nothing else but the bridle of his horse, both he and his
horse under him would soon be in the ditch, - as so many of us are at
the present moment because we have an untamed tongue in our
mouth on which we have not yet begun to put the bridle of truth and
justice and brotherly love. Indeed, such woe and misery has an
untamed tongue wrought in other churches and in other and more
serious ages than ours, that special religious brotherhoods have been
banded together just on the special and strict engagement that they
would above all things put a bridle on their tongues. 'What are the
chief cares of a young convert?' asked such a convert at an aged
Carthusian. 'I said I will take heed to my ways that I trespass not with
my tongue,' replied the saintly father. 'Say no more for the present,'
interrupted the youthful beginner; 'I will go home and practise that,
and will come again when I have performed it.'
Now, whatever faults that tall man had who took up so much of
Faithful's time and attention, he was a saint compared with the men
and the women who have just passed before us. Talkative, as John
Bunyan so scornfully names that tall man, though he undoubtedly
takes up too much time and too much space in Bunyan's book, was not
a busybody in other men's matters at any rate. Nobody could call him
a detractor or a backbiter or a talebearer or a liar. Christian knew him
well, and had known him long, but Christian was not afraid to leave
him alone with Faithful. We all know men we feel it unsafe to leave
long alone with our friends. We feel sure that they will be talking
about us, and that to our hurt, as soon as our backs are about. But to
give that tall man his due, he was not given with all his talk to tale-
bearing or scandal or detraction. Had he been guilty of any of these
things, Faithful would soon have found him out, and would have left
him to go to the Celestial City by himself. But, after talking for half a
day with Talkative, instead of finding out anything wrong in the tall
man's talk, Faithful was so taken and so struck with it, that he stepped
across to Christian and said, 'What a brave companion we have got!
Surely this man will make a most excellent pilgrim!' 'So I once thought
too,' said Christian, 'till I went to live beside him, and have to do with
him in the business of daily life.' Yes, it is near neighbourhood and the
business of everyday life that try a talking man. If you go to a meeting
for prayer, and hear some men praying and speaking on religious
subjects, you would say to yourself, What a good man that is, and how
happy must his wife and children and servants and neighbours be
with such an example always before them, and with such an
intercessor for them always with God! But if you were to go home with
that so devotional man, and try to do business with him, and were
compelled to cross him and go against him, you would find out why
Christian smiled so when Faithful was so full of Talkative's praises.
But of all the religiously-loquacious men of our day, your
ministers are the chief. For your ministers must talk in public, and that
often and at great length, whether they are truly religious men at
home or no. It is their calling to talk to you unceasingly about religious
matters. You chose them to be your ministers because they could talk
well. You would not put up with a minister who could not talk well on
religious things. You estimate them by their talk. You praise and pay
them by their talk. And if they are to live, talk incessantly to you about
religion they must, and they do. If any other man among us is not a
religious man, well, then, he can at least hold his tongue. There is no
necessity laid on him to speak in public about things that he does not
practise at home. But we hard-bested ministers must go on speaking
continually about the most solemn things. And if we are not
extraordinarily watchful over ourselves, and extraordinarily and
increasingly conscientious, if we are not steadily growing in
inwardness and insight and depth and real spirituality of mind and life
ourselves, we cannot escape, - our calling in life will not let us escape, -
becoming as sounding brass. There is an awful sentence in Butler that
should be written in letters of fire in every minister's conscience, to
the effect that continually going over religion in talk and making fine
pictures of it in the pulpit, creates a professional insensibility to
personal religion that is the everlasting ruin of multitudes of eloquent
ministers. That is true. We ministers all feel that to be true. Our
miserable experience tells us that is only too true of ourselves. What a
flood of demoralising talk has been poured out from the pulpits of this
one city to-day! - demoralising to preachers and to hearers both,
because not intended to be put in practice. How few of those who have
talked and heard talk all this day about divine truth and human duty,
have made the least beginning or the least resolve to live as they have
spoken and heard! And, yet, all will in words again admit that the soul
of religion is the practick part, and that the tongue without the heart
and the life is but death and corruption.
