Part 2
faith and patience is full, prove quite too much for some men till they
give themselves up to a state of mind that is nothing better than
atheism. "My evidences and my certainty," says Halyburton, "were not answerable to the weight I was compelled to lay upon them." A figure
which Goodwin in his own tender and graphic way takes up thus: "Set
pins in a wall and fix them in ever so loosely, yet, if you hang nothing
upon them they will seem to stand firm; but hang a heavy weight upon
them, or even give them the least jog as you pass, and the whole thing
will suddenly come down. The wall is God's word, the slack pin is our
faith, and the weight and the jog are the heavy burdens and the
sudden shocks of life, and down our hearts go, wall and pin and
suspended vessel and all."
When the church and her ministers, when the Scriptures and their
anomalies, and when the faults and failings of Christian men are made the subject of mockery and laughter, the reverence, the fear, the awe,
the respect that all enter so largely into religion, and especially into
the religion of young people, is too easily destroyed; and not seldom
the first seeds of practical and sometimes of speculative atheism are
thus sown. The mischief that has been done by mockery and laughter
to the souls, especially of the young and the inexperienced, only the
great day will fully disclose. And then, two men of great weight and
authority with us, tell us what we who are ministers would have found
out without them: this, namely, that the greatest atheists are they who
are ever handling holy things without feeling them.
"Is it true," said Christian to Hopeful, his fellow, "is it true what this man hath said?" "Take heed," said Hopeful, "remember what it hath cost us already for hearkening to such kind of fellows. What! No
Mount Zion! Did we not see from the Delectable Mountains the gate of
the City? And, besides, are we not to walk by faith? Let us go on lest
the man with the whip overtakes us again." Christian: "My brother, I said that but to prove thee, and to fetch from thee a fruit of the
honesty of thy heart." Many a deep and powerful passage has Butler
composed on that thesis which Hopeful here supplies him with; and
many a brilliant sermon has Newman preached on that same text till
he has made our "predispositions to faith" a fruitful and an ever fresh commonplace to hundreds of preachers. Yes; the best bulwark of faith
is a good and honest heart. To such a happy heart the truth is its own
unshaken evidence. To whom can we go but to Thee? - they who have
such a heart protest. The whole bent of such men's minds is toward
the truth of the gospel. Their instincts keep them on the right way
even when their reason and their observation are both confounded.
As Newman keeps on saying, they are "easy of belief." They cannot
keep away from Christ and His church. They cannot turn back. They
must go on. Though He slay them they will die yearning after Him.
They often fall into great error and into great guilt, but their seed
remaineth in them, and they cannot continue in error or in guilt,
because they are born of God. They are they in whom
"Persuasion and belief
Have ripened into faith; and faith become
A passionate intuition."
HOPEFUL
"We are saved by hope." - Paul
Up till the time when Christian and Faithful passed through
Vanity Fair on their way to the Celestial City, Hopeful was one of the
most light-minded men in all that light-minded town. By his birth, and
both on his father's and his mother's side, Hopeful was, to begin with,
a youth of an unusually shallow and silly mind. In the jargon of our
day he was a man of a peculiarly optimistic temperament. No one ever
blamed him for being too subjective and introspective. It took many
sharp trials and many bitter disappointments to take the inborn
frivolity and superficiality out of this young man's heart. He was far on
in his life, he was far on even in his religious life, before you would
have ever thought of calling him a serious-minded man. Hopeful had
been born and brought up to early manhood in the town of Vanity, and
he knew nothing better and desired nothing better than to lay out his
whole life and to rest all his hopes on the things of the fair; on such
things, that is, as houses, lands, places, honours, preferments, titles,
pleasures, and delights of all sorts. And that vain and empty life went
on with him, till, as he told his companion afterwards, it had all ended
with him in revelling, and drinking, and uncleanness, and Sabbath-
breaking, and all such things as destroyed his soul. But in Hopeful's
happy case also the blood of the martyrs became the seed of the
church. Hopeful, as he was afterwards called, had suffered so many
bitter disappointments and shipwrecks of expectation from the things
of the fair, that is to say, from the houses, the places, the preferments,
the pleasures and what not, of the fair, that even his heart was ripe for
something better than any of those things, when, as God would have it,
Christian and Faithful came to the town. Hopeful was still hanging
about the booths of the fair; he was just fingering his last sixpence
over a commodity that he knew quite well would be like gall in his
belly as soon as he had bought it; when, - what is that hubbub that
rolls down the street? Hopeful was always the first to see and to hear
every new thing that came to the town, and thus it was that he was
soon in the thick of the tumult that rose around Christian and Faithful.
Had those two pilgrims come to the town at any former time, Hopeful
would have been among the foremost to mock at and smite the two
men; but, to-day, Hopeful's heart is so empty, and his purse also, that
he is already won to their side by the loving looks and the wise and sweet words of the two ill-used men. Some of the men of the town
said that the two pilgrims were outlandish and bedlamite men, but
Hopeful took courage to reprove some of the foremost of the mob. Till,
at last, when Faithful was at the stake, it was all that his companions
could do to keep back Hopeful from leaping up on the burning pile
and embracing the expiring man. And then, when He who overrules all
things so brought it about that Christian escaped out of their hands,
who should come forth and join him at the upward gate of the city but
just Hopeful, who not only joined himself to the lonely pilgrim, but
told him also that there were many more of the men of the city who
would take their time and follow after. And thus, adds his biographer,
when one died to make his testimony to the truth, another rose up out
of his ashes to be a companion to Christian.
When Madame Krudener was getting her foot measured by a
pietist shoemaker, she was so struck with the repose and the
sweetness and the heavenly joy of the poor man's look and manner
that she could not help but ask him what had happened to him that he
had such a look on his countenance and such a light in his eye. She
was miserable, though she had all that heart could wish. She had all
that made her one of the most envied women in Europe; she had birth,
talents, riches, rank, and the friendship of princes and princesses, and
yet she was of all women the most miserable. And here was a poor
chance shoemaker whose whole heart was running over with a joy
such that all her wealth could not purchase to her heart one single
drop of it. The simple soul soon told her his secret; it was no secret: it
was just Jesus Christ who had done it all. And thus her poor
shoemaker's happy face was the means of this great lady's conversion.
And, in like manner, it was the beholding of Christian and Faithful in
their words and in their behaviour at the fair that decided Hopeful to
join himself to Christian and henceforth to be his companion. What
were the things, asked Christian of his young companion, that first led
you to leave off the vanities of the fair and to think to be a pilgrim?
