Bunyan Characters (Second Series)

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BUNYAN CHARACTERS--SECOND SERIES
Lectures delivered in St. George's Free Church Edinburgh
By Alexander Whyte, D.D.


IGNORANCE


"I was alive without the law once."--_Paul_.

"I was now a brisk talker also myself in the matter of
religion."--_Bunyan_.

This is a new kind of pilgrim. There are not many pilgrims like this
bright brisk youth. A few more young gentlemen like this, and the
pilgrimage way would positively soon become fashionable and popular, and
be the thing to do. Had you met with this young gentleman in society,
had you noticed him beginning to come about your church, you would have
lost no time in finding out who he was. I can well believe it, you would
have replied. Indeed, I felt sure of it. I must ask him to the house. I
was quite struck with his appearance and his manners. Yes; ask him at
once to your house; show him some pointed attentions and you will never
regret it. For if he goes to the bar and works even decently at his
cases, he will be first a sheriff and then a judge in no time. If he
should take to politics, he will be an under-secretary before his first
parliament is out. And if he takes to the church, which is not at all
unlikely, our West-end congregations will all be competing for him as
their junior colleague; and, if he elects either of our Established
churches to exercise his profession in it, he will have dined with Her
Majesty while half of his class-fellows are still half-starved
probationers. Society fathers will point him out with anger to their
unsuccessful sons, and society mothers will smile under their eyelids as
they see him hanging over their daughters.

Well, as this handsome and well-appointed youth stepped out of his own
neat little lane into the rough road on which our two pilgrims were
staggering upward, he felt somewhat ashamed to be seen in their company.
And I do not wonder. For a greater contrast you would not have seen on
any road in all that country that day. He was at your very first sight
of him a gentleman and the son of a gentleman. A little over-dressed
perhaps; as, also, a little lofty to the two rather battered but
otherwise decent enough men who, being so much older than he, took the
liberty of first accosting him. "Brisk" is his biographer's description
of him. Feather-headed, flippant, and almost impudent, you might have
been tempted to say of him had you joined the little party at that
moment. But those two tumbled, broken-winded, and, indeed,
broken-hearted old men had been, as an old author says, so emptied from
vessel to vessel--they had had a life of such sloughs and stiff
climbs--they had been in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness so
often--that it was no wonder that their dandiacal companion walked on a
little ahead of them. 'Gentlemen,' his fine clothes and his cane and his
head in the air all said to his two somewhat disreputable-looking fellow-
travellers,--"Gentlemen, you be utter strangers to me: I know you not.
And, besides, I take my pleasure in walking alone, even more a great deal
than in company, unless I like it better." But all his society manners,
and all his costly and well-kept clothes, and all his easy and
self-confident airs did not impose upon the two wary old pilgrims. They
had seen too much of the world, and had been too long mixing among all
kinds of pilgrims, young and old, true and false, to be easily imposed
upon. Besides, as one could see from their weather-beaten faces, and
their threadbare garments, they had found the upward way so dreadfully
difficult that they both felt a real apprehension as to the future of
this light-hearted and light-headed youth. "You may find some difficulty
at the gate," somewhat bluntly broke in the oldest of the two pilgrims on
their young comrade. "I shall, no doubt, do at the gate as other good
people do," replied the young gentleman briskly. "But what have you to
show at the gate that may cause that the gate be opened to you?" "Why, I
know my Lord's will, and I have been a good liver all my days, and I pay
every man his own. I pray, moreover, and I fast. I pay tithes, and give
alms, and have left my country for whither I am going." Now, before we
go further: Do all you young gentlemen do as much as that? Have you
always been good livers? Have you paid every man and woman their due? Do
you pray to be called prayer? And, if so, when, and where, and what for,
and how long at a time? I do not ask if your private prayer-book is like
Bishop Andrewes' _Devotions_, which was so reduced to pulp with tears and
sweat and the clenching of his agonising hands that his literary
executors were with difficulty able to decipher it. Clito in the
_Christian Perfection_ was so expeditious with his prayers that he used
to boast that he could both dress and do his devotions in a quarter of an
hour. What was the longest time you ever took to dress or undress and
say your prayers? Then, again, there is another Anglican young gentleman
in the same High Church book who always fasts on Good Friday and the
Thirtieth of January. Did you ever deny yourself a glass of wine or a
cigar or an opera ticket for the church or the poor? Could you honestly
say that you know what tithes are? And is there a poor man or woman or
child in this whole city who will by any chance put your name into their
prayers and praises at bedtime to-night? I am afraid there are not many
young gentlemen in this house to-night who could cast a stone at that
brisk lad Ignorance, Vain-Hope, door in the side of the hill, and all. He
was not far from the kingdom of heaven; indeed, he got up to the very
gate of it. How many of you will get half as far?

