Bunyan Characters (Second Series)

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We have to construct this pilgrim's birth and boyhood and youth from his
after-character and conversation; and we have no difficulty at all in
doing that. For, if the child is the father of the man, then the man
must be the outcome of the child, and we can have no hesitation in
picturing to ourselves what kind of child and boy and young man dear Old
Honest must always have been. He never was a bright child, bright and
beaming old man as he is. He was always slow and heavy at his lessons;
indeed, I would not like to repeat to you all the bad names that his
schoolmasters sometimes in their impatience called the stupid child.
Only, this was to be said of him, that dulness of uptake and
disappointment of his teachers were the worst things about this poor boy;
he was not so ill-behaved as many were who were made more of. When his
wits began to waken up after he had come some length he had no little
leeway to make up in his learning; but that was the chief drawback to Old
Honest's pilgrimage. For one thing, no young man had a cleaner record
behind him than our Honest had; his youthful garments were as unspotted
as ever any pilgrim's garments were. Even as a young man he had had the
good sense to keep company with one Good-conscience; and that friend of
his youth kept true to Old Honest all his days, and even lent him his
hand and helped him over the river at last. In his own manly, hearty,
blunt, breezy, cheery, and genial way Old Honest is a pilgrim we could
ill have spared. Old Honest has a warm place all for himself in every
good and honest heart.

"Now, a little before the pilgrims stood an oak, and under it when they
came up to it they found an old pilgrim fast asleep; they knew that he
was a pilgrim by his clothes and his staff and his girdle. So the guide,
Mr. Greatheart, awaked him, and the old gentleman, as he lifted up his
eyes, cried out: What's the matter? Who are you? And what is your
business here? Come, man, said the guide, be not so hot; here is none
but friends! Yet the old man gets up and stands upon his guard, and will
know of them what they are." That weather-beaten oak-tree under which we
first meet with Old Honest is an excellent emblem of the man. When he
sat down to rest his old bones that day he did not look out for a bank of
soft moss or for a bed of fragrant roses; that knotted oak-tree alone had
power to draw down under its sturdy trunk this heart of human oak. It
was a sight to see those thin grey haffets making a soft pillow of that
jutting knee of gnarled and knotty oak, and with his well-worn
quarterstaff held close in a hand all wrinkled skin and scraggy bone. And
from that day till he waved his quarterstaff when half over the river and
shouted, Grace reigns! there is no pilgrim of them all that affords us
half the good humour, sagacity, continual entertainment, and brave
encouragement we enjoy through this same old Christian gentleman.

1. Now, let us try to learn two or three lessons to-night from Old
Honest, his history, his character, and his conversation. And, to begin
with, let all those attend to Old Honest who are slow in the uptake in
the things of religion. O fools and slow of heart! exclaimed our Lord at
the two travellers to Emmaus. And this was Old Honest to the letter when
he first entered on the pilgrimage life; he was slow as sloth itself in
the things of the soul. I have often wondered, said Greatheart, that any
should come from your place; for your town is worse than is the City of
Destruction itself. Yes, answered Honest, we lie more off from the sun,
and so are more cold and senseless. And his biographer here annotates on
the margin this reflection: "Stupefied ones are worse than merely
carnal." So they are; though it takes some insight to see that, and some
courage to carry that through. Now, to be downright stupid in a man's
natural intellects is sad enough, but to be stupid in the intellects of
the soul and of the spirit is far more sad. You will often see this if
you have any eyes in your head, and are not one of the stupid people
yourself. You will see very clever people in the intellects of the head
who are yet as stupid as the beasts in the stall in the far nobler
intellects of the heart. You will meet every day with men and women who
have received the best college education this city can give them, who are
yet stark stupid in everything that belongs to true religion. They are
quick to find out the inefficiency of a university chair, or a
schoolmaster's desk, but they know no more of what a New Testament pulpit
has been set up for than the stupidest sot in the city. The Divine
Nature, human nature, sin, grace, redemption, salvation, holiness, heart-
corruption, spiritual life, prayer, communion with God, a conversation
and a treasure in heaven,--to all these noblest of studies and divinest
of exercises they are as a beast before God. When you come upon a man
who is a sot in his senses and in his understanding, you expect him to be
the same in his spiritual life. But to meet with an expert in science, a
classical scholar, an author or a critic in letters, a leader in
political or ecclesiastical or municipal life, and yet to discover that
he is as stupid as any sot in the things of his own soul, is one of the
saddest and most disheartening sights you can see. Much sadder and much
more disheartening than to see stairs and streets of people who can
neither read nor write. And yet our city is full of such stupid people.
You will find as utter spiritual stupidity among the rich and the
lettered and the refined of this city as you will find among the ignorant
and the vicious and the criminal classes. Is stupidity a sin? asks
Thomas in his Forty-Sixth Question. And the great schoolman answers
himself, "Stupidity may come of natural incapacity, in which case it is
not a sin. But it may come, on the other hand, of a man immersing his
soul in the things of this world so as to shut out all the things of God
and of the world to come, in which case stupidity is a deadly sin." Now,
from all that, you must already see what you are to do in order to escape
from your inborn and superinduced stupidity. You are, like Old Honest,
to open your gross, cold, senseless heart to the Sun of Righteousness,
and you are to take care every day to walk abroad under His beams. You
are to emigrate south for your life, as our well-to-do invalids do, to
where the sun shines in his strength all the day. You are to choose such
a minister, buy and read such a literature, cultivate such an
acquaintanceship, and follow out such a new life of habits and practices
as shall bring you into the full sunshine, till your heart of ice is
melted, and your stupefied soul is filled with spiritual sensibility.
For, "were a man a mountain of ice," said Old Honest, "yet if the Sun of
Righteousness will arise upon him his frozen heart shall feel a thaw; and
thus hath it been with me." Your poets and your philosophers have no
resource against the stupidity that opposes them. "Even the gods," they
complain, "fight unvictorious against stupidity." But your divines and
your preachers have hope beside the dullest and the stupidest and even
the most imbruted. They point themselves and their slowest and dullest-
witted hearers to Old Honest, this rare old saint; and they set up their
pulpit with hope and boldness on the very causeway of the town of
Stupidity itself.