Many things, replied Hopeful. Sometimes if I did but meet a good man
in the street. Or if mine head began unaccountably, or mine heart, to
ache. Or if some one of my companions became suddenly sick. Or if I
heard the bell toll that some one was dead. But, especially, when I
thought of myself that I must quickly come to judgment. And then it is told in the best style of the book how peace and rest and the
beginning of true satisfaction came to poor Hopeful's heart at last. But
you must promise me to read the passage for yourselves before you
sleep to-night; and to read it again and again till, like Hopeful's, your
heart also is full of joy, and your eyes full of tears, and your affections
running over with love to the name and to the people and to all the
ways of Jesus Christ.
And then, it is very encouraging and reassuring to us to see how
Hopeful's true conversion so deepened and sobered and strengthened
his whole character. He remained to the end in his mental constitution
and whole temperament, as we say, the same man he had always been;
but, while remaining the same man, at the same time a most
wonderful change gradually began to come over him, till, by slow but
sure degrees, he became the Hopeful we know and look to and lean
upon. To use his own autobiographic words about himself, it was "by
hearing and considering of things that are Divine" that his natural
levity was so completely whipped out of his soul till he was made at
last an indispensable companion to Christian, strong-minded and
serious-minded man as he was. "Conversion to God," says William
Law, "is often very sudden and instantaneous, unexpectedly raised
from variety of occasions. Thus, one by seeing only a withered tree,
another by reading the lives and deaths of the antediluvian fathers,
one by hearing of heaven, another of hell, one by reading of the love or
wrath of God, another of the sufferings of Christ, may find himself, as
it were, melted into penitence all of a sudden. It may be granted also
that the greatest sinner may in a moment be converted to God, and
may feel himself wounded in such a degree as perhaps those never
were who have been turning to God all their lives. But, then, it is to be
observed that this suddenness of change or flash of conviction is by no
means of the essence of true conversion. This stroke of conversion is
not to be considered as signifying our high state of a new birth in
Christ, or a proof that we are on a sudden made new creatures, but
that we are thus suddenly called upon and stirred up to look after a
newness of nature. The renewal of our first birth and state is
something entirely distinct from our first sudden conversion and call
to repentance. That is not a thing done in an instant, but is a certain
process, a gradual release from our captivity and disorder, consisting of several stages and degrees, both of life and death, which the soul
must go through before it can have thoroughly put off the old man. It
is well worth observing that our Saviour's greatest trials were near
the end of His life. This might sufficiently show us that our first
awakenings have carried us but a little way; that we should not then
begin to be selfassured of our own salvation, but should remember
that we stand at a great distance from, and are in great ignorance of,
our severest trials." Such was the way that Christian in his experience
and in his wisdom talked to his young companion till his outward
trials and the consequent discoveries he made of his own weakness
and corruption made even Hopeful himself a sober-minded and a
thoughtful man. "Where pain ends, gain ends too."
Then, again, no one can read Hopeful's remarkable history
without discovering this about him, that he showed best in adversity
and distress, just as he showed worst in deliverance and prosperity. It
is a fine lesson in Christian hope to descend into Giant Despair's
dungeon and hear the older pilgrim groaning and the younger pilgrim
consoling him, and, again, to stand on the bank of the last river and
hear Hopeful holding up Christian's drowning head. "Be of good cheer,
my brother, for I feel the bottom, and it is good!" Bless Hopeful for
that, all you whose deathbeds are still before you. For never was more
true and fit word spoken for a dying hour than that. Read, till you have
it by heart and in the dark, Hopeful's whole history, but especially his
triumphant end. And have some one bespoken beforehand to read
Hopeful in the River to you when you have in a great measure lost
your senses, and when a great horror has taken hold of your mind. "I
sink in deep waters," cried Christian, as his sins came to his mind,
even the sins which he had committed both since and before he came
to be a pilgrim. "But I see the gate," said Hopeful, "and men standing at it ready to receive us." "Read to me where I first cast my anchor," said John Knox to his weeping wife.
The Enchanted Ground, on the other hand, threatened to throw
Hopeful back again into his former light-minded state. And there is no
saying what shipwreck he might have made there had the older man
not been with him to steady and reprove and instruct him. As it was, a
touch now and then of his old vain temper returned to him till it took
all his companion's watchfulness and wariness to carry them both out of that second Vanity Fair. "I acknowledge myself in a fault," said
Hopeful to Christian, "and had I been here alone I had run in danger of
death. Hitherto, thy company hath been my mercy, and thou shalt have
a good reward for all thy labour."
Now, my brethren, in my opinion we owe a great debt of gratitude
to John Bunyan for the large and the displayed place he has given to
Hopeful in the Pilgrim's Progress. The fulness and balance and
proportion of the Pilgrim's Progress are features of that wonderful
book far too much overlooked. So far as my reading goes I do not
know any other author who has at all done the justice to the saving
grace of hope that John Bunyan has done both in his doctrinal and in
his allegorical works. Bunyan stands alone and supreme not only for
the insight, and the power with which he has constructed the
character and the career of Hopeful, but even for having given him the
space at all adequate to his merits and his services. In those eighty-
seven so suggestive pages that form the index to Dr. Thomas
Goodwin's works I find some hundred and twenty-four references to
"faith," while there are only two references to "hope." And that same oversight and neglect runs through all our religious literature, and I
suppose, as a consequence, through all our preaching too. Now that is
not the treatment the Bible gives to this so essential Christian grace,
as any one may see at a glance who takes the trouble to turn up his
Cruden. Hope has a great place alongside of faith and love in the Holy
Scriptures, and it has a correspondingly large and eloquent place in
Bunyan. Now, that being so, why is it that this so great and so blessed
grace has so fallen out of our sermons and out of our hearts? May God
grant that our reading of Hopeful's autobiography and his subsequent
history to-night may do something to restore the blessed grace of
hope to its proper place both in our pulpit and in all our hearts.
To kindle then, to quicken, and to anchor your hope, my brethren, may
I have God's help to speak for a little longer to your hearts concerning
this neglected grace! For, what is hope? Hope is a passion of the soul,
wise or foolish, to be ashamed of or to be proud of, just according to
the thing hoped for, and just according to the grounds of the hope.
Hope is made up of these two ingredients - desire and expectation.
