'The palace is not for man, but for the Lord God.' - David.
therefore; suspect and challenge all outsiders who come near it. Keep
the passes that lead to your heart with all diligence. Let nothing
contraband, let nothing that even looks suspicious, ever enter your
hearts; for, if it once enters, and turns out to be evil, you will never get
it all out again as long as you live. 'Death is come up into our
windows,' says our prophet in another place, 'and is entered into our
palaces, to cut off our children in our houses and our young men in
our streets.' Make a covenant, then, with your eyes. Take an oath of
your eyes as to which way they are henceforth to look. For, let them
look this way, and your heart is immediately full of lust, and hate, and
envy, and ill-will. On the other hand, lead them to look that way and
your heart is as immediately full of truth and beauty, brotherly
kindness and charity. The light of the body is the eye; if, therefore,
thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light; but if thine
eye be evil, thy whole body is full of darkness. If, therefore, the light
that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
Chapter 5 - THE KING'S PALACE
'The palace is not for man, but for the Lord God.' - David.
'Now, there is in this gallant country a fair and delicate town, a
corporation, called Mansoul: a town for its building so curious, for its
situation so commodious, for its privileges so advantageous, that I
may say of it, there is not its equal under the whole heaven. Also, there
was reared up in the midst of this town a most famous and stately
palace: for strength, it might be called a castle; for pleasantness, a
paradise; and for largeness, a place so copious as to contain all the
world. This place the King intended for Himself alone, and not for
another with Him, so great was His delight in it.' Thus far, our excellent
allegorical author. But there are other authors that treat of this great
matter now in hand besides the allegorical authors. You will hear tell
sometimes about a class of authors called the Mystics. Well, listen at
this stage to one of them, and one of the best of them, on this present
matter - the human heart, that is. 'Our heart,' he says, 'is our manner
of existence, or the state in which we feel ourselves to be; it is an
inward life, a vital sensibility, which contains our manner of feeling
what and how we are; it is the state of our desires and tendencies, of
inwardly seeing, tasting, relishing, and feeling that which passes
within us; our heart is that to us inwardly with regard to ourselves
which our senses of seeing, hearing, feeling, and such like are with
regard to things that are without or external to us. Your heart is the
best and greatest gift of God to you. It is the highest, greatest,
strongest, and noblest power of your nature. It forms your whole life,
be it what it will. All evil and all good come from your heart. Your
heart alone has the key of life and death for you.' I was just about to
ask you at this point which of our two authors, our allegorical or our
mystical author upon the heart, you like best. But that would be a
stupid and a wayward question since you have them both before you,
and both at their best, to possess and to enjoy. To go back then to John
Bunyan, and to his allegory of the human heart.
To begin with, then, there was reared up in the midst of this town
of Mansoul a most famous and stately palace. And that palace and the
town immediately around it were the mirror and the glory of all that
its founder and maker had ever made. His palace was his very top-
piece. It was the metropolitan of the whole world round about it; and
it had positive commission and power to demand service and support of all around. Yes. And all that is literally, evidently, and actually true of
the human heart. For all other earthly things are created and upheld,
are ordered and administered, with an eye to the human heart. The
human heart is the final cause, as our scholars would say, of absolutely
all other earthly things. Earth, air, water; light and heat; all the
successively existing worlds, mineral, vegetable, animal, spiritual;
grass, herbs, corn, fruit-trees, cattle and sheep, and all other living
creatures; all are upheld for the use and the support of man. And,
then, all that is in man himself is in him for the end and the use of his
heart. All his bodily senses; all his bodily members; every fearfully and
wonderfully made part of his body and of his mind; all administer to
his heart. She is the sovereign and sits supreme. And she is worthy
and is fully entitled so to sit. For there is nothing on the earth greater
or better than the heart, unless it is the Creator Himself, who planned
and executed the heart for Himself and not for another with Him. 'The
body exists,' says a philosophical biologist of our day, 'to furnish the
cerebral centres with prepared food, just as the vegetable world,
viewed biologically, exists to furnish the animal world with similar
food. The higher is the last formed, the most difficult, and the most
complex; but it is just this that is most precious and significant - all of
which shows His unrolling purpose. It is the last that alone explains all
that went before, and it is the coming that will alone explain the
present. God before all, through all, foreseeing all, and still preparing
all; God in all is profoundly evident.' Yes, profoundly evident to
profound minds, and experimentally and sweetly evident to religious
minds, and to renewed and loving and holy hearts.