Let us, then, this very night begin to do something practical after all this talk about talk. And let us all begin to do something in the
direct line of our present talk. What a noble congregation of
evangelical Carthusians that would make us if we all put a bridle on
our tongue tonight before we left this house. For we all have
neighbours, friends, enemies, against whom we every day sin with our
unbridled tongue. We all have acquaintances we are ashamed to meet,
we have been so unkind and so unjust to them with our tongue. We
hang down our head when they shake our hand. Yes, we know the
men quite well of whom Pascal speaks. We know many men who
would never speak to us again if they only knew how, and how often,
we have spoken about them behind their back. Well, let us sin against
them, and against ourselves, and against our Master's command and
example no more. Let this night and this lecture on Talkative and his
kindred see the last of our sin against our ill-used neighbour. Let us
promise God and our own consciences to-night, that we shall all this
week put on a bridle about that man, and about that subject, and in
that place, and in that company. Let us say, God helping me, I shall for
all this week not speak about that man at all, anything either good or
bad, nor on that subject, nor will I let the conversation turn into that
channel at all if I can help it. And God will surely help us, till, after
weeks and years of such prayer and such practice, we shall by slow
degrees, and after many defeats, be able to say with the Psalmist, 'I
will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my tongue. I will keep
my mouth with a bridle. I will be dumb with silence. I will hold my
peace even from good.'
JUDGE HATE-GOOD
'Hear, O heads of Jacob, and ye princes of the house of Israel . . . who
hate the good and love the evil.' - Micah.
The portrait of Judge Hate-good in The Pilgrim's Progress is but a
poor replica, as our artists say, of the portrait of Judge Jeffreys in our
English history books. I am sure you have often read, with
astonishment at Bunyan's literary power, his wonderful account of the
trial of Faithful, when, as Bunyan says, he was brought forth to his trial
in order to his condemnation. We have the whole ecclesiastical
jurisprudence of Charles and James Stuart put before us in that single
satirical sentence. But, powerful as Bunyan's whole picture of Judge
Hate-good's court is, it is a tame and a poor picture compared with
what all the historians tell us of the injustice and cruelty of the court
of Judge Jeffreys. Macaulay's portrait of the Lord Chief Justice of
England for ferocity and fiendishness beats out of sight Bunyan's
picture of that judge who keeps Satan's own seal in Bunyan's Book.
Jeffreys was bred for his future work at the bar of the Old Bailey, a bar
already proverbial for the licence of its tongue and for the coarseness
of its cases.
Jeffreys served his apprenticeship for the service that our two last
Stuarts had in reserve for him so well, that he soon became, so his
beggared biographer describes him, the most consummate bully that
ever disgraced an English bench. The boldest impudence when he was
a young advocate, and the most brutal ferocity when he was an old
judge, sat equally secure on the brazen forehead of George Jeffreys.
The real and undoubted ability and scholarship of Jeffreys only made
his wickedness the more awful, and his whole career the greater curse
both to those whose tool he was, and to those whose blood he drank
daily. Jeffreys drank brandy and sang lewd songs all night, and he
drank blood and cursed and swore on the bench all day. Just imagine
the state of our English courts when a judge could thus assail a poor
wretch of a woman after passing a cruel sentence upon her.
'Hangman,' shouted the ermined brute, 'Hangman, pay particular
attention to this lady. Scourge her soundly, man. Scourge her till the
blood runs. It is the Christmas season; a cold season for madam to
strip in. See, therefore, man, that you warm her shoulders thoroughly.'
And you all know who Richard Baxter was. You have all read his
seraphic book, The Saints' Rest. Well, besides being the Richard Baxter so well known to our saintly fathers and mothers, he was also, and he
was emphatically, the peace-maker of the Puritan party. Baxter's
political principles were of the most temperate and conciliatory, and
indeed, almost royalist kind. He was a man of strong passions, indeed,
but all the strength and heat of his passions ran out into his hatred of
sin and his love of holiness, and an unsparing and consuming care for
the souls of his people. Very Faithful himself stood before the bar of
Judge Jeffreys in the person of Richard Baxter. It took all the barefaced
falsehood and scandalous injustice of the crown prosecutors to draw
out the sham indictment that was read out in court against inoffensive
Richard Baxter. But what was lacking in the charge of the crown was
soon made up by the abominable scurrility of the judge. 'You are a
schismatical knave,' roared out Jeffreys, as soon as Baxter was brought
into court. 'You are an old hypocritical villain.' And then, clasping his
hands and turning up his eyes, he sang through his nose: 'O Lord, we
are Thy peculiar people: we are Thy dear and only people.' 'You old
blockhead,' he again roared out, 'I will have you whipped through the
city at the tail of the cart. By the grace of God I will look after you,
Richard.' And the tiger would have been as good as his word had not
an overpowering sense of shame compelled the other judges to
protest and get Baxter's inhuman sentence commuted to fine and
imprisonment. And so on, and so on. But it was Jeffreys' 'Western
Circuit,' as it was called, that filled up the cup of his infamy - an infamy,
say the historians, that will last as long as the language and the history
of England last. The only parallel to it is the infamy of a royal house
and a royal court that could welcome home and promote to honour
such a detestable miscreant as Jeffreys was. But the slaughter in
Somerset was only over in order that a similar slaughter in London
might begin. Let those who have a stomach for more blood and tears
follow out the hell upon earth that James Stuart and George Jeffreys
together let loose on the best life of England in their now fast-
shortening day. Was Judge Jeffreys, some of you will ask me, born and
bred in hell? Was the devil his father, and original sin his mother? Or,
was he not the very devil himself come to earth for a season in English
flesh? No, my brethren, not so. Judge Jeffreys was one of ourselves.