What we greatly desire we take no rest till we find good grounds on
which to build up our expectations of it; and when we have found good grounds for our expectations, then a glad hope takes possession
of our hearts. Now, to begin with, how is it with your desires? You are
afraid to say much about your expectations and your hopes. Well; let
us come to your hearts' desires. - Men of God, I will enter into your
hearts and I will tell you your hearts' desires better than you know
them yourselves; for the heart is deceitful above all things. The time
was, when, like this young pilgrim before he became a pilgrim, your
desires were all set on houses, and lands, and places, and honours,
and preferments, and wives, and children, and silver, and gold, and
what not. These things at one time were the utmost limit of your
desires. But that has all been changed. For now you have begun to
desire a better city, that is, an heavenly. What is your chief desire for
this New Year? Is it not a new heart? Is it not a clean heart? Is it not a
holy heart? Is it not that the Holy Ghost would write the golden rule
on the tables of your heart? Does not God know that it is the deepest
desire of your heart to be able to love your neighbour as yourself? To
be able to rejoice with him in his joy as well as to weep with him in his
sorrow? What would you not give never again to feel envy in your
heart at your brother, or straitness and pining at his prosperity? One
thing do I desire, said the Psalmist, that mine ear may be nailed to the
doorpost of my God: that I may always be His servant, and may never
wander from His service. Now, that is your desire too. I am sure it is.
You would not say it of yourself, but I defy you to deny it when it is
said about you. Well, then, such things being found among your
desires, what grounds have you for expecting the fulfilment of such
desires? What grounds? The best of grounds and every ground. For
you have the sure ground of God's word.
And you have more than His word: you have His very nature, and
the very nature of things. For shall God create such desires in any
man's heart only to starve and torture that man? Impossible! It were
blasphemy to suspect it. No. Where God has made any man to be so far
a partaker of the Divine nature as to change all that man's deepest
desires, and to turn them from vanity to wisdom, from earth to
heaven, and from the creature to the Creator, doubt not, wherever He
has begun such a work, that He will hasten to finish it. Yes; lift up your
heavy hearts, all ye who desire such things, for God hath sent His Son
to say to you, Blessed are ye that hunger and thirst after
righteousness, for ye shall be filled. Only, keep desiring. Desire every
day with a stronger and a more inconsolable desire. Desire, and
ground your desire on God's word, and then heave your hope like an
anchor within the veil whither the Forerunner is for you entered. May
I so hope? you say. May I venture to hope? Yes; not only may you hope,
but you must hope. You are commanded to hope. It is as much your
bounden duty to hope always, and to hope for the greatest and best
things, as it is to repent of your sins, to love God and your neighbour,
to keep yourself pure, and to set a watch on the door of your lips. You
have been destroyed, I confess and lament it, for lack of knowledge
about the nature, the grounds, and the duty of hope.
But make up now for past neglect. Hope steadfastly, hope
constantly, hope boldly; hope for the best things, the greatest things,
the most divine and the most blessed things. If you forget to-night all
else you have heard to-day, I implore you not any longer to forget and
neglect this, that hope is your immediate, constant, imperative duty.
No sin, no depth of corruption in your heart, no assault on your heart
from your conscience, can justify you in ceasing to hope. Even when
trouble "comes tumbling over the neck of all your reformations" as it came tumbling on Hopeful, let that only drive you the more deeply
down into the true grounds of hope; even against hope rejoice in hope.
Remember the Psalmist in the hundred-and-thirtieth Psalm, - down in
the deeps, if ever a fallen sinner was. Yet hear him when you cannot
see him saying: I hope in Thy word! And - for it is worthy to stand
beside even that splendid psalm, - I beseech you to read and lay to
heart what Hopeful says about himself in his conversion despair.
And then, as if to justify that hope, there always come with it such
sanctifying influences and such sure results. The hope that you are
one day to awaken in the Divine likeness will make you lie down on
your bed every night in self-examination, repentance, prayer, and
praise. The hope that your eyes are one day to see Christ as He is will
make you purify yourself as nothing else will. The hope that you are to
walk with Christ in white will make you keep your garments clean; it
will make you wash them many times every day in the blood of the
Lamb. The hope that you are to cast your crown at His feet will make
you watch that no man takes your crown from you. The hope that you
are to drink wine with Him in His Father's kingdom will reconcile you meanwhile to water, lest with your wine you stumble any of His little
ones. The hope of hearing Him say, Well done! - how that will make
you labour and endure and not faint! And the hope that you shall one
day enter in through the gates into the city, and have a right to the tree
of life, - how scrupulous that will make you to keep all His
commandments! And this is one of His commandments, that you gird
up the loins of your mind, and hope to the end for the grace that is to
be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
TEMPORARY
"They are they, which, when they hear, receive the word with joy; and
have no root, which for a while believe, and in time of temptation fall
away." - Our Lord.
"Well, then, did you not know about ten years ago one Temporary
in your parts who was a forward man in religion? Know him! replied
the other. Yes. For my house not being above three miles from his
house he would ofttimes come to me, and that with many tears. Truly I
pitied the man, and was not altogether without hope of him; but one
may see that it is not every one who cries Lord, Lord. And now, since
we are talking about him, let us a little inquire into the reason of the
sudden backsliding of him and such others. It may be very profitable,
said Christian, but do you begin. Well, then, there are in my judgment
several reasons for it." And then, with the older man's entire approval,
Hopeful sets forth several reasons, taken from his own observation of
backsliders, why so many men's religion is such a temporary thing;
why so many run well for a time, and then stand still, and then turn
back.
The fear of man bringeth a snare, said Hopeful, moralising over
his old acquaintance Temporary. And how true that observation is
every evangelical minister knows to his deep disappointment. A
young man comes to his minister at some time of distress in his life, or
at some time of revival of religion in the community, or at an ordinary
communion season, and gives every sign that he is early and fairly
embarked on an honourable Christian life. He takes his place in the
Church of Christ, and he puts out his hand to her work, till we begin to
look forward with boastfulness to a life of great stability and great
attainment for that man. Our Lord, as we see from so many of His
parables, must have had many such cases among His first followers.
Our Lord might be speaking prophetically, as well as out of His own
experience, so well do His regretful and lamenting words fit into so
many of our own cases to-day. For, look at that young business man.
He has been born and brought up in the Church of Christ. He has
gladdened more hearts than he knows by the noble promise of his
early days. Many admiring and loving eyes have been turned on him as
he took so hopefully the upward way. But a sifting-time soon comes. A
time of temptation comes. A time comes when sides must be taken in
some moral, religious, ecclesiastical controversy. This young man is at that moment a candidate for a post that will bring distinction, wealth,
and social influence to him who holds it. And the candidate we are so
much interested in is admittedly a man of such outstanding talents
that he would at once get the post were it not that the holder of that
post must not have his name so much associated with such and such a
church, such and such political and religious opinions, and such and
such public men. He is told that. Indeed, he is not so dull as to need to
be told that. He has seen that all along. And at first it is a dreadful
wrench to him. He feels how far he is falling from his high ideals in
life; and, at first, and for a long time, it is a dreadful humiliation to him.
