'If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his
drinking too much? Does envy make our heart a very hell? Let us
name the man we envy, and let us keep our Communion eye upon him.
Let us mix his name with all the psalms and prayers and sermons of
this Communion season. Or is it diabolical ill-will? Or is it a wicked
tongue against an unsuspecting friend? Let us examine ourselves as
Paul did, as Prywell did, and as God would have us do it, and we shall
discover things in ourselves so bad that if I were to put words on them
to-night, you would stop your ears in horror and flee out of the
church. Let a man see himself at least as others see him; and then he
will be led on from that to see himself as God sees him; and then he
will judge himself so severely as that he shall not need to be judged at
the Judgment Day, and will condemn himself so sufficiently as that he
shall not be condemned with a condemned world at the last.
Chapter 16 - YOUNG CAPTAIN SELF-DENIAL
'If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his
cross daily and follow Me.' - Our Lord.
'Now the siege was long, and many a fierce attempt did the
enemy make upon the town, and many a shrewd brush did some of
the townsmen meet with from the enemy, especially Captain Self-
denial, to whose care both Ear-gate and Eye-gate had been intrusted.
This Captain Self-denial was a young man, but stout, and a townsman
in Mansoul. This young captain, therefore, being a hardy man, and a
man of great courage to boot, and willing to venture himself for the
good of the town, he would now and then sally out upon the enemy;
but you must think this could not easily be done, but he must meet
with some sharp brushes himself, and, indeed, he carried several of
such marks on his face, yea, and some on some other parts of his
body.' Thus, Bunyan. I shall now go on to-night to offer you some
annotations and some reflections on this short but excellent history of
young Captain Self-denial.
Well, to begin with, this Captain Self-denial was still a young man.
'And, now, it comes into my mind, said Goodman Gains after supper, I
will tell you a story well worth the hearing, as I think. There were two
men once upon a time that went on pilgrimage; the one began when
he was young and the other began when he was old. The young man
had strong corruptions to grapple with, whereas the old man's
corruptions were decayed with the decays of nature. The young man
trod his steps as even as did the old one, and was every way as light as
he; who, now, or which of them, had their graces shining clearest,
since both seemed to be alike? Why, the young man's, doubtless,
answered Mr. Honest. For that which heads against the greatest
opposition gives best demonstration that it is strongest. A young man,
therefore, has the advantage of the fairest discovery of a work of grace
within him. And thus they sat talking till the break of day.'
Now, I have taken up Captain Self-denial to-night because the
young men and I are to begin a study to-night to which I was first
attracted because it taught me lessons about myself, and about self-
denial, and thus about both a young man's and an old man's deepest
and most persistent corruptions - lessons such as I have never been
taught in any other school. In all my philosophical, theological, moral,
and experimental reading, so to describe it, I have never met with any school of authors for one moment to be compared with the great
evangelical mystics, especially when they treat of self, self-love, self-
denial, the daily cross, and all suchlike lessons. Take the great
doctrinal and experimental Puritans, such as John Owen, Thomas
Goodwin, Richard Baxter, John Howe, and Jonathan Edwards, and add
on to them the greatest and best mystics, such as Jacob Behmen,
Thomas A Kempis, Francis Fenelon, Jeremy Taylor, Samuel Rutherford,
Robert Leighton, and William Law, and you will have the profoundest,
the most complete, the most perfect, and, I will add, the most
fascinating and enthralling of spiritual teaching in all the world. And I
will be bold enough to promise you that if you will but join our Young
Men's Class to-night, and will buy and read our mystical books, and
will resolve to put in practice what you hear and read in the class, I
will promise you, I say, that by the end of our short session you will
not only be ten times more open and hospitably-minded men, but also
ten times more spiritually-minded men, ten times more Christ-like
men, and with your joy in Christ and His joy in you all but full.