Little George Jeffreys was born and brought up in a happy English
home. He was baptised and confirmed in an English church. He took honours in an English university. He ate dinners, was called to the bar,
conducted cases, and took silk in an English court of justice. And in the
ripeness of his years and of his services, he wore the honourable
ermine and sat upon the envied wool-sack of an English sovereign. It
would have been far less awful and far less alarming to think of, had
Judge Jeffreys been, as you supposed, a pure devil let loose on the
Church of Christ and the awakening liberty of England. But some
innocent soul will ask me next whether there has ever been any other
monster on the face of the earth like Judge Jeffreys; and whether by
any possibility there are any such monsters anywhere in our own day.
Yes, truth compels me to reply.
Yes, there are, plenty, too many. Only their environment,
nowadays, as our naturalists say, does not permit them to grow to
such strength and dimensions as those of James Stuart, and George
Jeffreys, his favourite judge. At the same time, be not deceived by your
own deceitful heart, nor by any other deceiver's smooth speeches.
Judge Jeffreys is in yourself, only circumstances have not yet let him
fully show himself in you. Still, if you look close enough and deep
enough into your own hearts, you will see the same wicked light
glancing sometimes there that used so to terrify Judge Jeffreys'
prisoners when they saw it in his wicked eyes. If you lay your ear close
enough to your own heart, you will sometimes hear something of that
same hiss with which that human serpent sentenced to torture and to
death the men and the women who would not submit to his
command. The same savage laughter also will sometimes all but
escape your lips as you think of how your enemy has been made to
suffer in body and in estate. O yes, the very same hell-broth that ran
for blood in Judge Jeffreys' heart is in all our hearts also; and those
who have the least of its poison left in their hearts will be the foremost
to confess its presence, and to hate and condemn and bewail
themselves on account of its terrible dregs.
HATE-GOOD is an awful enough name for any human being to
bear. Those who really know what goodness is, and then, what hatred
is, - they will feel how awful a thing it is for any man to hate goodness.
But there is something among us sinful men far more awful than even
that, and that is to hate God. The carnal mind, writes the apostle Paul
to the Romans - and it is surely the most terrible sentence that often terrible enough apostle ever wrote - the carnal mind is enmity against
God. And Dr. John Owen annotating on that sentence is equally
terrible. The carnal mind, he says, has 'chosen a great enemy indeed.'
And having mentioned John Owen, will you let me once more beseech
all students of divinity, that is, all students, amongst other things, of
the desperate depravity of the human heart, to read John Owen's sixth
volume till they have it by heart, - by a broken, believing heart. Owen
On Indwelling Sin is one of the greatest works of the great Puritan
period. It is a really great, and as we nowadays say, a truly scientific
work to the bargain. But all that by the way. Yes, this carnal heart that
is still left in every one of us has chosen a great enemy, and it would
need both strong and faithful allies in order to fight him. The hatred
that His Son also met with when He was in this world is one of the
most hateful pages of this hateful world's hateful history. He knew His
own heart towards His enemies, and thus He was able to say to the
Searcher of Hearts with His dying breath, They hated Me without a
cause. Truly our hatred is hottest when it is most unjust.