Now (what think you?), was it not a very bold thing in John Bunyan, whose
own descent was of such a low and inconsiderable generation, his father's
house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the
families in the land--was it not almost too bold in such a clown to take
such a gentleman-scholar as Saul of Tarsus, the future Apostle of the
Lord, and put him into the _Pilgrim's Progress_, and there go on to
describe him as a very brisk lad and nickname him with the nickname of
Ignorance? For, in knowledge of all kinds to be called knowledge,
Gamaliel's gold medallist could have bought the unlettered tinker of
Elstow in one end of the market and sold him in the other. And nobody
knew that better than Bunyan did. And yet such a lion was he for the
truth, such a disciple of Luther was he, and such a defender and preacher
of the one doctrine of a standing or falling church, that he fills page
after page with the crass ignorance of the otherwise most learned of all
the New Testament men. Bunyan does not accuse the rising hope of the
Pharisees of school or of synagogue ignorance. That young Hebrew Rabbi
knew every jot and tittle of the law of Moses, and all the accumulated
traditions of the fathers to boot. But Bunyan has Paul himself with him
when he accuses and convicts Saul of an absolutely brutish ignorance of
his own heart and hidden nature. That so very brisk lad was always
boasting in himself of the day on which he was circumcised, and of the
old stock of which he had come; of his tribe, of his zeal, of his
blamelessness, and of the profit he had made of his educational and
ecclesiastical opportunities. Whereas Bunyan is fain to say of himself
in his _Grace Abounding_ that he is "not able to boast of noble blood or
of a high-born state according to the flesh. Though, all things
considered, I magnify the Heavenly Majesty for that by this door He
brought me into this world to partake of the grace and life that is in
Christ by the Gospel."

As we listen to the conversation that goes on between the two old
pilgrims and this smartly appointed youth, we find them striving hard,
but without any sign of success, to convince him of some of the things
from which he gets his somewhat severe name. For one thing, they at last
bluntly told him that he evidently did not know the very A B C about
himself. Till, when too hard pressed by the more ruthless of the two old
men, the exasperated youth at last frankly burst out: "I will never
believe that my heart is thus bad!" There is a warm touch of Bunyan's
own experience here, mixed up with his so dramatic development of Paul's
morsels of autobiography that he lets drop in his Epistles to the
Philippians and to the Galatians. "Now was I become godly; now I was
become a right honest man. Though as yet I was nothing but a poor
painted hypocrite, yet I was proud of my godliness. I read my Bible, but
as for Paul's Epistles, and such like Scriptures, I could not away with
them; being, as yet, but ignorant both of the corruptions of my nature
and of the want and worth of Jesus Christ to save me. The new birth did
never enter my mind, neither knew I the deceitfulness and treachery of my
own wicked heart. And as for secret thoughts, I took no notice of them."
My brethren, old and young, what do you think of all that? What have you
to say to all that? Does all that not open a window and let a flood of
daylight into your own breast? I am sure it does. That is the best
portrait of you that ever was painted. Do you not see yourself there as
in a glass? And do you not turn with disgust and loathing from the
stupid and foolish face? You complain and tell stories about how
impostors and cheats and liars have come to your door and have impudently
thrust themselves into your innermost rooms; but your own heart, if you
only knew it, is deceitful far above them all. Not the human heart as it
stands in confessions, and in catechisms, and in deep religious books,
but your own heart that beats out its blood-poison of self-deceit, and
darkness, and death day and night continually. "My heart is a good
heart," said that poor ill-brought-up boy, who was already destroyed by
his father and his mother for lack of self-knowledge. I entirely grant
you that those two old sinners by this time were taking very pessimistic
and very melancholy views of human nature, and, therefore, of every human
being, young and old. They knew that no language had ever been coined in
any scripture, or creed, or catechism, or secret diary of the deepest
penitent, that even half uttered their own evil hearts; and they had
lived long enough to see that we are all cut out of one web, are all dyed
in one vat, and are all corrupted beyond all accusation or confession in
Adam's corruption. But how was that poor, mishandled lad to know or
believe all that? He could not. It was impossible. "You go so fast,
gentlemen, that I cannot keep pace with you. Go you on before and I will
stay a while behind." Then said Christian to his companion: "It pities
me much for this poor lad, for it will certainly go ill with him at
last." "Alas!" said Hopeful, "there are abundance in our town in his
condition: whole families, yea, whole streets, and that of pilgrims too."
Is your family such a family as this? And are you yourself just such a
pilgrim as Ignorance was, and are you hastening on to just such an end?