The Captain Self-denial was a young man, and he was also a
townsman in Mansoul. Young Self-denial and one other were all of
Emmanuel's captains who were townsmen in Mansoul. All his other
captains Emmanuel had brought with him; but the Captains Self-
denial and Experience were both born and reared to their full
manhood in that besieged city. 'A townsman.' How much there is for us
all in that one word! How much instruction! How much
encouragement! How much caution and correction! Our greatest
grace; our most essential and indispensable grace; our most
experimental and evidential grace; that grace, indeed, without which
all our other graces are but specious shows and painted surfaces of
graces; that grace into which our Lord here gathers up all our other
graces; - that greatest of graces cannot be imputed, imported, or
introduced; it must be born, bred, exercised, reared up to its full
maturity, and sent forth to fight and to conquer, and all within the
walls of its own native town; in short, our self-denial must have its
beginning and middle and end in our own heart. Antinomians there
were, as our Puritan fathers nicknamed all those persons who
glorified Christ by letting Him do all things for them, both His own
things and their things too, both their justification and their sanctification too. And there are many good but ill-instructed men
among ourselves who have just this taint of that old heresy cleaving to
them still - this taint, namely, that they are tempted to carry over the
suretyship and substitutionary work of Christ into such regions, and
to carry it to such lengths in those regions, as, practically, to make
Christ to minister to their soft and sinful living, and to their excuse
and indulgence of themselves. I will put it squarely and plainly to
some of my very best friends here to-night. Is it not the case, now, that
you do not like this direction into which this text, and the truth of this
text, are now travelling? Is it not so that you shift back in your seat
from the approaching cross? Is it not the very and actual fact that you
have secret ways of sin, secret habits of self-indulgence in your body
and in your soul, in your mind and in your heart, secret sins that you
mantle over with the robe of Christ's righteousness? His spotless and
imputed righteousness? In your present temper you would have
disliked deeply the Sermon on the Mount had you heard it; and I see
you shaking your head over your Sabbath-day dinner at this text when
it was first spoken. Lay this down for a law, all my brethren, - a New
Testament and a never-to-be-abrogated law, - that the best and the
safest religion for you is that way of religion that is hardest on your
pride, on your self-importance, on your self-esteem, as well as on your
purse and on your belly. You are not likely to err by practising too
much of the cross. You may very well have too much of the cross of
Christ preached to you, and too little of your own. Why! did not Christ
die for me? you indignantly say. Yes; so He did. But only that you might
die too. He was crucified, and so must you be crucified every day
before one single drop of His sin-atoning blood shall ever be wasted
on You. Be not deceived: the cross is not mocked; for only as a man
nails himself, body and soul, to the cross every day shall he ever be
saved from sin and death and hell by means of it. And, exactly as a
man denies himself - no more and no less - his appetites, his passions,
his thoughts and words and deeds, every day and every hour of every
day, just so much shall He who searches our hearts and sees us in
secret, acknowledge us, both every day now, and at the last day of all.
This same Captain Self-denial, his history goes on, was stout, he
was an hardy man also, and a man of great courage. Stout and hardy
and of great courage at home, that is; in his own mind and heart, soul and body, that is. Young Captain Self-denial was a perfect hero at
saying No! and at saying No! to himself. It is a proverb that there is
nothing so difficult as to say that monosyllable. And the proverb is
Scripture truth if you try to say No! to yourself. It takes the very
stoutest of hearts, the most noble, the most manly, the most soldierly,
and the most saintly of hearts to say No! to itself, and to keep on
saying No! to itself to the bitter end of every trial and temptation and
opportunity. I remember reading long ago a page or two of a medical
man's diary. And in it he made a confession and an appeal I have never
forgot; though, to my loss, I have not always acted upon it. He said that
for many years he had never been entirely well. He had constant
headaches and depressions, and it was seldom that he was not to
some extent out of sorts. But, all the time, he had a shrewd guess
within himself as to what was the matter with him. He felt ashamed to
confess it even to himself that he over-ate himself every day at table;
till, at last, summoning up all divine and human help, he determined
that, however hungry he was, and however savoury the dish was, and
however excellent the wine was, he would never either ask for or
accept a second helping. And this was his testimony, that from that
stout and hardy day he grew better in health daily; 'my head became
clear, my eye bright, my complexion pure, my mind and feelings were
redeemed from all clouds and depressions. And to-day I am a younger
man at fifty than I was at thirty.' Now, if just saying No! to himself and
to the waiter at table did work such a new birth in a confirmed
gourmand of middle life, what would it not have wrought for him had
he carried his answer stoutly and courageously through all the other
parts of his body and soul? - as perhaps he did. Perhaps, having tasted
the sweet beginnings of salvation, he carried his short and sure
regimen through. If he has done so, let him give us his full
autobiography. What a blessed, what a priceless book it would be!