2. In the second place,--on this fine old pilgrim's birth and boyhood
and youth. The apostle says that there is no real difference between one
of us and another; and what he says on that subject must be true. No;
there is really no difference compared with the Celestial City whether a
pilgrim is born in Stupidity, in Destruction, in Vanity, or in Darkland.
At the same time, nature, as well as grace, is of God, and He maketh,
when it pleaseth Him, one man to differ in some most important respects
from another. You see such differences every day. Some children are
naturally, and from their very infancy, false and cruel, mean and greedy;
while their brothers and sisters are open and frank and generous. One
son in a house is born a vulgar snob, and one daughter a shallow-hearted
and shameless little flirt; while another brother is a born gentleman,
and another sister a born saint. Some children are tender-hearted,
easily melted, and easily moulded; while others in the same family are
hard as stone and cold as ice. Sometimes a noble and a truly Christian
father will have all his days to weep and pray over a son who is his
shame; and then, in the next generation, a grandson will be born to him
who will more than recover the lost image of his father's father. And so
is it sometimes with father Adam's family. Here and there, in Darkland,
in Destruction, and in Stupidity, a child will be born with a surprising
likeness to the first Adam in his first estate. That happy child at his
best is but the relics and ruins of his first father; at the same time,
in him the relics are more abundant and the ruins more easy to trace out.
And little Honest was such a well-born child. For, Stupidity and all,
there was a real inborn and inbred integrity, uprightness,
straightforwardness, and nobleness about this little and not over-clever
man-child. And, on the principle of "to him that hath shall be given,"
there was something like a special providence that hedged this boy about
from the beginning. "I girded thee though thou hast not known Me" was
never out of Old Honest's mouth as often as he remembered the days of his
own youth and heard other pilgrims mourning over theirs. "I have
surnamed thee though thou hast not known Me," he would say to himself in
his sleep. Slow-witted as he was, no one had been able to cheat young
Honest out of his youthful integrity. He had not been led, and he had
led no one else, into the paths of the destroyer. He could say about
himself all that John Bunyan so boldly and so bluntly said about himself
when his enemies charged him with youthful immorality. He left the town
in nobody's debt. He left the print of his heels on no man or woman or
child when he took his staff in his hand to be a pilgrim. The upward
walk of too many pilgrims is less a walk than an escape and a flight. The
avenger of men's blood and women's honour has hunted many men deep into
heaven's innermost gate. But Old Honest took his time. He walked, if
ever pilgrim walked, all the way with an easy mind. He lay down to sleep
under the oaks on the wayside, and smiled like a child in his sleep. And,
when he was suddenly awaked, instead of crying out for mercy and starting
to his heels, he grasped his staff and demanded even of an armed man what
business he had to break in on an honest pilgrim's midday repose! The
King of the Celestial City had a few names even in Stupidity which had
not defiled their garments, and Old Honest was one of them. And all his
days his strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart was pure.