But, then, there are splendid compensations. And, better than that,
there are some good, and indeed compelling, reasons that begin to
rise up in our minds when we need them and begin to look for them,
till what at first seemed so mean and so contemptible, and so
ungrateful, and so dishonourable, as well as so spiritually perilous,
comes to be faced and gone through with positively on a ground of
high principle, and, indeed, of stern moral necessity. So deceitful is the
human heart that you could not believe what compelling reasons such
a mean-spirited man will face you with as to why he should leave all
the ways he once so delighted in for a piece of bread, and for the smile
of the open enemies of his church, and his faith, not to say his Saviour.
You will meet with several such men any afternoon coming home from
their business. Sometimes they have still some honest shame on their
faces when they meet you; but still oftener they pass you with a sullen
hatred and a fierce defiance. This is he who heard the word, and anon
with joy received it. Yet had he not root in himself, but dured for a
while; for when tribulation or persecution arose because of the word
by and by he was offended. They went out from us, says John, but they
were not of us; for if they had been of us they would no doubt have
continued with us; but they went out that they might be made
manifest that they were not all of us.
Guilt, again, Hopeful went on, and to meditate terror, are so
grievous to most men, that they rather choose such ways as will but
harden their hearts still more and more. You all know what it is to
meditate terror? "Thine heart shall meditate terror," says the prophet,
"when thou sayest to thyself, who among us shall dwell with the
devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?"
The fifty-first Psalm is perhaps the best meditation both of guilt and of
terror that we have in the whole Bible. But there are many other
psalms and passages of psalms only second to the fifty-first Psalm,
such as the twenty-second, the thirty-eighth, the sixty-ninth, and the
hundred-and-thirtieth. Our Lord Himself also was meditating terror in
the garden of Gethsemane, and Paul both guilt and terror when he
imagined himself both an apostate preacher and a castaway soul. And
John's meditations of terror in the Revelation rose into those
magnificent pictures of the Last Judgment with which he has to all
time covered the walls of the Seven Churches. In his own Grace
Abounding there are meditations of terror quite worthy to stand
beside the most terrible things of that kind that ever were written, as
also in many others of our author's dramatical and homiletical books.
I read to you the other Sabbath morning a meditation of terror that
was found among Bishop Andrewes' private papers after his death.
You will not all have forgotten that meditation, but I will read it to you
to-night again. "How fearful," says Andrewes, in his terror, "will Thy judgment be, O Lord, when the thrones are set, and the angels stand
around, and men are brought in, and the books are opened, and all our
works are inquired into, and all our thoughts are examined, and all the
hidden things of darkness! What, O God, shall Thy judgment that day
be upon me? Who shall quench my flame, who shall lighten my
darkness, if Thou pity me not? Lord, as Thou art loving, give me tears,
give me floods of tears, and give me all that this day, before it be too
late.
For then will be the incorruptible Judge, the horrible judgment-
seat, the answer without excuse, the inevitable charge, the shameful
punishment, the endless Gehenna, the pitiless angels, the yawning
hell, the roaring stream of fire, the unquenchable flame, the dark
prison, the rayless darkness, the bed of live coals, the unwearied
worm, the indissoluble chains, the bottomless chaos, the impassable
wall, the inconsolable cry. And none to stand by me; none to plead for
me; none to snatch me out."
Now, no Temporary ever possessed anything like that in his own
handwriting among his private papers. A meditation like that, written
out with his own hand, and hidden away under lock and key, will
secure any man from it, even if he had been appointed to backsliding and reprobation. Bishop Andrewes, as any one will see who reads his
Private Devotions, was the chief of sinners; but his discovered and
deciphered papers will all speak for him when they are spread out
before the great white throne, "glorious in their deformity, being
slubbered," as his editors say, "with his pious hands, and watered with his penitential tears."
Thomas Shepard's Ten Virgins is the most terrible book upon
Temporaries that ever was written. Temporaries never once saw their
true vileness, he keeps on saying. Temporaries are, no doubt,
wounded for sin sometimes, but never in the right place nor to the
right depth. And again, sin, and especially heart-sin, is never really
bitter to Temporaries. In an "exhortation to all new beginners, and so
to all others," "Be sure," Shepard says, "your wound for sin at first is deep enough. For all the error in a man's faith and sanctification
springs from his first error in his humiliation. If a man's humiliation
be false, or even weak or little, then his faith and his hold of Christ are
weak and little, and his sanctification counterfeit. But if a man's
wound be right, and his humiliation deep enough, that man's faith will
be right and his sanctification will be glorious. The esteem of Christ is
always little where sin lies light." And Hopeful himself says a thing at
this point that is quite worthy of Shepard himself, such is its depth
and insight. He speaks of the righteous actually loving the sight of
their misery. He does not explain what he means by that startling
language because he is talking all the time, as he knows quite well, to
one who understood all that before he was born. Nor will I attempt to
explain or to vindicate what he says. Those of you who love the sight
of your own misery as sinners will understand what Hopeful says
without any explanation; while those who do not understand him
would only be the more stumbled by any explanation of him. The love
of the sight of their misery, and the unearthly sweetness of their
sorrow for sin, are only another two of those provoking paradoxes of
which the lives of God's true saints are full - paradoxes and
impossibilities and incoherencies that make the literature of
experimental religion to be positively hateful and unbearable to
Temporary and to all his self-seeking and apostate kindred.
But even where the consciences of such men are occasionally
awakened, proceeds Hopeful, in his so searching discovery of
Temporaries, yet their minds are not changed. There you are pretty
near the business, replied his fellow; for the bottom of all is, for want
of a change of their mind and will. Now, one would have been afraid
and ashamed for one moment to suspect that Temporary's mind was
not completely changed, so "forward" was he at first in his religion.