'Look to yourselves,' wrote the apostle John to the elect lady and
her children. Yes; let us all look sharply and suspiciously to ourselves
in this matter now in hand, and we shall not need John Owen nor
anybody else to discover to us the hatred and the hatefulness of our
own hearts. Look to yourselves, and the work of the law will soon be
fulfilled in you. Homo homini lupus, taught an old philosopher who
had studied moral philosophy not in books so much as in his own
heart. 'Is no man naturally good?' asked innocent Lady Macleod of
Dunvegan Castle at her guest, Dr. Samuel Johnson. 'No, madam, no
more than a wolf.' That is quite past all question with all those who
either in natural morals or in revealed religion look to and know and
characterise themselves. We have all an inborn propensity to dislike
one another, and a very small provocation will suddenly blow that
banked-up furnace into a flame. It is ever present with me, says self-
examining Paul, and hence its so sudden and so destructive outbreaks.
So the written or the printed name of our enemy, his image in our
mind, his passing step, his figure out of the window; his wife, his child,
his carriage, his cart in the street, anything, everything will stir up our
heart at the man we do not like.
And the whole of our so honest Bible, our present text, and the illustrations of our text in Judge Jeffreys' and Judge Hate-good's
courts, all go to show that the better a man is the more sometimes will
we hate him. Good men, better men than we are, men who in public
life and in private life pursue great and good ends, of necessity cross
and go counter to us in our pursuit of small, selfish, evil ends, and of
necessity we hate them. For, cross a selfish sinner sufficiently and you
have a very devil - as many good men, if they knew it, have in us.
Again, good men who come into contact with us cannot help seeing
our bad lives, our tempers, our selfishness, our public and private
vices; and we see that they see us, and we cannot love those whose
averted eye so goes to our conscience. And not only in the hatred of
good men, but if you know of God how to watch yourselves, you will
find yourselves out every day also in the hatred of good movements,
good causes, good institutions, and good works. There are doctors
who would far rather hear of their rival's patient expiring in his hands
than hear their rival's success trumpeted through all the town. There
are ministers, also, who would rather that the masses of the city and
the country sank yet deeper into improvidence and drink and neglect
of ordinances than that they were rescued by any other church than
their own. They hate to hear of the successes of another church. There
are party politicians who would rather that the ship of the state ran on
the rocks both in her home and her foreign policy than that the
opposite party should steer her amid a nation's cheers into harbour.
And so of good news. I will stake the divine truth of this evening's
Scriptures, and of their historical and imaginative illustrations, on the
feelings, if you know how to observe, detect, characterise, and confess
them, - the feelings, I say, that will rise in your heart to-morrow
morning when you read what is good news to other men, even to good
men, and to the families and family interests of good men. It does not
matter one atom into what profession, office, occupation, interest you
track the corrupt heart of man, as sure as a substance casts a shadow,
so sure will you find your own selfish heart hating goodness when the
goodness does not serve or flatter you.
Now, though they will never be many, yet there must be some
men among us, one here and another there, who have so looked at and
found out themselves. I can well believe that some men here came up
to this house to-night trembling in their heart all the way. They felt the very advertisement go through them like a knife: they felt that they
were summoned up hither almost by name as to judgment. For they
feel every day, though they have never told their feelings to any, that
they have this horrible heart deep-seated within them to love evil and
to hate good. They gnash their teeth at themselves as they catch
themselves rejoicing in iniquity. They feel their hearts expanding, and
they know that their faces shine, when you tell them evil tidings. They
sicken and lose heart and sit solitary when you carry to them a good
report. They feel as John Bunyan felt, that no one but the devil can
equal them in pollution of heart. And their wonder sometimes is that
the Searcher of Hearts does not drive them down where devils dwell
and hate God and man and one another. They look around them when
the penitential psalm is being sung, and they smile bitterly to
themselves. O people of God, they say, you do not know what you are
saying. Leave that psalm to me. I can sing it. I can tell to God what He
knows about sin, and about sin in the heart. Stand away back from me,
that man says, for I am a leper. The chief of sinners is beside you. A
whited sepulchre stands open beside you. - Stop now, O hating and
hateful man, and let me speak for a single moment before we separate.