3. At the same time, honesty is not holiness; and no one knew that
better than did this honest old saint. When any one spoke to Old Honest
about his blameless youth, the look in his eye made them keep at arm's-
length as he growled out that without holiness no man shall see God!
Writing from Aberdeen to John Bell of Hentoun, Samuel Rutherford says: "I
beseech you, in the Lord Jesus, to mind your country above; and now, when
old age is come upon you, advise with Christ before you put your foot
into the last ship and turn your back on this life. Many are beguiled
with this that they are free of scandalous sins. But common honesty will
not take men to heaven. Alas! that men should think that ever they met
with Christ who had never a sick night or a sore heart for sin. I have
known a man turn a key in a door and lock it by." "I can," says John
Owen, "and I do, commend moral virtues and honesty as much as any man
ought to do, and I am sure there is no grace where they are not. Yet to
make anything to be our holiness that is not derived from Jesus Christ,--I
know not what I do more abhor." "Are morally honest and sober men
qualified for the Lord's Supper?" asks John Flavel. "No; civility and
morality do not make a man a worthy communicant. They are not the
wedding garment; but regenerating grace and faith in the smallest measure
are." "My outside may be honest," said this honest old pilgrim, "while
all the time my heart is most unholy. My life is open to all men, but I
must hide my heart with Christ in God."

4. And then this racy-hearted old bachelor was as full of delight in
children, and in children's parties, with all their sweetmeats and nuts
and games and riddles,--quite as much so--as if he had been their very
grandfather himself. Nay, this rosy-hearted old rogue was as inveterate
a matchmaker as if he had been a mother of the world with a houseful of
daughters on her hands and with the sons of the nobility dangling around.
It would make you wish you could kiss the two dear old souls, Gaius the
innkeeper and Old Honest his guest, if you would only read how they laid
their grey heads together to help forward the love-making of Matthew and
Mercy. Yes, it would be a great pity, said Old Honest,--thinking with a
sigh of his own childless old age,--it would be a great pity if this
excellent family of our sainted brother should fail for want of children,
and die out like mine. And the two old plotters went together to the
mother of the bridegroom, and told her with an aspect of authority that
she must put no obstacle in her son's way, but take Mercy as soon as
convenient into a closer relation to herself. And Gaius said that he for
his part would give the marriage supper. And I shall make no will, said
Honest, but hand all I have over to Matthew my son. This is the way,
said Old Honest; and he skipped and smiled and kissed the cheek of the
aged mother and said, Then thy two children shall preserve thee and thy
husband a posterity in the earth! Then he turned to the boys and he
said, Matthew, be thou like Matthew the publican, not in vice, but in
virtue. Samuel, he said, be thou like Samuel the prophet, a man of faith
and of prayer. Joseph, said he, be thou like Joseph in Potiphar's house,
chaste, and one that flees from temptation. And James, be thou like
James the Just, and like James the brother of our Lord. Mercy, he said,
is thy name, and by mercy shalt thou be sustained and carried through all
thy difficulties that shall assault thee in the way, till thou shalt come
thither where thou shalt look the Fountain of Mercy in the face with
comfort. And all this while the guide, Mr. Greatheart, was very much
pleased, and smiled upon the nimble old gentleman.

5. "Then it came to pass a while after that there was a post in the town
that inquired for Mr. Honest. So he came to his house where he was, and
delivered to his hands these lines, Thou art commanded to be ready
against this day seven night, to present thyself before thy Lord at His
Father's house. And for a token that my message is true, all thy
daughters of music shall be brought low. Then Mr. Honest called for his
friends and said unto them, I die, but shall make no will. As for my
honesty, it shall go with me: let him that comes after me be told of
this. When the day that he was to be gone was come he addressed himself
to go over the river. Now, the river at that time overflowed the banks
at some places. But Mr. Honest in his lifetime had spoken to one Good-
conscience to meet him there, the which he also did, and lent him his
hand, and so helped him over. The last words of Mr. Honest were, Grace
reigns! So he left the world." Look at that picture and now look at
this: "They then addressed themselves to the water, and, entering,
Christian began to sink, and crying out to his good friend Hopeful, he
said, I sink in deep waves, the billows go over my head, all His waters
go over me. Then said the other, Be of good cheer, my brother, I feel
the bottom, and it is good. Then said Christian, Ah, my friend, the
sorrows of death have compassed me about; I shall not see the land that
flows with milk and honey. And with that a great horror and darkness
fell upon Christian, so that he could not see before him; and all the
words that he spoke still tended to discover that he had horror of mind
lest he should die in that river and never obtain entrance in at the
gate. Here also, as they that stood by perceived, he was much in the
troublesome thoughts of the sins that he had committed, both since and
before he began to be a pilgrim. 'Twas also observed that he was
troubled with apparitions of hobgoblins and evil spirits. Hopeful,
therefore, had much ado to keep his brother's head above water. Yea,
sometimes he would be quite gone down, and then ere a while he would rise
up again half dead." My brethren, all my brethren, be not deceived; God
is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. Whom
the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.
Thou, O God, wast a God that forgavest them, but Thou tookest vengeance
on their inventions.