But, no: forward before all his neighbours as Temporary was, to begin
with, yet all the time his mind was not really changed. His
forwardness did not properly spring out of his true mind at all, but
only out of his momentarily awakened conscience and his
momentarily excited heart. A sinner with a truly changed mind is
never forward. His mind is so changed that forwardness in anything is
utterly alien to it, and especially all forwardness in the profession of
religion. The change that had taken place in Temporary, whatever was
the seat of it, only led him to bully men like Christian and Hopeful,
who would not go fast enough for him. "Come," said Pliable, in the
beginning of the book, "come on and let us mend our pace." "I cannot go so fast as I would," humbly replied Christian, "because of this
burden on my back." It is a common observation among mountaineers
that he who takes the hill at the greatest spurt is the last climber to
come to the top, and that many who so ostentatiously make spurts at
the bottom of the hill never come within sight of the top at all. And
this is one of the constant dangers that wait on all revivals, religious
retreats, conferences, and even communion seasons. Our hot fits, the
hotter they are, are only the more likely, unless we take the greatest
care, to cast us down into all the more deadly a chill. It is this danger
that our Lord points out so plainly in His parable of apostasy. The
same is he, says our Lord, that heareth the word, and anon with joy
receiveth it; yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while. In
Hopeful's words, his mind and will were never changed with all his
joy, only his passing moods and his momentary emotions.
Multitudes of men who are as forward at first as Pliable and
Temporary were turn out at last to have no root in themselves; but
here and there you will discover a man who is all root together. There
are some men whose whole mind and heart and will, whose whole
inward man, has gone to root. All the strength and all the fatness of
their religious life retreat into its root. They have no leaves at all, and they have too little fruit as yet; but you should see their roots. Only, no
eye but the eye of God can see sorrow for sin - secret and sore
humiliation on account of secret sin - the incessant agony that goes on
within between the flesh and the spirit, between sin and grace,
between very hell and heaven itself. To know your own evil hearts, my
brethren, say to you on that subject what any Temporary will, is the
very root of the whole matter to you. Whatever Dr. Newman's
mistakes as to outward churches may have been, he was a master of
the human heart, the most difficult of all matters to master. Listen,
then, to what he says on the matter now in hand. "Now, unless we
have some just idea of our hearts and of sin, we can have no right idea
of a Moral Governor, a Saviour, or a Sanctifier; that is, in professing to
believe in them we shall be using words without attaching any distinct
meaning to them. Thus self-knowledge is at the root of all real
religious knowledge; and it is vain, - it is worse than vain, - it is a
deceit and a mischief, to think to understand the Christian doctrines
as a matter of course, merely by being taught by books, or by
attending sermons, or by any outward means, however excellent,
taken by themselves. For it is in proportion as we search our hearts
and understand our own nature that we understand what is meant by
an Infinite Governor and Judge; it is in proportion as we comprehend
the nature of disobedience and our actual sinfulness that we feel what
is the blessing of the removal of sin, redemption, pardon,
sanctification, which otherwise are mere words. God speaks to us
primarily in our hearts. Self-knowledge is the key to the precepts and
doctrines of Scripture. The very utmost that any outward notices of
religion can do is to startle us and make us turn inward and search
our hearts; and then, when we have experienced what it is to read
ourselves, we shall profit by the doctrine of the Church and the Bible."
My brethren, the temper in which you receive that passage, and
receive it from its author, may be safely taken by you as a sure presage
whether you are to turn out a Temporary and a Castaway or no.
Now, to conclude with a word of admission, and, bound up with it, a
word of encouragement. After all that has been said, I fully admit that
we are all Temporaries to begin with. We all cool down from our first
heat in religion. We all halt from our first spurt. We all turn back from
faith and from duty and from privilege through our fear of men, or through our corrupt love of ourselves, or through our coarse-minded
love of this present world. Only, those who are appointed to
perseverance, and through that to eternal life, always kindle again;
they are kindled again, and they love the return of their lost warmth.
They recover themselves and address themselves again and again to
the race that is still set before them. They prove themselves not to be
of those who draw back unto perdition, but of those that believe to the
saving of the soul. Now, if you have only too good ground to suspect
that you are but a temporary believer, what are you to do to make
your sure escape out of that perilous state? What, but to keep on
believing? You must cry constantly, Lord, I believe, help Thou mine
unbelief! When at any time you are under any temptation or
corruption, and you feel that your faith and your love are letting slip
their hold of Christ and of eternal life, then knot your weak heart all
the faster to the throne of grace, to the cross of Christ, and to the gate
of heaven. Give up all your mind and heart, and all that is within you,
to the one thing needful. Labour night and day in your own heart at
believing on Christ, at loving your neighbour, and at discovering,
denying, and crucifying yourself. It will all pay you in the long run. For
if you do all these things, and persistently do them, then, though you
are at this moment all but dead to all divine things, and all but a
reprobate, it will be found at last that all the time your name was
written among the elect in heaven.
The perseverance of the saints, the "five points" notwithstanding,
is not a foregone conclusion. The final perseverance of the ripest and
surest saint is all made up of ever-new beginnings in repentance, in
faith, in love, and in obedience. Begin, then, every new day to repent
anew, to return anew, to believe and to love anew. And if all your New-
Year repentances and returnings and reformations are all already
proved to be but temporary - even if they lie all around you already a
bitter mockery of all your professions - still, begin again. Begin to-
night, and begin again to-morrow morning. Spend all the remainder of
your days on earth beginning. And, ere ever you are aware, the final
perseverance of another predestinated saint will be found
accomplished in you.
SECRET
"The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him." - David.
A truly religious life is always a secret life: it is a life hid, as Paul
has it, with Christ in God. The secret of the Lord, says the Psalmist, is
with them that fear Him. And thus it is that when men begin to fear
God, both their hearts and their lives are henceforth full of all kinds of
secrets that are known to themselves and to God only. It was when
Christiana's fearful thoughts began to work in her mind about her
husband whom she had lost - it was when all her unkind, unnatural,
and ungodly carriages to her dear friend came into her mind in
swarms, clogged her conscience, and loaded her with guilt - it was
then that Secret knocked at her door. "Next morning," so her opening history runs, "when she was up, and had prayed to God, and talked
with her children awhile, one knocked hard at the door to whom she
spake out, saying, If thou comest in God's name, come in. So he who
was at the door said, Amen, and opened the door, and saluted her
with, Peace be to this house. The which when he had done, he said,
Christiana, knowest thou wherefore I am come? Then she blushed and
trembled, also her heart began to wax warm with desires to know
whence he came, and what was his errand to her. So he said unto her,
My name is Secret, I dwell with those that are high. It is talked of
where I dwell as if thou hadst a desire to go thither; also, there is a
report that thou art aware now of the evil thou formerly didst to thy
husband in hardening of thy heart against his way, and in keeping of
thy babes in their ignorance. Christiana, the Merciful One has sent me
to tell thee that He is a God ready to forgive, and that He taketh delight
to multiply to pardon offences. He would also have thee know that He
inviteth thee to come into His presence, even to His table, and that He
will there feed thee with the fat of His house, and with the heritage of
Jacob thy father. Christiana at all this was greatly abashed in herself,
and she bowed her head to the ground, while her visitor proceeded
and said, Christiana, here is a letter for thee which I have brought from
thy husband's King. So she took it and opened it, and, as she opened it,
it smelt after the manner of the best perfume; also it was written in
lettering of gold. The contents of the letter was to this effect, that the
King would have her do as did Christian her husband, for that was the
way to come to the city and to dwell in His presence with joy for ever.