And then, as a consequence, being wholly ignorant of his own corruption
and condemnation in the sight of God, this miserable man must remain
ignorant and outside of all that God has done in Christ for corrupt and
condemned men. "I believe that Christ died for sinners and that I shall
be justified before God from the curse through His gracious acceptance of
my obedience to His law. Or, then, to take it this way, Christ makes my
duties that are religious acceptable to His Father by virtue of His
merits, and so shall I be justified." Now, I verify believe that nine
out of ten of the young men who are here to-night would subscribe that
statement and never suspect there was anything wrong with it or with
themselves. And yet, what does Christian, who, in this matter, is just
John Bunyan, who again is just the word of God--what does the old pilgrim
say to this confession of this young pilgrim's faith? "Ignorance is thy
name," he says, "and as thy name is, so art thou: even this thy answer
demonstrateth what I say. Ignorant thou art of what justifying
righteousness is, and as ignorant how to secure thy soul through the
faith of it from the heavy wrath of God. Yea, thou also art ignorant of
the true effect of saving faith in this righteousness of Christ's, which
is to bow and win over the heart to God in Christ, to love His name, His
word, His ways, and His people." Paul sums up all his own early life in
this one word, "ignorant of God's righteousness." "Going about," he says
also, "to establish our own righteousness, not submitting ourselves to be
justified by the righteousness that God has provided with such wisdom and
grace, and at such a cost in His Son Jesus Christ." Now, young men, I
defy you to be better born, better brought up, or to have better
prospects than Saul of Tarsus had. I defy you to have profited more by
all your opportunities and advantages than he had done. I defy you to be
more blameless in your opening manhood than he was. And yet it all went
like smoke when he got a true sight of himself, and, with that, a true
sight of Christ and His justifying righteousness. Read at home to-night,
and read when alone, what that great man of God says about all that in
his classical epistle to the Philippians, and refuse to sleep till you
have made the same submission. And, to-night, and all your days, let
_submission_, Paul's splendid submission, be the soul and spirit of all
your religious life. Submission to be searched by God's holy law as by a
lighted candle: submission to be justified from all that that candle
discovers: submission to take Christ as your life and righteousness,
sanctification and redemption: and submission of your mind and your will
and your heart to Him at all times and in all things. Nay, stay still,
and say where you sit, Lord, I submit. I submit on the spot to be
pardoned. I submit now to be saved. I submit in all things from this
very hour and house of God not any longer to be mine own, but to be
Thine, O God, Thine, Thine, for ever, in Jesus Christ Thy Son and my
Saviour!

"But, one day, as I was passing in the field, and that, too, with some
dashes in my conscience, fearing lest all was not right, suddenly this
sentence fell upon my soul, Thy Righteousness is in heaven! And,
methought, I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God's right
hand. There, I saw, was my Righteousness. I also saw, moreover, that it
was not my good frame of heart that made my Righteousness better, nor my
bad frame of heart that made my Righteousness worse: for my Righteousness
was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.
'Twas glorious to me to see His exaltation, and the worth and prevalency
of His benefits. And that because I could now look from myself to Him
and should reckon that all those graces of God that were now green in me
were yet but like those crack-groats and four-pence halfpennies that rich
men carry in their purses when their gold is in their trunks at home! Oh,
I saw that day that my gold was all in my trunk at home! Even in Christ,
my Lord and Saviour! Now, Christ was all to me: all my wisdom, all my
righteousness, all my sanctification and all my redemption."

"Methinks in this God speaks,
No tinker hath such power."




LITTLE-FAITH


"O thou of little faith."--_Our Lord_.