MR. FEARING


"Happy is the man that feareth alway."--_Solomon_

For humour, for pathos, for tenderness, for acute and sympathetic insight
at once into nature and grace, for absolutely artless literary skill, and
for the sweetest, most musical, and most exquisite English, show me
another passage in our whole literature to compare with John Bunyan's
portrait of Mr. Fearing. You cannot do it. I defy you to do it.
Spenser, who, like John Bunyan, wrote an elaborate allegory, says: It is
not in me. Take all Mr. Fearing's features together, and even
Shakespeare himself has no such heart-touching and heart-comforting
character. Addison may have some of the humour and Lamb some of the
tenderness; but, then, they have not the religion. Scott has the insight
into nature, but he has no eye at all for grace; while Thackeray, who, in
some respects, comes nearest to John Bunyan of them all, would be the
foremost to confess that he is not worthy to touch the shoe-latchet of
the Bedford tinker. As Dr. Duncan said in his class one day when telling
us to read Augustine's Autobiography and Halyburton's:--"But," he said,
"be prepared for this, that the tinker beats them all!" "Methinks," says
Browning, "in this God speaks, no tinker hath such powers."

Now, as they walked along together, the guide asked the old gentleman if
he knew one Mr. Fearing that came on pilgrimage out of his parts. "Yes,"
said Mr. Honest, "very well. He was a man that had the root of the
matter in him; but he was one of the most troublesome pilgrims that ever
I met with in all my days." "I perceive you knew him," said the guide,
"for you have given a very right character of him." "Knew him!"
exclaimed Honest, "I was a great companion of his; I was with him most an
end. When he first began to think of what would come upon us hereafter,
I was with him." "And I was his guide," said Greatheart, "from my
Master's house to the gates of the Celestial City." "Then," said Mr.
Honest, "it seems he was well at last." "Yes, yes," answered the guide,
"I never had any doubt about him; he was a man of a choice spirit, only
he was always kept very low, and that made his life so burdensome to
himself and so troublesome to others. He was, above many, tender of sin;
he was so afraid of doing injuries to others that he would often deny
himself of that which was lawful because he would not offend." "But
what," asked Honest, "should be the reason that such a good man should be
all his days so much in the dark?" "There are two sorts of reasons for
it," said the guide; "one is, the wise God will have it so: some must
pipe and some must weep. Now, Mr. Fearing was one that played upon this
base. He and his fellows sound the sackbut, whose notes are more doleful
than the notes of other music are. Though, indeed, some say that the
base is the ground of music. And, for my part, I care not at all for
that profession that begins not with heaviness of mind. The first string
that the musician usually touches is the base when he intends to put all
in tune. God also plays upon this string first when He sets the soul in
tune for Himself. Only, here was the imperfection of Mr. Fearing, that
he could play upon no other music but this till toward his latter end."

1. Take Mr. Fearing, then, to begin with, at the Slough of Despond.
Christian and Pliable, they being heedless, did both fall into that bog.
But Mr. Fearing, whatever faults you may think he had--and faults, too,
that you think you could mend in him--at any rate, he was never heedless.
Everybody has his fault to find with poor Mr. Fearing. Everybody blames
poor Mr. Fearing. Everybody can improve upon poor Mr. Fearing. But I
will say again for Mr. Fearing that he was never heedless. Had Peter
been on the road at that period he would have stood up for Mr. Fearing,
and would have taken his judges and would have said to them, with some
scorn--Go to, and pass the time of your sojourning here with something of
the same silence and the same fear! Christian's excuse for falling into
the Slough was that fear so followed him that he fled the next way, and
so fell in. But Mr. Fearing had no such fear behind him in his city as
Christian had in his. All Mr. Fearing's fears were within himself. If
you can take up the distinction between actual and indwelling sin,
between guilt and corruption, you have already in that the whole key to
Mr. Fearing. He was blamed and counselled and corrected and pitied and
patronised by every morning-cloud and early-dew neophyte, while all the
time he lived far down from the strife of tongues where the root of the
matter strikes its deep roots still deeper every day. "It took him a
whole month," tells Greatheart, "to face the Slough. But he would not go
back neither. Till, one sunshiny morning, nobody ever knew how, he
ventured, and so got over. But the fact of the matter is," said the
shrewd-headed guide, "Mr. Fearing had, I think, a slough of despond in
his own mind; and a slough that he carried everywhere with him." Yes,
that was it. Greatheart in that has hit the nail on the head. With one
happy stroke he has given us the whole secret of poor Mr. Fearing's life-
long trouble. Just so; it was the slough in himself that so kept poor
Mr. Fearing back. This poor pilgrim, who had so little to fear in his
past life, had yet so much scum and filth, spume and mire in his present
heart, that how to get on the other side of that cost him not a month's
roaring only, but all the months and all the years till he went over the
River not much above wet-shod. And, till then, not twenty million cart-
loads of wholesome instructions, nor any number of good and substantial
steps, would lift poor Mr. Fearing over the ditch that ran so deep and so
foul continually within himself. "Yes, he had, I think, a slough of
despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him, or
else he never could have been the man he was." I, for one, thank the
great-hearted guide for that fine sentence.