For fame and for state a palace, while for strength it might be
called a castle. In sufficiently ancient times the king's palace was
always a castle also. David's palace on Mount Zion was as much a
military fortress as a royal residence; and King Priam's palace was the
protection both of itself and of the whole of the country around. In
those wild times great men built their houses on high places, and then
the weak and endangered people gathered around the strongholds of
the powerful, as we see in our own city. Our own steep and towering
rock invited to its top the castle-builder of a remote age, and then the
exposed country around began to gather itself together under the
shelter of the bourg. And thus it is that the military engineering of the Holy War makes that old allegorical book most excellent to read, not
only for common men like you and me, who are bent on the
fortification and the defence of our own hearts, but for the military
historians of those old times also, for the experts of to-day also, and
for all good students of fortification. And the New Testament of the
Divine peace itself, as well as the Old Testament so full of the wars of
the Lord - they both support and serve as an encouragement and an
example to our spiritual author in the elaboration of his military
allegory. Every good soldier of Jesus Christ has by heart the noble
paradox of Paul to the Philippians - that the peace of God which
passeth all understanding shall keep their hearts and minds through
Christ Jesus. Let God's peace, he says, be your man of war. Let His
surpassing peace do both the work of war and the work of peace also
in your hearts and in your minds. Let that peace both fortify with
walls, and garrison with soldiers, and watch every gate, and hold
every street and lane of your hearts and of your minds all around your
hearts. And all through the Prince of Peace, the Captain of all Holy
War, Jesus Christ Himself. No wonder, then, that in a strength - in a
kind and in a degree of strength - that passeth all understanding, this
stately palace of the heart is also here called a well-garrisoned castle.
And then for pleasantness the human heart is a perfect paradise.
For pleasantness the human heart is like those famous royal parks of
Nineveh and Babylon that sprang up in after days as if to recover and
restore the Garden of Eden that had been lost to those eastern lands.
But even Adam's own paradise was but a poor outside imitation in
earth and water, in flowers and fruits, of the far better paradise God
had planted within him. Take another Mystic at this point upon
paradise. 'My dear man,' exclaims Jacob Behmen, 'the Garden of Eden
is not paradise, neither does Moses say so. Paradise is the divine joy,
and that was in their own hearts so long as they stood in the love of
God. Paradise is the divine and angelical joy, pure love, pure joy, pure
gladness, in which there is no fear, no misery, and no death. Which
paradise neither death nor the devil can touch. And yet it has no stone
wall around it; only a great gulf which no man or angel can cross but
by that new birth of which Christ spoke to Nicodemus. Reason asks,
Where is paradise to be found? Is it far off or near? Is it in this world
or is it above the stars? Where is that desirable native country where there is no death? Beloved, there is nothing nearer you at this moment
than paradise, if you incline that way. God beckons you back into
paradise at this moment, and calls you by name to come. Come, He
says, and be one of My paradise children. In paradise,' the Teutonic
Philosopher goes on, 'there is nothing but hearty love, a meek and a
gentle love; a most friendly and most courteous discourse: a gracious,
amiable, and blessed society, where the one is always glad to see the
other, and to honour the other. They know of no malice in paradise, no
cunning, no subtlety, and no sly deceit. But the fruits of the Spirit of
God are common among them in paradise, and one may make use of
all the good things of paradise without causing disfavour, or hatred, or
envy, for there is no contrary affection there, but all hearts there are
knit together in love. In paradise they love one another, and rejoice in
the beauty, loveliness, and gladness of one another. No one esteems or
accounts himself more excellent than another in paradise; but every
one has great joy in another, and rejoices in another's fair beauty,
whence their love to one another continually increases, so that they
lead one another by the hand, and so friendly kiss one another.' Thus
the blessed Behmen saw paradise and had it in his heart as he sat over
his hammer and lapstone in his solitary stall. For of such as Jacob
Behmen and John Bunyan is the kingdom of heaven, and all such
saintly souls have paradise restored again and improved upon in their
own hearts.
And for largeness a place so copious as to contain all the world.