Before you say any more about yourself, and before you leave the
house of God, lift up your broken heart and with all your might bless
God that He has opened your eyes and taught you how to look at
yourself and how to hate yourself. There are hundreds of honest
Christian men and women in this house at this moment to whom God
has not done as, in His free grace, He has done to you. For He has not
only begun a good work in you, but He has begun that special and
peculiar work which, when it goes on to perfection, makes a great and
an eminent saint of God. To know your own heart as you evidently
know it, and to hate it as you say you hate it, and to hunger after a
clean heart as, with every breath, you hunger, - all that, if you would
only believe it, sets you, or will yet set you, high up among the people
of God. Be comforted; it is your bounden duty to be comforted. God
deserves it at your hands that you be more than comforted amid such
unmistakable signs of His eminent grace to you. And be patient under
your exceptional sanctification. Rome was not built in a day. You
cannot reverse the awful law of your sanctification. You cannot be
saved by Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit without seeing yourself, and you cannot see yourself without hating yourself, and you cannot begin
to hate yourself without all your hatred henceforth turning against
yourself. You are deep in the red-hot bosom of the refiner's fire. And
when you are once sufficiently tried by the Divine Refiner of Souls, He
will in His own good time and way bring you out as gold. Be patient,
therefore, till the coming of the Lord. And say continually amid all
your increasing knowledge of yourself, and amid all your increasing
hatred of yourself, 'As for me, I will behold Thy face in righteousness; I
shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness.'
FAITHFUL IN VANITY FAIR
'Be thou faithful.' - Rev. 2. 10.
The breadth of John Bunyan's mind, the largeness of his heart,
and the tolerance of his temper all come excellently out in his fine
portrait of Faithful. New beginners in personal religion, when they
first take up The Pilgrim's Progress in earnest, always try to find out
something in themselves that shall somewhat correspond to the
recorded experience of Christian, the chief pilgrim. And they are afraid
that all is not right with them unless they, like him, have had, to begin
with, a heavy burden on their back. They look for something in their
religious life that shall answer to the Slough of Despond also, to the
Hill Difficulty, to the House Beautiful, and, especially and
indispensably, to the place somewhat ascending with a cross upon it
and an open sepulchre beneath it. And because they cannot always
find all these things in themselves in the exact order and in the full
power in which they are told of Christian in Bunyan's book, they begin
to have doubts about themselves as to whether they are true pilgrims
at all. But here is Faithful, with whom Christian held such sweet and
confidential discourse, and yet he had come through not a single one
of all these things. The two pilgrims had come from the same City of
Destruction indeed, and they had met at the gate of Vanity and passed
through Vanity Fair together, but, till they embraced one another again
in the Celestial City, that was absolutely all the experience they had in
common. Faithful had never had any such burden on his back as that
was which had for so long crushed Christian to the earth. And the all
but complete absence of such a burden may have helped to let Faithful
get over the Slough of Despond dry shod. He had the good lot to
escape Sinai also and the Hill Difficulty, and his passing by the House
Beautiful and not making the acquaintance of Discretion and
Prudence and Charity may have had something to do with the fact that
one named Wanton had like to have done him such a mischief. His
remarkable experiences, however, with Adam the First, with Moses,
and then with the Man with holes in His hands, all that makes up a
page in Faithful's autobiography we could ill have spared. His
encounter with Shame also, and soon afterwards with Talkative, are
classical passages in his so individual history. Altogether, it would be
almost impossible for us to imagine two pilgrims talking so heartily
together, and yet so completely unlike one another. A very important lesson surely as to how we should abstain from measuring other men
by ourselves, as well as ourselves by other men; an excellent lesson
also as to how we should learn to allow for all possible varieties
among good men, both in their opinions, their experiences, and their
attainments. True Puritan as the author of The Pilgrim's Progress is,
he is no Procrustes. He does not cut down all his pilgrims to one size,
nor does he clip them all into one pattern. They are all thinking men,
but they are not all men of one way of thinking. John Bunyan is as
fresh as Nature herself, and as free and full as Holy Scripture herself in
the variety, in the individuality, and even in the idiosyncrasy of his
spiritual portrait gallery.
Vanity Fair is one of John Bunyan's universally-admitted
masterpieces. The very name of the fair is one of his happiest strokes.
Thackeray's famous book owes half its popularity to the happy name
he borrowed from John Bunyan. Thackeray's author's heart must have
leaped in his bosom when Vanity Fair struck him as a title for his great
satire. 'Then I saw in my dream that when they were got out of the
wilderness they presently saw a town before them, and the name of
that town is Vanity, and at that town there is a fair kept called Vanity
Fair. The fair is kept all the year long, and it beareth the name of
Vanity Fair, because the town where it is kept is lighter than Vanity.