2. It was a sight to see poor Mr. Fearing at the wicket gate. "Knock,
and it shall be opened unto you." He read the inscription over the gate
a thousand times, but every time he read it his slough-filled heart said
to him, Yes, but that is not for such as you. Pilgrim after pilgrim came
up the way, read the writing, knocked, and was taken in; but still Mr.
Fearing stood back, shaking and shrinking. At last he ventured to take
hold of the hammer that hung on the gate and gave with it a small rap
such as a mouse might make. But small as the sound was, the Gatekeeper
had had his eye on his man all the time out of his watch-window; and
before Mr. Fearing had time to turn and run, Goodwill had him by the
collar. But that sudden assault only made Mr. Fearing sink to the earth,
faint and half-dead. "Peace be to thee, O trembling man!" said Goodwill.
"Come in, and welcome!" When he did venture in, Mr. Fearing's face was
as white as a sheet. You would have said that an officer had caught a
thief if you had seen poor Mr. Fearing hiding his face, and the
Gatekeeper hauling him in. And not all the entertainment for which the
Gate was famous, nor all the encouragement that Goodwill was able to
speak, could make terrified Mr. Fearing for once to smile. A more hard-
to-entertain pilgrim, all the Gate declared when he had gone, they had
never had in their hospitable house.

3. "So he came," said the guide, "till he came to our House; but as he
behaved himself at the Gate, so he did at my Master the Interpreter's
door. He lay about in the cold a good while before he would adventure to
call. Yet he would not go back neither. And the nights were cold and
long then. At last I think I looked out of the window, and perceiving a
man to be up and down about the door, I went out to him, and asked what
he was; but, poor man, the water stood in his eyes. So I perceived what
he wanted. I went in, therefore, and told it in the house, and we showed
the thing to our Lord. So He sent me out again to entreat him to come
in, but I dare say I had hard work to do it. At last he came in, and I
will say that for my Lord, He carried it wonderful lovingly to Mr.
Fearing. There were but a few good bits at the table, but some of it was
laid upon his trencher." In this way the guide tells us his first
introduction to Mr. Fearing, and how Mr. Fearing behaved himself in the
Interpreter's House. For instance, in the parlour full of dust, when the
Interpreter said that the dust is original sin and inward corruption, you
would have thought that the Interpreter had stabbed poor Mr. Fearing to
the heart, so did he break out and weep. Before the damsel could come
with the pitcher, Mr. Fearing's eyes alone would have laid the dust, they
were such a fountain of tears. When he saw Passion and Patience, each
one in his chair--"I am that child in rags," said Mr. Fearing; "I have
already received all my good things!" Also, at the wall where the fire
burned because oil was poured into it from the other side, he perversely
turned that fire also against himself. And when they came to the man in
the iron cage, you could not have told whether the miserable man inside
the cage or the miserable man outside of it sighed the loudest. And so
on, through all the significant rooms. The spider-room overwhelmed him
altogether, till his sobs and the beating of his breast were heard all
over the house. The robin also when gobbling up spiders he made an
emblem of himself, and the tree that was rotten at the heart,--till the
Interpreter's patience with this so perverse pilgrim was fairly worn out.
So the Interpreter shut up his significant rooms, and had this so
troublesome pilgrim into his own chamber, and there carried it so
tenderly to Mr. Fearing that at last he did seem to have taken some
little heart of grace. "And then we," said Greatheart, "set forward, and
I went before him; but the man was of few words, only he would often sigh
aloud."