Over against the word 'copious' Bunyan hangs for a key, Ecclesiastes
third and eleventh; and under it Miss Peacock adds this as a note -
'Copious, spacious. Old French, copieux; Latin, copiosus, plentiful.' The
human heart, as we have already read to-night, is the highest, greatest,
strongest, and noblest part of human nature. And so it is. Fearfully and
wonderfully made as is the whole of human nature, that fear and that
wonder surpass themselves in the spaciousness and the copiousness
of the human heart. For what is it that the human heart has not space
for, and to spare? After the whole world is received home into a
human heart, there is room, and, indeed, hunger, for another world,
and after that for still another. The sun is - I forget how many times
bigger than our whole world, and yet we can open our heart and take
down the sun into it, and shut him out again and restore him to his immeasurable distances in the heavens, and all in the twinkling of an
eye. As for instance. As I wrote these lines I read a report of a lecture
by Sir Robert Ball in which that distinguished astronomer discoursed
on recent solar discoveries. A globe of coal, Sir Robert said, as big as
our earth, and all set ablaze at the same moment, would not give out
so much heat to the worlds around as the sun gives out in a
thousandth part of a second. Well, as I read that, and ere ever I was
aware what was going on, my heart had opened over my newspaper,
and the sun had swept down from the sky, and had rushed into my
heart, and before I knew where I was the cry had escaped my lips,
'Great and marvellous are Thy works, Lord God Almighty! Who shall
not fear Thee and glorify thy name?' And then this reflection as
suddenly came to me: How good it is to be at peace with God, and to
be able and willing to say, My Father! That the whole of the surging
and flaming sun was actually down in my straitened and hampered
heart at that idle moment over my paper is scientifically
demonstrable; for only that which is in the heart of a man can kindle
the passions that are in the heart of that man; and nothing is more
sure to me than that the great passions of fear and love, wonder and
rapture were at that moment at a burning point within me. There is a
passage well on in the Holy War, which for terror and for horror, and
at the same time for truth and for power, equals anything either in
Dante or in Milton. Lucifer has stood up at the council board to second
the scheme of Beelzebub. 'Yes,' he said, amid the plaudits of his fellow-
princes - 'Yes, I swear it. Let us fill Mansoul full with our abundance.
Let us make of this castle, as they vainly call it, a warehouse, as the
name is in some of their cities above. For if we can only get Mansoul to
fill herself full with much goods she is henceforth ours. My peers,' he
said, 'you all know His parable of how unblessed riches choke the
word; and, again, we know what happens when the hearts of men are
overcharged with surfeiting and with drunkenness. Let us give them
all that, then, to their heart's desire.' This advice of Lucifer, our history
tells us, was highly applauded in hell, and ever since it has proved
their masterpiece to choke Mansoul with the fulness of this world, and
to surfeit the heart with the good things thereof. But, my brethren, you
will outwit hell herself and all her counsellors and all her
machinations, if, out of all the riches, pleasures, cares, and
possessions, that both heaven and earth and hell can heap into your
heart, those riches, pleasures, cares, and possessions but produce
corresponding passions and affections towards God and man. Only let
fear, and love, and thankfulness, and helpfulness be kindled and fed to
all their fulness in your heart, and all the world and all that it contains
will only leave the more room in your boundless heart for God and for
your brother. All that God has made, or could make with all His
counsel and all His power laid out, will not fill your boundless and
bottomless heart. He must come down and come into your boundless
and bottomless heart Himself. Himself: your Father, your Redeemer,
and your Sanctifier and Comforter also. Let the whole universe try to
fill your heart, O man of God, and after it all we shall hear you singing
in famine and in loneliness the doleful ditty:
'O come to my heart, Lord Jesus,
There is room in my heart for Thee.
'Madame,' said a holy solitary to Madame Guyon in her misery -
'Madame, you are disappointed and perplexed because you seek
without what you have within. Accustom yourself to seek for God in
your own heart and you will always find Him there.' From that hour
that gifted woman was a Mystic. The secret of the interior life flashed
upon her in a moment. She had been starving in the midst of fulness;
God was near and not far off; the kingdom of heaven was within her.
The love of God from that hour took possession of her soul with an
inexpressible happiness. Prayer, which had before been so difficult,
was now delightful and indispensable; hours passed away like
moments: she could scarcely cease from praying. Her domestic trials
seemed great to her no longer; her inward joy consumed like a fire the
reluctance, the murmur, and the sorrow, which all had their birth in
herself. A spirit of comforting peace, a sense of rejoicing possession,
pervaded all her days. God was continually with her, and she seemed
continually yielded up to God. 'Madame,' said the solitary, 'you seek
without for what you have within.' Where do you seek for God when
you pray, my brethren? To what place do you direct your eyes? Is it to
the roof of your closet? Is it to the east end of your consecrated
chapel? Is it to that wooden table in the east end of your chapel? Or, passing out of all houses made with hands and consecrated with holy
oil, do you lift up your eyes to the skies where the sun and the moon
and the stars dwell alone? 'What a folly!' exclaims Theophilus, in the
golden dialogue, 'for no way is the true way to God but by the way of
our own heart. God is nowhere else to be found. And the heart itself
cannot find Him but by its own love of Him, faith in Him, dependence
upon Him, resignation to Him, and expectation of all from Him.' 'You
have quite carried your point with me,' answered Theogenes after he
had heard all that Theophilus had to say. 'The God of meekness, of
patience, and of love is henceforth the one God of my heart. It is now
the one bent and desire of my soul to seek for all my salvation in and
through the merits and mediation of the meek, humble, patient,
resigned, suffering Lamb of God, who alone has power to bring forth
the blessed birth of those heavenly virtues in my soul. What a comfort
it is to think that this Lamb of God, Son of the Father, Light of the
World; this Glory of heaven and this Joy of angels is as near to us, is as