And, also, because all that is sold there is vanity. As is the saying of the
wise, All that cometh is vanity. The fair is no new erected business, but
a thing of ancient standing: I will show you the original of it. About
five thousand years ago there were pilgrims walking to the Celestial
City, as these two honest persons now are, and Beelzebub, Apollyon,
and Legion, with their companions, perceiving that by the path that
the pilgrims made, that their way to the city lay through this town of
Vanity, they contrived there to set up a fair: a fair wherein should be
sold all sorts of vanity, and that it should last all the year long.
Therefore at this fair are all such merchandise sold as houses, lands,
trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms,
pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as wives, husbands, children,
masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, precious
stones, and what not.
And, moreover, at this fair at all times there is to be seen juggling,
cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind.' And then our author goes on to tell us the names of the various
streets and rows where such and such wares are vended. And from
that again he goes on to tell how the Prince of princes Himself went at
one time through this same fair, and that upon a fair day too, and how
the lord of the fair himself came and took Him from street to street to
try to get Him induced to cheapen and buy some of the vain
merchandise. But as it turned out He had no mind to the merchandise
in question, and He therefore passed through the town without laying
out so much as one farthing upon its vanities. The fair, therefore, you
will see, is of long standing and a very great fair. Now, our two
pilgrims had heard of all that, they remembered also what Evangelist
had told them about the fair, and so they buttoned up their pockets
and pushed through the booths in the hope of getting out at the upper
gate before any one had time to speak to them. But that was not
possible, for they were soon set upon by the men of the fair, who cried
after them: 'Hail, strangers, look here, what will you buy?' 'We buy the
truth only,' said Faithful, 'and we do not see any of that article of
merchandise set out on any of your stalls.' And from that began a
hubbub that ended in a riot, and the riot in the apprehension and
shutting up in a public cage of the two innocent pilgrims. Lord Hate-
good was the judge on the bench of Vanity in the day of their trial, and
the three witnesses who appeared in the witness-box against the two
prisoners were Envy, Superstition, and Pickthank. The twelve jurymen
who sat on their case were Mr. Blindman, Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr.
Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr.
Liar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, and Mr. Implacable, - Mr. Blindman to
be the foreman. And it was before these men that Faithful was brought
forth to his trial in order to his condemnation. And very soon after his
trial Faithful came to his end. 'Now I saw that there stood behind the
multitude a chariot and a couple of horses waiting for Faithful, who
[so soon as his adversaries had despatched him) was taken up into it,
and straightway was carried up through the clouds, with sound of
trumpet, the nearest way to the Celestial gate.'
Now, I cannot tell you how it was, I cannot account for it to
myself, but it is nevertheless absolutely true that as I was reading my
author last week and was meditating my present exposition, it came
somehow into my mind, and I could not get it out of my mind, that there is a great and a close similarity between John Bunyan's Vanity
Fair and a general election. And, all I could do to keep the whole thing
out of my mind, one similarity after another would leap up into my
mind and would not be put out of it. I protest that I did not go out to
seek for such similarities, but the more I frowned on them the thicker
they came. And then the further question arose as to whether I should
write them down or no; and then much more, as to whether I should
set them out before my people or no. As you will easily believe, I was
immediately in a real strait as to what I should do. I saw on the one
side what would be sure to be said by ill-natured people and people of
a hasty judgment. And I saw with much more anxiety what would be
felt even when they restrained themselves from saying it by timid and
cautious and scrupulous people. I had the full fear of all such judges
before my eyes; but, somehow, something kept this before my eyes
also, that, as Evangelist met the two pilgrims just as they were
entering the fair, so, for anything I knew to the contrary, it might be of
God, that I also, in my own way, should warn my people of the real and
special danger that their souls will be in for the next fortnight. And as
I thought of it a procession of people passed before me all bearing to
this day the stains and scars they had taken on their hearts and their
lives and their characters at former general elections. And, like
Evangelist, I felt a divine desire taking possession of me to do all I
could to pull my people out of gunshot of the devil at this election.
And, then, when I read again how both the pilgrims thanked
Evangelist for his exhortation, and told him withal that they would
have him speak further to them about the dangers of the way, I said at
last to myself, that the thanks of one true Christian saved in anything
and in any measure from the gun of the devil are far more to be
attended to by a minister than the blame and the neglect of a hundred
who do not know their hour of temptation and will not be told it. And
so I took my pen and set down some similarities between Vanity Fair
and the approaching election, with some lessons to those who are not
altogether beyond being taught.
