' - the book of the wars of the Lord.' - Moses.
Chapter 26 - Emmanuel's Livery
Chapter 27 - Mansoul's Magna Charta
Chapter 28 - Emmanuel's Last Charge
Chapter 1 - THE BOOK
' - the book of the wars of the Lord.' - Moses.
John Bunyan's Holy War was first published in 1682, six years
before its illustrious author's death. Bunyan wrote this great book
when he was still in all the fulness of his intellectual power and in all
the ripeness of his spiritual experience. The Holy War is not the
Pilgrim's Progress - there is only one Pilgrim's Progress. At the same
time, we have Lord Macaulay's word for it that if the Pilgrim's
Progress did not exist the Holy War would be the best allegory that
ever was written: and even Mr. Froude admits that the Holy War alone
would have entitled its author to rank high up among the
acknowledged masters of English literature. The intellectual rank of
the Holy War has been fixed before that tribunal over which our
accomplished and competent critics preside; but for a full
appreciation of its religious rank and value we would need to hear the
glad testimonies of tens of thousands of God's saints, whose hard-
beset faith and obedience have been kindled and sustained by the
study of this noble book. The Pilgrim's Progress sets forth the spiritual
life under the scriptural figure of a long and an uphill journey. The
Holy War, on the other hand, is a military history; it is full of soldiers
and battles, defeats and victories. And its devout author had much
more scriptural suggestion and support in the composition of the Holy
War than he had even in the composition of the Pilgrim's Progress. For
Holy Scripture is full of wars and rumours of wars: the wars of the
Lord; the wars of Joshua and the Judges; the wars of David, with his
and many other magnificent battle-songs; till the best known name of
the God of Israel in the Old Testament is the Lord of Hosts; and then in
the New Testament we have Jesus Christ described as the Captain of
our salvation. Paul's powerful use of armour and of armed men is
familiar to every student of his epistles; and then the whole Bible is
crowned with a book all sounding with the battle-cries, the shouts,
and the songs of soldiers, till it ends with that city of peace where they
hang the trumpet in the hall and study war no more. Military
metaphors had taken a powerful hold of our author's imagination
even in the Pilgrim's Progress, as his portraits of Greatheart and
Valiant-for-truth and other soldiers sufficiently show; while the
conflict with Apollyon and the destruction of Doubting Castle are so
many sure preludes of the coming Holy War. Bunyan's early
experiences in the great Civil War had taught him many memorable
things about the military art; memorable and suggestive things that he
afterwards put to the most splendid use in the siege, the capture, and
the subjugation of Mansoul.
The Divine Comedy is beyond dispute the greatest book of
personal and experimental religion the world has ever seen. The
consuming intensity of its author's feelings about sin and holiness, the
keenness and the bitterness of his remorse, and the rigour and the
severity of his revenge, his superb intellect and his universal learning,
all set ablaze by his splendid imagination - all that combines to make
the Divine Comedy the unapproachable masterpiece it is. John
Bunyan, on the other hand, had no learning to be called learning, but
he had a strong and a healthy English understanding, a conscience and
a heart wholly given up to the life of the best religion of his religious
day, and then, by sheer dint of his sanctified and soaring imagination
and his exquisite style, he stands forth the peer of the foremost men in
the intellectual world.
And thus it is that the great unlettered religious world possesses
in John Bunyan all that the select and scholarly world possesses in
Dante. Both Dante and Bunyan devoted their splendid gifts to the
noblest of services - the service of spiritual, and especially of personal
religion; but for one appreciative reader that Dante has had Bunyan
has had a hundred. Happy in being so like his Master in so many
things, Bunyan is happy in being like his unlettered Master in this also,
that the common people hear him gladly and never weary of hearing
him.
It gives by far its noblest interest to Dante's noble book that we
have Dante himself in every page of his book. Dante is taken down into
Hell, he is then led up through Purgatory, and after that still up and up
into the very Paradise of God. But that hell all the time is the hell that
Dante had dug and darkened and kindled for himself. In the Purgatory,
again, we see Dante working out his own salvation with fear and
trembling, God all the time working in Dante to will and to do of His
good pleasure. And then the Paradise, with all its sevenfold glory, is
just that place and that life which God hath prepared for them that
love Him and serve Him as Dante did. And so it is in the Holy War. John
Bunyan is in the Pilgrim's Progress, but there are more men and other men than its author in that rich and populous book, and other
experiences and other attainments than his. But in the Holy War we
have Bunyan himself as fully and as exclusively as we have Dante in
the Divine Comedy. In the first edition of the Holy War there is a
frontispiece conceived and executed after the anatomical and
symbolical manner which was so common in that day, and which is to
be seen at its perfection in the English edition of Jacob Behmen. The
frontispiece is a full-length likeness of the author of the Holy War, with
his whole soul laid open and his hidden heart 'anatomised.' Why,
asked Wordsworth, and Matthew Arnold in our day has echoed the
question - why does Homer still so live and rule without a rival in the
world of letters? And they answer that it is because he always sang
with his eye so fixed upon its object.
'Homer, to thee I turn.' And so it was with Dante. And so it was
with Bunyan. Bunyan's Holy War has its great and abiding and
commanding power over us just because he composed it with his eye
fixed on his own heart.
My readers, I have somewhat else to do,
Than with vain stories thus to trouble you;
What here I say some men do know so well
They can with tears and joy the story tell . . .
Then lend thine ear to what I do relate,
Touching the town of Mansoul and her state:
For my part, I (myself) was in the town,
Both when 'twas set up and when pulling down.
Let no man then count me a fable-maker,
Nor make my name or credit a partaker
Of their derision: what is here in view
Of mine own knowledge, I dare say is true.