Little-Faith, let it never be forgotten, was, all the time, a good man.
With all his mistakes about himself, with his sad misadventure, with all
his loss of blood and of money, and with his whole after-lifetime of
doleful and bitter complaints,--all the time, Little-Faith was all
through, in a way, a good man. To keep us right on this all-important
point, and to prevent our being prematurely prejudiced against this
pilgrim because of his somewhat prejudicial name--because give a dog a
bad name, you know, and you had better hang him out of hand at
once--because, I say, of this pilgrim's somewhat suspicious name, his
scrupulously just, and, indeed, kindly affected biographer says of him,
and says it of him not once nor twice, but over and over and over again,
that this Little-Faith was really all the time a truly good man. And,
more than that, this good man's goodness was not a new thing with him it
was not a thing of yesterday. This man had, happily to begin with, a
good father and a good mother. And if there was a good town in all those
parts for a boy to be born and brought up in it was surely the town of
Sincere. "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old
he will not depart from it." Well, Little-Faith had been so trained up
both by his father and his mother and his schoolmaster and his minister,
and he never cost either of them a sore heart or even an hour's sleep.
One who knew him well, as well, indeed, as only one young man knows
another, has been fain to testify, when suspicions have been cast on the
purity and integrity of his youth, that nothing will describe this
pilgrim so well in the days of his youth as just those beautiful words
out of the New Testament--"an example to all young men in word, in
conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith even, and in purity"--and
that, if there was one young man in all that town of Sincere who kept his
garments unspotted it was just our pilgrim of to-night. Yes, said one
who had known him all his days, if the child is the father of the man,
then Little-Faith, as you so unaccountably to me call him, must have been
all along a good man.

It was said long ago in _Vanity Fair_ about our present Premier that if
he were a worse man he would be a better statesman. Now, I do not repeat
that in this place because I agree with it, but because it helps to
illustrate, as sometimes a violent paradox will help to illustrate, a
truth that does not lie all at once on the surface. But it is no paradox
or extravagance or anything but the simple truth to say that if Little-
Faith had had more and earlier discoveries made to him of the innate evil
of his own heart, even if it had been by that innate evil bursting out of
his heart and laying waste his good life, he would either have been
driven out of his little faith altogether or driven into a far deeper
faith. Had the commandment come to him in the manner it came to Paul;
had it come so as that the sinfulness of his inward nature had revived,
as Paul says, under its entrance; then, either his great goodness or his
little faith must have there and then died. God's truth and man's
goodness cannot dwell together in the same heart. Either the truth will
kill the goodness, or the goodness will kill the truth. Little-Faith, in
short, was such a good man, and had always been such a good man, and had
led such an easy life in consequence, that his faith had not been much
exercised, and therefore had not grown, as it must have been exercised
and must have grown, had he not been such a good man. In short, and to
put it bluntly, had Little-Faith been a worse sinner, he would have been
a better saint. "_O felix culpa_!" exclaimed a church father; "O happy
fault, which found for us sinners such a Redeemer." An apostrophe which
Bishop Ken has put into these four bold lines--

"What Adam did amiss,
Turned to our endless bliss;
O happy sin, which to atone,
Drew Filial God to leave His throne."