Well, then, in the first place, the only way to the Celestial City ran
through Vanity Fair; by no possibility could the advancing pilgrims
escape the temptations and the dangers of the fatal fair. He that will go
to the Celestial City and yet not go through Vanity Fair must needs go out of the world. And so it is with the temptations and trials of the
next ten days. We cannot get past them. They are laid down right
across our way. And to many men now in this house the next ten days
will be a time of simply terrible temptation. If I had been quite sure
that all my people saw that and felt that, I would not have introduced
here to-night what some of them, judging too hastily, will certainly call
this so secular and unseemly subject. But I am so afraid that many not
untrue, and in other things most earnest men amongst us, do not yet
know sufficiently the weakness and the evil of their own hearts, that I
wish much, if they will allow me, to put them on their guard. ''Tis
hard,' said Contrite, who was a householder and had a vote in the
town of Vanity, ''tis hard keeping our hearts and our spirits in any
good order when we are in a cumbered condition. And you may be
sure that we are full of hurry at fair-time. He that lives in such a place
as this is, and that has to do with such as we have to do with, has need
of an item to caution him to take heed every hour of the day.' Now, if
all my people, and all this day's communicants, were only contrite
enough, I would leave them to the hurry of the approaching election
with much more comfort. But as it is, I wish to give them such an item
as I am able to caution them for the next ten days. Let them know,
then, that their way for the next fortnight lies, I will not say through a
fair of jugglings and cheatings, carried on by apes and knaves, but, to
speak without figure, their way certainly lies through what will be to
many of them a season of the greatest temptation to the very worst of
all possible sins - to anger and bitterness and ill-will; to no end of evil-
thinking and evil-speaking; to the breaking up of lifelong friendships;
and to widespread and lasting damage to the cause of Christ, which is
the cause of truth and love, meekness and a heavenly mind. Now, amid
all that, as Evangelist said to the two pilgrims, look well to your own
hearts. Let none of all these evil things enter your heart from the
outside, and let none of all these evil things come out of your hearts
from the inside. Set your faces like a flint from the beginning against
all evil-speaking and evil-thinking. Let your own election to the
kingdom of heaven be always before you, and walk worthy of it; and
amid all the hurry of things seen and temporal, believe steadfastly
concerning the things that are eternal, and walk worthy of them.
'We buy the truth and we sell it not again for anything,' was the reply of the two pilgrims to every stall-keeper as they passed up the
fair, and this it was that made them to be so hated and hunted down
by the men of the fair. And, in like manner, there is nothing more
difficult to get hold of at an election time than just the very truth. All
the truth on any question is not very likely to be found put forward in
the programme of any man or any party, and, even if it were, a general
election is not the best time for you to find it out. 'I design the search
after truth to be the one business of my life,' wrote the future Bishop
Butler at the age of twenty-one. And whether you are to be a member
of Parliament or a silent voter for a member of Parliament, you, too,
must love truth and search for her as for hid treasure from your youth
up. You must search for all kinds of truth, - historical, political,
scientific, and religious, - with much reading, much observation, and
much reflection. And those who have searched longest and dug
deepest will always be found to be the most temperate, patient, and
forbearing with those who have not yet found the truth. I do not know
who first said it, but he was a true disciple of Socrates and Plato who
first said it. 'Plato,' he said, 'is my friend, and Socrates is my friend, but
the truth is much more my friend.' There is a thrill of enthusiasm,
admiration and hope that goes through the whole country and comes
down out of history as often as we hear or read of some public man
parting with all his own past, as well as with all his leaders and
patrons and allies and colleagues in the present, and taking his
solitary way out after the truth. Many may call that man Quixotic,
visionary, unpractical, imprudent, and he may be all that and more,
but to follow conscience and the love of truth even when they are for
the time leading him wrong is noble, and is every way far better both
for himself and for the cause he serves, than if he were always found
following his leaders loyally and even walking in the way of
righteousness with the love of self and the love of party at bottom
ruling his heart. How healthful and how refreshing at an election time
it is to hear a speech replete with the love of the truth, full knowledge
of the subject, and with the dignity, the good temper, the respect for
opponents, and the love of fair play that full knowledge of the whole
subject is so well fitted to bring with it! And next to hearing such a
speaker is the pleasure of meeting such a hearer or such a reader at
such a time. Now, I want such readers and such hearers, if not such speakers, to be found all the next fortnight among my office-bearers
and my people. Be sure you say to some of your political opponents
something like this: - 'I do not profess to read all the speeches that fill
the papers at present. I do not read all the utterances made even on
my own side, and much less all the utterances made on your side. But
there is one of your speakers I always read, and I almost always find
him instructive and impressive, a gentleman, if not a Christian. He is
fair, temperate, frank, bold, and independent; and, to my mind at least,
he always throws light on these so perplexing questions.' Now, if you
have the intelligence and the integrity and the fair-mindedness to say
something like that to a member of the opposite party you have
poured oil on the waters of party; nay, you are in that a wily politician,
for you have almost, just in saying that, won over your friend to your
own side. So noble is the love of truth, and so potent is the high-
principled pursuit and the fearless proclamation of the truth.