The characters in the Holy War are not as a rule nearly so clear-
cut or so full of dramatic life and movement as their fellows are in the
Pilgrim's Progress, and Bunyan seems to have felt that to be the case.
He shows all an author's fondness for the children of his imagination
in the Pilgrim's Progress. He returns to and he lingers on their doings
and their sayings and their very names with all a foolish father's fond delight. While, on the other hand, when we look to see him in his
confidential addresses to his readers returning upon some of the
military and municipal characters in the Holy War, to our
disappointment he does not so much as name a single one of them,
though he dwells with all an author's self-delectation on the
outstanding scenes, situations, and episodes of his remarkable book.
What, then, are some of the more outstanding scenes, situations, and
episodes, as well as military and municipal characters, in the book
now before us? And what are we to promise ourselves, and to expect,
from the study and the exposition of the Holy War in these lectures?
Well, to begin with, we shall do our best to enter with mind, and heart,
and conscience, and imagination into Bunyan's great conception of the
human soul as a city, a fair and a delicate city and corporation, with its
situation, surroundings, privileges and fortunes. We shall then enter
under his guidance into the famous and stately palace of this
metropolitan city; a palace which for strength might be called a castle,
for pleasantness a paradise, and for largeness a place so copious as to
contain all the world. The walls and the gates of the city will then
occupy and instruct us for several Sabbath evenings, after which we
shall enter on the record of the wars and battles that rolled time after
time round those city walls, and surged up through its captured gates
till they quite overwhelmed the very palace of the king itself. Then we
shall spend, God willing, one Sabbath evening with Loth-to-stoop, and
another with old Ill-pause, the devil's orator, and another with Captain
Anything, and another with Lord Willbewill, and another with that
notorious villain Clip-promise, by whose doings so much of the king's
coin had been abused, and another with that so angry and so ill-
conditioned churl old Mr. Prejudice, with his sixty deaf men under
him. Dear Mr. Wet-eyes, with his rope upon his head, will have a fit
congregation one winter night, and Captain Self-denial another. We
shall have another painful but profitable evening before a communion
season with Mr. Prywell, and so we shall eat of that bread and drink of
that cup. Emmanuel's livery will occupy us one evening, Mansoul's
Magna Charta another, and her annual Feast-day another. Her
Established Church and her beneficed clergy will take up one evening,
some Skulkers in Mansoul another, the devil's last prank another, and
then, to wind up with, Emmanuel's last speech and charge to Mansoul from his chariot-step till He comes again to accomplish her rapture.
All that we shall see and take part in; unless, indeed, our Captain
comes in anger before the time, and spears us to the earth when He
finds us asleep at our post or in the act of sin at it, which may His
abounding mercy forbid!
And now take these three forewarnings and precautions.
First: - All who come here on these coming Sabbath evenings will
not understand the Holy War all at once, and many will not
understand it at all. And little blame to them, and no wonder. For, fully
to understand this deep and intricate book demands far more mind,
far more experience, and far more specialised knowledge than the
mass of men, as men are, can possibly bring to it. This so exacting
book demands of us, to begin with, some little acquaintance with
military engineering and architecture; with the theory of, and if
possible with some practice in, attack and defence in sieges and
storms, winter campaigns and long drawn-out wars. And then,
impossible as it sounds and is, along with all that we would need to
have a really profound, practical, and at first-hand acquaintance with
the anatomy of the human subject, and especially with cardiac
anatomy, as well as with all the conditions, diseases, regimen and
discipline of the corrupt heart of man. And then it is enough to terrify
any one to open this book or to enter this church when he is told that
if he comes here he must be ready and willing to have the whole of
this terrible and exacting book fulfilled and experienced in himself, in
his own body and in his own soul.
And, then, you will not all like the Holy War. The mass of men
could not be expected to like any such book. How could the vain and
blind citizen of a vain and blind city like to be wakened up, as Paris
was wakened up within our own remembrance, to find all her gates in
the hands of an iron-hearted enemy? And how could her sons like to
be reminded, as they sit in their wine gardens, that they are thereby
fast preparing their city for that threatened day when she is to be
hung up on her own walls and bled to the white? Who would not hate
and revile the book or the preacher who prophesied such rough things
as that? Who could love the author or the preacher who told him to
his face that his eyes and his ears and all the passes to his heart were
already in the hands of a cruel, ruthless, and masterful enemy? No wonder that you never read the Holy War. No wonder that the bulk of
men have never once opened it. The Downfall is not a favourite book
in the night-gardens of Paris.
And then, few, very few, it is to be feared, will be any better of the
Holy War. For, to be any better of such a terrible book as this is, we
must at all costs lay it, and lay it all, and lay it all at once, to heart. We
must submit ourselves to see ourselves continually in its blazing glass.
We must stoop to be told that it is all, in all its terrors and in all its
horrors, literally true of ourselves. We must deliberately and
resolutely set open every gate that opens in on our heart - Ear-gate
and Eye-gate and all the gates of sense and intellect, day and night, to
Jesus Christ to enter in; and we must shut and bolt and bar every such
gate in the devil's very face, and in the face of all his scouts and
orators, day and night also. But who that thinks, and that knows by
experience what all that means, will feel himself sufficient for all that?
No man: no sinful man. But, among many other noble and blessed
things, the Holy War will show us that our sufficiency in this
impossibility also is all of God. Who, then, will enlist? Who will risk all
and enlist? Who will matriculate in the military school of Mansoul?
Who will submit himself to all the severity of its divine discipline?
Who will be made willing to throw open and to keep open his whole
soul, with all the gates and doors thereof, to all the sieges, assaults,
capitulations, submissions, occupations, and such like of the war of