At this the good woman was completely overcome. So she said to her visitor, Sir, will you carry me and my children with you that we may go
and worship this King? Then said the heavenly visitor, Christiana, the
bitter is before the sweet. Thou must through troubles, as did he that
went before thee, enter this celestial city." And so on.
Now, to begin with, you will have noticed the way in which
Christiana was prepared for the entrance of Secret into her house. She
was a widow. She sat alone in that loneliness which only widows
know and understand. More than lonely, she was very miserable.
"Mark this," says the author on the margin, "you that are churls to your godly relations." For this widow felt sure that her husband had
been taken from her because of her cruel behaviour to him. Her past
unnatural carriages toward her husband now rent the very caul of her
heart in sunder. And, again and again, about that same time strange
dreams would sometimes visit her. Dreams such as this. She would see
her husband in a place of bliss with a harp in his hand, standing and
playing upon it before One that sat on a throne with a rainbow round
His head. She saw also as if he bowed his head with his face to the
paved work that was under the Prince's feet, saying, I heartily thank
my Lord and King for bringing me to this place. You will easily see how
ready this lone woman was with all that for his entrance who knocked
and said, Peace be to this house, and handed her a letter of perfume
from her husband's King. Then you will have remarked also some of
the things this visitor from on high said to her of the place whence he
had come. He told her, to begin with, how they sometimes talked
about her in his country. She thought that she was a lonely and
forgotten widow, and that no one cared what became of her. But her
visitor assured her she was quite wrong in thinking that. He had often
himself heard her name mentioned in conversation above; and the
most hopeful reports, he told her, were circulated from door to door
that she was actually all but started on the upward way. Yes, he said,
and we have a place prepared for you on the strength of these reports,
a place among the immortals close beside your husband. And all that,
as you will not wonder, was the beginning of Christiana's secret life.
After that morning she never again felt alone or forgotten. I am not
alone, she would after that say, when any of her old neighbours
knocked at her door. No, I am not alone, but if thou comest in God's
name, come in.
And from that day a long succession of secret providences began
to enter Christiana's life, till, as time went on, her whole life was filled
full of secret providences. And not her present life only, but her
discoveries of God's secret providences towards her and hers became
retrospective also, till both her own parentage and birth, her
husband's parentage and birth also, the day she first saw him, the day
of their espousals, the day of their marriage, and the day of his death,
all shone out now as so many secret and special providences of God
toward her.
Bishop Martensen has a fine passage on the fragmentariness of
our knowledge, not only of divine providence as a whole, but even of
those divine providences that fill up our own lives. And he warns us
that, till we have heard the "Prologue in Heaven," many a riddle in our lives must of necessity remain unsolved. Christiana could not have
told her inquiring children what a prologue was, nor an epilogue
either, but many were the wise and winning discourses she held with
her boys about their father now in heaven, about her happiness in
having had such a father for her children, and about their happiness
that the road was open before them to go to where he now is. And
there are many poor widows among ourselves who are wiser than all
their teachers, because they are in that school of experience into
which God takes His afflicted people and opens to them His deepest
secrets. They remember, with Job, when the secret of the Lord was
first upon their tabernacle. Their widowed hearts are full of holy
household memories. They remember the days when the candle of the
Lord shone upon their head when they washed their steps with butter,
and the rock poured them out rivers of oil. And still, when, like Job
also, they sit solitary among the ashes, the secret of the Lord is only
the more secretly and intimately with them. John Bunyan was well
fitted to be Christiana's biographer, because his own life was as full as
it could hold of these same secret and special providences. One day he
was walking - so he tells us - in a good man's shop, bemoaning himself
of his sad and doleful state - when a mighty rushing wind came in
through the window and seemed to carry words of Scripture on its
wings to Bunyan's disconsolate soul. He candidly tells us that he does
not know, after twenty years' reflection, what to make of that strange
dispensation. That it took place, and that it left the most blessed results behind it, he is sure; but as to how God did it, by what means,
by what instruments, both the rushing wind itself and the salutation
that accompanied it, he is fain to let lie till the day of judgment. And
many of ourselves have had strange dispensations too that we must
leave alone, and seek no other explanation of them for the present but
the blessed results of them. We have had divine descents into our lives
that we can never attempt to describe. Interpositions as plain to us as
if we had both seen and spoken with the angel who executed them.
Miraculous deliverances that throw many Old and New Testament
miracles into the shade. Providential adaptations and readjustments
also, as if all things were actually and openly and without a veil being
made to work together for our good. Extrications also; nets broken,
snares snapped, and such pavilions of safety and solace opened to us
that we can find no psalm secret and special enough in which to utter
our life-long astonishment. Importunate prayers anticipated,
postponed, denied, translated, transmuted, and then answered till our
cup was too full; sweet changed to bitter, and bitter changed to sweet,
so wonderfully, so graciously, and so often, that words fail us, and we
can only now laugh and now weep over it all. Poor Cowper knew
something about it -
"God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
"Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.
"Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan his work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain."
Secret scriptures also - from that enlightening day Christiana's
Bible became full of them. Peter says that no prophecy is of any
private interpretation; and, whatever he means by that, what he says
must be true. But Christiana would have understood the apostle
better if he had said the exact opposite of that, - if not about the
prophecies, at least about the psalms. Leave the prophecies in this
connection alone; but of the psalms it may safely be said that it is
neither the literal nor the historical nor the mystical interpretation
that gets at the heart of those supreme scriptures. It is the private,
personal, and, indeed, secret interpretation that gets best at the
deepest heart of the psalms. An old Bible came into my hands the
other day - a Bible that had seen service - and it opened of its own
accord at the Book of Psalms. On turning over the yellow leaves I
found a date and a deep indentation opposite these words: "Commit
thy way unto the Lord: trust also in Him: and He will bring it to pass."