A general election is a trying time to all kinds of public men, but it
is perhaps most trying of all to Christian ministers. Unless they are to
disfranchise themselves and are to detach and shut themselves in
from all interest in public affairs altogether, an election time is to our
ministers, beyond any other class of citizens perhaps, a peculiarly
trying time. How they are to escape the Scylla of cowardice and the
contempt of all free and true men on the one hand, and the Charybdis
of pride and self-will and scorn of other men's opinions and wishes on
the other, is no easy dilemma to our ministers. Some happily
constituted and happily circumstanced ministers manage to get
through life, and even through political life, without taking or giving a
wound in all their way. They are so wise and so watchful; they are so
inoffensive, unprovoking, and conciliatory; and even where they are
not always all that, they have around them sometimes a people who
are so patient and tolerant and full of the old-fashioned respect for
their minister that they do not attempt to interfere with him. Then,
again, some ministers preach so well, and perform all their pastoral
work so well, that they make it unsafe and impossible for the most
censorious and intolerant of their people to find fault with them. But
all our ministers are not like that. And all our congregations are not
like that. And those of our ministers who are not like that must just be
left to bear that which their past unwisdom or misfortune has brought upon them. Only, if they have profited by their past mistakes or
misfortunes, a means of grace, and an opportunity of better playing
the man is again at their doors. I am sure you will all join with me in
the prayer that all our ministers, as well as all their people, may come
well out of the approaching election.
There is yet one other class of public men, if I may call them so,
many of whom come almost worse out of an election time than even
our ministers, and that class is composed of those, who, to continue
the language of Vanity Fair, keep the cages of the fair. I wish I had
tonight, what I have not, the ear of the conductors of our public
journals. For, what an omnipotence in God's providence to this
generation for good or evil is theirs! If they would only all consider
well at election times, and at all times, who they put into their cages
and for what reason; if they would only all ask what can that man's
motives be for throwing such dirt at his neighbour; if they would only
all set aside all the letters they will get during the next fortnight that
are avowedly composed on the old principle of calumniating boldly in
the certainty that some of it will stick, what a service they would do to
the cause of love and truth and justice, which is, surely, after all, their
own cause also! The very best papers sin sadly in this respect when
their conductors are full for the time of party passion. And it is
inexpressibly sad when a reader sees great journals to which he owes
a lifelong debt of gratitude absolutely poisoned under his very eyes
with the malignant spirit of untruthful partisanship. But so long as our
public cages are so kept, let those who are exposed in them resolve to
imitate Christian and Faithful, who behaved themselves amid all their
ill-usage yet more wisely, and received all the ignominy and shame
that was cast upon them with so much meekness and patience that it
actually won to their side several of the men of the fair.
My brethren, this is the last time this season that I shall be able to
speak to you from this pulpit; and, perhaps, the last time altogether.
But, if it so turns out, I shall not repent that the last time I spoke to
you, and that, too, immediately after the communion table, the burden
of my message was the burden of my Master's message after the first
communion table. 'If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.
A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another. By this
shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another. Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit, so shall
ye be My disciples. These things have I spoken unto you that in Me ye
might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of
good cheer, I have overcome the world. Know ye what I have done
unto you? Ye call Me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I am.'
BY-ENDS
'Ye seek Me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of
the loaves.' - Our Lord.
In no part of John Bunyan's ingenious book is his strong sense
and his sarcastic and humorous vein better displayed than just in his