And John Calvin, the soberest of men, supports Augustine, the most
impulsive of men, in saying the same thing. All things which happen to
the saints are so overruled by God that what the world regards as evil
the issue shows to be good. For what Augustine says is true, that even
the sins of saints are, through the guiding providence of God, so far
from doing harm to them, that, on the contrary, they serve to advance
their salvation. And Richard Hooker, a theologian, if possible, still
more judicious than even John Calvin, says on this same subject and in
support of the same great father, "I am not afraid to affirm it boldly
with St. Augustine that men puffed up through a proud opinion of their
own sanctity and holiness receive a benefit at the hands of God, and are
assisted with His grace, when with His grace they are not assisted, but
permitted, and that grievously, to transgress. Ask the very soul of
Peter, and it shall undoubtedly make you itself this answer: My eager
protestations, made in the glory of my ghostly strength, I am ashamed of;
but those crystal tears, wherewith my sin and weakness were bewailed,
have procured my endless joy: my strength hath been my ruin, and my fall
my stay." And our own Samuel Rutherford is not likely to be left far
behind by the best of them when the grace of God is to be magnified. "Had
sin never been we should have wanted the mysterious Emmanuel, the
Beloved, the Chief among ten thousand, Christ, God-man, the Saviour of
sinners. For, no sick sinners, no soul-physician of sinners; no captive,
no Redeemer; no slave of hell, no lovely ransom-payer of heaven. Mary
Magdalene with her seven devils, Paul with his hands smoking with the
blood of the saints, and with his heart sick with malice and blasphemy
against Christ and His Church, and all the rest of the washen ones whose
robes are made fair in the blood of the Lamb, and all the multitude that
no man can number in that best of lands, are all but bits of free grace.
O what a depth of unsearchable wisdom to contrive that lovely plot of
free grace. Come, all intellectual capacities, and warm your hearts at
this fire. Come, all ye created faculties, and smell the precious
ointment of Christ. Oh come, sit down under His shadow and eat the
apples of life. Oh that angels would come, and generations of men, and
wonder, and admire, and fall down before the unsearchable wisdom of this
gospel-art of the unsearchable riches of Christ!" And always pungent
Thomas Shepard of New England: "You shall find this, that there is not
any carriage or passage of the Lord's providence toward thee but He will
get a name to Himself, first and last, by it. Hence you shall find that
those very sins that dishonour His name He will even by them get Himself
a better name; for so far will they be from casting you out of His love
that He will actually do thee good by them. Look and see if it is not so
with thee? Doth not thy weakness strengthen thee like Paul? Doth not
thy blindness make thee cry for light? And hath not God out of darkness
oftentimes brought light? Thou hast felt venom against Christ and thy
brother, and thou hast on that account loathed thyself the more. Thy
falls into sin make thee weary of it, watchful against it, long to be rid
of it. And thus He makes thy poison thy food, thy death thy life, thy
damnation thy salvation, and thy very greatest enemies thy very best
friends. And hence Mr. Fox said that he thanked God more for his sins
than for his good works. And the reason is, God will have His name."
And, last, but not least, listen to our old acquaintance, James Fraser of
Brea: "I find advantages by my sins: '_Peccare nocet, peccavisse vero
juvat_.' I may say, as Mr. Fox said, my sins have, in a manner, done me
more good than my graces. Grace and mercy have more abounded where sin
had much abounded. I am by my sins made much more humble, watchful,
revengeful against myself. I am made to see a greater need to depend
more upon Him and to love Him the more. I find that true which Shepard
says, 'sin loses strength by every new fall.'" Have you followed all
that, my brethren? Or have you stumbled at it? Do you not understand
it? Does your superficial gin-horse mind incline to shake its empty head
over all this? I know that great names, and especially the great names
of your own party, go much farther with you than the truth goes, and
therefore I have sheltered this deep truth under a shield of great names.
For their sakes let this sure truth of God's best saints lie in peace and
undisputed beside you till you arrive to understand it.

But, to proceed,--the thing was this. At this passage there comes down
from Broadway-gate a lane called Dead-Man's-lane, so called because of
the murders that are commonly done there. And this Little-Faith going on
pilgrimage, as we now do, chanced to sit down there and fell fast asleep.
Yes; the thing was this: This good man had never been what one would call
really awake. He was not a bad man, as men went in the town of Sincere,
but he always had a half-slept half-awakened look about his eyes, till
now, at this most unfortunate spot, he fell stone-dead asleep. You all
know, I shall suppose, what the apostle Paul and John Bunyan mean by
sleep, do you not? You all know, at any rate, to begin with, what sleep
means in the accident column of the morning papers. You all know what
sleep meant and what it involved and cost in the Thirsk signal-box the
other night. {1} When a man is asleep, he is as good as dead, and other
people are as good as dead to him. He is dead to duty, to danger, to
other people's lives, as well as to his own. He may be having pleasant
dreams, and may even be laughing aloud in his sleep, but that may only
make his awaking all the more hideous. He may awake just in time, or he
may awake just too late. Only, he is asleep and he neither knows nor
cares. Now, there is a sleep of the soul as well as of the body. And as
the soul is in worth, as the soul is in its life and in its death to the
body, so is its sleep. Many of you sitting there are quite as dead to
heaven and hell, to death and judgment, and to what a stake other people
as well as yourselves have in your sleep as that poor sleeper in the
signal-box was dead to what was coming rushing on him through the black
night. And as all his gnashing of teeth at himself, and all his sobs
before his judge and before the laid-out dead, and before distracted
widows and half-mad husbands did not bring back that fatal moment when he
fell asleep so sweetly, so will it be with you. Lazarus! come forth!
Wise and foolish virgins both: Behold the Bridegroom cometh! Awake, thou
that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light!