Stout Captain Self-denial was commanded to begin his life as an
officer in Emmanuel's army by taking especial watch over Ear-gate
and Eye-gate; and at our last accounts of our abstemious doctor he
had only got the length of Mouth-gate. But having begun so well with
those three great outposts of the soul, if those two trusty officers only
held on, and played the man courageously enough, they would soon be
promoted to still more important, still more central, and, if more difficult and dangerous, then also much more honourable and
remunerative posts. Appetite, deep and deadly as its evils are, is, after
all, only an outwork of the soul; and the same sharp knife that the
epicure and the sot in all their stages must put to their throat, that
same knife must be made to draw blood in all parts of their mind and
their heart, in their will and in their imagination, till a perfect chorus
of self-denials rings like noblest martial music through all the gates,
and streets, and fortresses, and strongholds, and very palaces and
temples of the soul. I shall here stand aside and let the greatest of the
English mystics speak to you on this present point. 'When we speak of
self-denial,' he says, in his Christian Perfection, 'we are apt to confine
it to eating and drinking: but we ought to consider that, though a strict
temperance be necessary in these things, yet that these are the easiest
and the smallest instances of self-denial. Pride, vanity, self-love,
covetousness, envy, and other inclinations of the like nature call for a
more constant and a more watchful self-denial than the appetites of
hunger and thirst. And till we enter into this course of universal
selfdenial we shall make no progress in real piety, but our lives will be
a ridiculous mixture of I know not what; sober and covetous, proud
and devout, temperate and vain, regular in our forms of devotion and
irregular in all our passions, circumspect in little modes of behaviour
and careless and negligent of tempers the most essential to piety. And
thus it will necessarily be with us till we lay the axe to the root of the
tree, till we deny and renounce the whole corruption of our nature,
and resign ourselves up entirely to the Spirit of God, to think and
speak and act by the wisdom and the purity of religion.'
Stout as Captain Self-denial was, and notable alarms and some
brisk execution as he did upon the enemy, yet he must meet with
some brushes himself; indeed, he carried several of the marks of such
brushes on his face as well as on some other parts of his body. If I had
read in his history that Young Captain Self-denial had left his mark
upon his enemies, I would have said, Well done, and I would have
added that I always expected as much. But it is far more to my
purpose to read that he had not always got himself off without
wounds that left lasting scars both where they were seen of all, and
where they were seen and felt only by Self-denial himself. And not
Self-denial only, but even Paul, in our flesh, and with like passions with us, had the same experience and has left us the same record. 'I
keep my body under': so our emasculated English version makes us
read it. But the visual image in the masterly original Greek is not so
mealy-mouthed. I box and buffet myself day and night, says Paul. I
play the truculent tyrant over a lewd and lazy slave. I hit myself
blinding blows on my tenderest part. I am ashamed to look at myself
in the glass, for all under my eyes I am black and blue. If David, after
the matter of Uriah, had done that to himself, and even more than that,
we would not have wondered; we would have expected it, and we
would have said, It is no more than we would have done ourselves.
But that a spotless, gentle, noble soul like Paul should so have
mangled himself, - that quite dumfounders us. If Paul, then, who,
touching the righteousness which is in the law, was blameless, had to
handle himself in that manner in order to keep himself blameless,
shall any young man here hope to escape temptation without such
blows at himself as shall leave their mark on him all his days? Nay, not
only so, but after Self-denial had thus exercised himself and subdued
himself, still his enemy sometimes got such an advantage over him as
left him as his history here describes him. All which is surely full of the
most excellent heartening to all who read, in earnest and for an
example, his fine history.
The last and crowning exploit of our matchless captain was to
capture, and execute, and quarter, and hang up on a gallows at the
market-cross, the head and the hands and the feet of his oldest, most
sworn, and most deadly enemy, one Self-love. So stout and so
insufferable was our captain in the matter of Self-love that when it
was proposed by some of his many influential friends and high-in-
place relations in the city that the judgment of the court-martial on
Self-love should be deferred, our stout soldier with the cuts on his face
and in some other parts of his body stood up, and said that the city
and the army must make up their mind either to relieve him of his
sword, hacked and broken off as it was, or else to execute the law
upon Self-love on the spot. I will lay down my commission this very
day, he said, with an extraordinary indignation. Many rich men in the
city, and many men deep in the King's service, muttered mutinous
things when their near relative was hurried to the open cause-way,
but by that time the soldiers of Self-denial's company had brained Self-love with the butts of their muskets. And it was the stand that our
captain made in the matter of Self-love that at last lifted the young
soldier where many had felt he should have been lifted long ago.
From that day he was made a lord, a military peer, and an adviser of
the crown and the crown officers in all the deepest counsels
concerning Mansoul. Only, with the cloak and the coronet of Self-
denial the present history all but comes to an end. For, before the
outcast remains of Selflove had mouldered to their dust on the city
gate, the King's chariot had descended into the street, had ascended
up to the palace at the head of the street, and a new age of the city life
had begun, the full history of which has yet to be told. Remain behind,
then, and begin with us to-night, all you young men. You cannot begin
this lifelong study and this lifelong pursuit of self-denial too early. For,
even if you begin to read our books and to practise our discipline in
your very boyhood, when you are old men and very saints of God you
will feel that your self-love is still so full of life and power, that your
self-denial has scarcely begun. Ah, me! men: both old and young men.