And as I looked at the figures on the margin, and at the underscored
text, I felt as if I were on the brink of an old-world secret. "Create in me a clean heart" had a significant initial also; as had this: "The
sacrifices of God are a broken spirit." The whole of the hundred-and-
third psalm was bracketed off from all public interpretation; while the
tenth, the cardinal verse of that secret psalm, had a special seal set
upon it. Judging from its stains and scars and other accidents, the
whole of the hundred-and-nineteenth psalm had been a special
favourite; while the hundred-and-forty-third also was all broidered
round with shorthand symbols. But the secret key of all those symbols
and dates and enigmatical marks was no longer to be found; it had
been carried away in the owner's own heart. But, my head being full of
Christiana at the time, I felt as if I held her own old Bible in my hand
as I turned over those ancient leaves.
Our Lord so practised secrecy Himself in His fasting, in His
praying, and in His almsgiving, and He makes so much of that same
secrecy in all His teaching, as almost to make the essence of all true
religion to stand in its secrecy. "When thou prayest," says our Lord,
"shut thy door and pray in secret." As much as to say that we are
scarcely praying at all when we are praying in public. Praying in public
is so difficult that new beginners, like His disciples, have to practise
that so difficult art for a long time in secret. Public prayer has so many
besetting sins, it is open to so many temptations, distractions, and corruptions, that it is almost impossible to preserve the real essence
of prayer in public prayer. But in secret all those temptations and
distractions are happily absent. We have no temptation to be too long
in secret prayer, or too loud, or too eloquent. Stately old English goes
for nothing in secret prayer. We never need to go to our knees in
secret trembling, lest we lose the thread of our prayer, or forget that
so fit and so fine expression. The longer we are the better in secret
prayer. Much speaking is really a virtue in secret prayer; much
speaking and many repetitions. Also, we can put things into our secret
prayers that we dare not come within a thousand miles of in the
pulpit, or the prayer-meeting, or the family. We can enter into the
most plain-spoken particulars about ourselves in secret. We can put
our proper name upon ourselves, and upon our actions, and especially
upon our thoughts when our door is shut. Then, again, we can pray for
other people by name in secret; we can enter, so far as we know them,
into all their circumstances in a way it is impossible to do anywhere
but in the utmost secrecy. We can, in short, be ourselves in secret; and,
unless it is to please or to impress men, we had better not pray at all
unless we are ourselves when we are engaged in it. You can be
yourself, your very worst self; nay, you must be, else you will not long
pray in secret, and even if you did you would not be heard. I do not
remember that very much is said in so many words in her after-
history about Christiana's habits of closet-prayer. But that Secret
taught her the way, and waited till she had tasted the sweetness and
the strength of being a good while on her knees alone, I am safe to say;
indeed, I read it between the lines in all her after-life. She was
rewarded openly in a way that testifies to much secret prayer; that is
to say, in the early conversion of her children, in the way they settled
in life, and such like things. Pray much for those things in secret that
you wish to possess openly.
But perhaps the best and most infallible evidence we can have of
the truth of our religion in this life is in the steady increase of our
secret sinfulness. Christiana had no trouble with her own wicked
heart so long as she was a woman of a wicked life. But directly she
became a new creature, her heart began to swarm, such is her own
expression, with sinful memories, sinful thoughts, and sinful feelings;
till she had need of some one ever near her, like Greatheart, constantly to assure her that those cruel and deadly swarms, instead of being a
bad sign of her salvation, were the very best signs possible of her good
estate. Humility is the foundation of all our graces, and there is no
humility so deep and so ever-deepening as that evangelical humility
which in its turn rises out of and rests upon secret sinfulness. Not
upon acts of secret sin. Do not mistake me. Acts of secret sin harden
the heart and debauch the conscience. But I speak of that secret,
original, unexplored, and inexpugnable sinfulness out of which all a
sinner's actual sins, both open sins and secret, spring; and out of
which a like life of open and actual sins would spring in God's very
best saints, if only both He and they did not watch night and day
against them. Sensibility to sin, or rather to sinfulness, is far and away
the best evidence of sanctification that is possible to us in this life. It is this keen and bitter sensibility that secures, amid all oppositions and
obstructions, the true saint's onward and upward progress. Were it
not for the misery of their own hearts, God's best saints would fall
asleep and go back like other men. A sinful heart is the misery of all
miseries. It is the deepest and darkest of all dungeons. It is the most
painful and the most loathsome of all diseases. And the secrecy of it all
adds to the bitterness and the gall of it all. We may know that other
men's hearts are as sinful as our own, but we do not feel their
sinfulness. We cannot sensibly feel humiliation, bondage, sickness,
and self-loathing on account of another man's envy, or ill-will, or
resentment, or cruelty, or falsehood, or impurity. All these things must
be our own before we can enter into the pain and the shame of them;
but, when we do, then we taste what death and hell are indeed. As I
write these feeble words about it, a devil's shaft of envy that was shot
all against my will into my heart this morning, still, after a whole day,
rankles and festers there. I have been on my knees with it again and
again; I have stood and looked into an open grave to-day; but there it
is sucking at my heart's blood still, like a leech of hell. Who can
understand his errors? Cleanse Thou me from secret faults. Create in
me a clean heart, O God, O wretched man that I am! "Let a man," says William Law when he is enforcing humility, "but consider that if the
world knew all that of him which he knows of himself: if they saw
what vanity and what passions govern his inside, and what secret
tempers sully and corrupt his best actions, he would have no more pretence to be honoured and admired for his goodness and wisdom
than a rotten and distempered body to be loved and admired for its
beauty and comeliness. This is so true, and so known to the hearts of
almost all people, that nothing would appear more dreadful to them
than to have their hearts fully discovered to the eyes of all beholders.
And, perhaps, there are very few people in the world who would not
rather choose to die than to have all their secret follies, the errors of
their judgments, the vanity of their minds, the falseness of their
pretences, the frequency of their vain and disorderly passions, their
uneasinesses, hatreds, envies, and vexations made known to all the
world." Where did William Law get that terrible passage? Where could
he get it but in the secret heart of the miserable author of the Serious
Call?
The half cannot be told of the guilt and the corruption, the pain
and the shame and the manifold misery of secret sin; but all that will
be told, believed, and understood by all men long before the full
magnificence of their sanctification, and the superb transcendence of
their blessedness, will even begin to be described to God's secret
saints. For, all that sleepless, cruel, and soul-killing pain, and all that
shameful and humbling corruption, - all that means, all that is, so
much holiness, so much heaven, working itself out in the soul. All that
is so much immortal life, spotless beauty, and incorruptible joy
already begun in the soul. Every such pang in a holy heart is a death-
pang of another sin and a birth-pang of another grace. Brotherly love
is at last being born never to die in that heart where envy and malice
and resentment and revenge are causing inward agony. And humility
and meekness and the whole mind of Christ are there where pride and
anger and ill-will are felt to be very hell itself. And holiness, even as
God is holy, will soon be there for ever where the sinfulness of sin is a
sinner's acutest sorrow. "As for me," said one whose sin was ever
before him, "I will behold Thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I wake with Thy likeness."
MRS. TIMOROUS
"But the fearful [literally, the timid and the cowardly] shall have their part in the second death." - Revelation 21.
No sooner had Secret bidden Christiana farewell than she began
with all her might to make ready for her great journey. "Come, my
children, let us pack up and begone to the gate that leads to the
Celestial City, that we may see your father and be with him, and with
his companions, in peace, according to the laws of that land." And
then: "Come in, if you come in God's name!" Christiana called out, as two of her neighbours knocked at her door. "Having little to do at
home this morning," said the elder of the two women, "I have come
across to kill a little time with you. I spent last night with Mrs. Light-
mind, and I have some good news for you this morning." "I am just
preparing for a journey this morning," said Christiana, packing up all
the time, "and I have not so much as one moment to spare." You know
yourselves what Christiana's nervousness and almost impatience
were. You know how it upsets your good temper and all your civility
when you are packing up for a long absence from home, and some one
comes in, and will talk, and will not see how behindhand and how
busy you are. "For what journey, I pray you?" asked Mrs. Timorous, for that
was her visitor's name. "Even to go after my good husband," the busy woman said, and with that she fell a-weeping. But you must read
the whole account of that eventful morning in Christiana's memoirs
for yourselves till you have it, as Secret said, by root-of-heart. On the
understanding that you are not total strangers to that so excellently-
written passage I shall now venture a few observations upon it.
Well, to begin with, Mrs. Timorous was not a bad woman, as
women went in that town and in that day. Her companions, - her
gossips, as she would have called them, - were far worse women than
she was; and, had it not been for her family infirmity, had it not been
for that timid, hesitating, lukewarm, and half-and-half habit of mind
which she had inherited from her father, there is no saying what part
she might have played in the famous expedition of Christiana and
Mercy and the boys. Her father had been a pilgrim himself at one time;
but he had now for a long time been known in the town as a turncoat
and a temporary, and all his children had unhappily taken after their
father in that. Had her father held on as he at one time had begun -
had he held on in the face of all fear and all danger as Christiana's noble husband had done - to a certainty his daughter would have
started that morning with Christiana and her company, and would
have been, if a timid, easily scared, and troublesome pilgrim, yet as
true a pilgrim, and made as welcome at last, as, say, Miss Much-afraid,
Mr. Fearing, and Mr. Ready-to-halt were made. But her father's
superficiality and shakiness, and at bottom his warm love of this
world and his lukewarm love of the world to come, had unfortunately
all descended to his daughter, till we find her actually reviling
Christiana on that decisive morning, and returning to her dish
of tea and tittle-tattle with Mrs. Bats-eyes, Mrs. Inconsiderate, Mrs.
Light-mind, and Mrs. Know-nothing.
The thing that positively terrified Mrs. Timorous at the very
thought of setting out with Christiana that morning was that
intolerable way in which Christiana had begun to go back upon her
past life as a wife and a mother. Christiana could not hide her deep
distress, and, indeed, she did not much try. Such were the swarms of
painful memories that her husband's late death, the visit of Secret,
and one thing and another had let loose upon Christiana's mind, that
she could take pleasure in nothing but in how she was to escape away
from her past life, and how she could in any way mend it and make up
for it where she could not escape from it. "You may judge yourself,"
said Mrs. Timorous to Mrs. Light-mind, "whether I was likely to find
much entertainment with a woman like that!" For, Mrs. Timorous too,
you must know, had a past life of her own; and it was that past life of
hers all brought back by Christiana's words that morning that made
Mrs. Timorous so revile her old friend and return to the society we so
soon see her with. Now, is not this the case, that we all have swarms of
evil memories that we dare not face? There is no single relationship in
life that we can boldly look back upon and fully face. As son or as
daughter, as brother or as sister, as friend or as lover, as husband or as
wife, as minister or as member, as master or as servant - what swarms
of hornet-memories darken our hearts as we so look back! Let any
grown-up man, with some imagination, tenderness of heart, and
integrity of conscience, go back step by step, taking some time to it, -
at a new year, say, or a birthday, or on some such suitable occasion: let
him go over his past life back to his youth and childhood - and what an
intolerable burden will be laid on his heart before he is done! What a panorama of scarlet pictures will pass before his inward eye! What a
forest of accusing fingers will be pointed at him! What hissing curses
will be spat at him both by the lips of the living and the dead! What
untold pains he will see that he has caused to the innocent and the
helpless! What desolating disappointments, what shipwrecks of hope
to this man and to that woman! What a stone of stumbling he has been
to many who on that stone have been for ever broken and lost! What a
rock of offence even his mere innocent existence, all unknown to
himself till afterwards, has been! Swarms, said Christiana. Swarms of
hornets armed, said Samson. And many of us understand what that
bitter word means better than any commentator on Bunyan or on
Milton can tell us. One of the holiest men the Church of England ever
produced, and one of her best devotional writers, used to shut his
door on the night of every first day of the week, and on his knees
spread out a prayer which always contained this passage: "I worship
Thee, O God, on my face. I smite my breast and say with the publican,
God be merciful to me a sinner; the chief of sinners; a sinner far above
the publican. Despise me not - an unclean worm, a dead dog, a putrid
corpse. Despise me not, despise me not, O Lord. But look upon me
with those eyes with which Thou didst look upon Magdalene at the
feast, Peter in the hall, and the thief on the cross. O that mine eyes
were a fountain of tears that I might weep night and day before Thee! I
despise and bruise myself that my penitence is not deeper, is not
fuller. Help Thou mine impenitence, and more and more pierce, rend,
and crush my heart. My sins are more in number than the sand. My
iniquities are multiplied, and I have no relief." Perish your Puritanism, and your prayer-books too! I hear some high-minded and indignant
man saying. Perish your Celestial City and all my desire after it, before
I say the like of that about myself! Brave words, my brother; brave
words! But there have been men as blameless as you are, and as
brave-hearted over it, who, when the scales fell off their eyes, were
heard crying out ever after: O wretched man that I am! And: Have
mercy on me, the chief of sinners! And so, if it so please God, will it yet
be with you.
"Having had little to do this morning," said Mrs. Timorous to Mrs.
Light-mind, "I went to give Christiana a visit." "Law," I read in his most 59