Bunyan Characters, Third Series

A >> Alexander Whyte >> Bunyan Characters, Third Series


2. Another difficulty or impossibility to our salvation rises out of the
awful corruption and pollution of our hearts. But is there any use
entering on that subject? Is there one man in a hundred who even knows
the rudiments of the language I must now speak in? Is there one man in a
hundred in whose mind any idea arises, and in whose heart any emotion or
passion is kindled, as I proceed to speak of corruption of nature and
pollution of heart? I do not suppose it. I do not presume upon it. I
do not believe it. That most miserable man who is let down of God's Holy
Spirit into the pit of corruption that is in his own heart,--to him his
corruption, added to his guilt, causes a sadness that nothing in this
world can really relieve; it causes a deep and an increasing melancholy,
such as the ninety and nine who need no repentance and feel no pollution
know nothing of. All living men flee from the corruption of an unburied
corpse. The living at once set about to bury their dead. 'I am a
stranger and a sojourner among you,' said Abraham to the children of
Heth; 'give me a possession of a burying-place among you that I may bury
my dead out of my sight.' But Paul could find no grave in the whole
world in which to bury out of his sight the body of death to which he was
chained fast; that body of sin and death which always makes the holiest
of men the most wretched of men,--till the loathing and the disgust and
the misery that filled the apostle's heart are to be understood by but
one in a thousand even of the people of God.

3. And then, as if to make our salvation a very hyperbole of
impossibility, the all but almighty power of indwelling sin comes in.
Have you ever tried to break loose from the old fetter of an evil habit?
Have you ever said on a New Year's Day with Thomas A Kempis that this
year you would root that appetite,--naming it,--out of your body, and
that vice,--naming it,--out of your heart? Have you ever sworn at the
Communion table that you would watch and pray, and set a watch on your
evil heart against that envy, and that revenge, and that ill-will, and
that distaste, dislike, and antipathy? Then your minister will not need
to come back from his death-bed to preach to you on the difficulty of
salvation.

4. And yet such is the grace of God, such is the work of Christ, and
such is the power and the patience of the Holy Ghost that, if we had only
an adequate ministry in our pulpits, and an assisting literature in our
homes, even this three-fold impossibility would be overcome and we would
be saved. But if the ministry that is set over us is an ignorant,
indolent, incompetent, self-deceived ministry; if our own chosen, set-up,
and maintained minister is himself an uninstructed, unspiritual,
unsanctified man; and if the books we buy and borrow and read are all
secular, unspiritual, superficial, ephemeral, silly, stupid, impertinent
books, then the impossibility of our salvation is absolute, and we are as
good as in hell already with all our guilt and all our corruption for
ever on our heads. Now, that was the exact case of Mansoul in the
allegory of the Holy War at one of the last and acutest stages of that
war. Or, rather, that would have been her exact case had Diabolus got
his own deep, diabolical way with her. For what did her ancient enemy do
but sound a parley till he had played his last card in these glozing and
deceitful words;--'I myself,' he had the face to say to Emmanuel, 'if
Thou wilt raise Thy siege and leave the town to me, I will, at my own
proper cost and charge, set up and maintain a sufficient ministry,
besides lecturers, in Mansoul, who shall show to Mansoul that
transgression stands in the way of life; the ministers I shall set up
shall also press the necessity of reformation according to Thy holy law.'
And even now, with the two pulpits, God's and the devil's, and the two
preachers, and the two pastors, in our own city,--how many of you see any
difference, or think that the one is any worse or any better than the
other? Or, indeed, that the ministry of the last card is not the better
of the two to your interest and to your taste, to the state of your mind
and to the need of your heart? Let us proceed, then, to look at
Mansoul's two pulpits and her two lectureships as they stand portrayed on
the devil's last card and in Emmanuel's crowning commission; that is, if
our eyes are sharp enough to see any difference.

5. The first thing, then, on the devil's last card was this, 'A
sufficient ministry, besides lecturers, in Mansoul.' Now, a sufficient
ministry has never been seen in the true Church of Christ since her
ministry began. And yet she has had great ministers in her time. After
Christ Himself, Paul was the greatest and the best minister the Church of
Christ has ever had. But such was the transcendent greatness of his
office, such were its tremendous responsibilities, such were its
magnificent opportunities and its incessant demands, such were its
ceaseless calls to consecration, to cross-bearing, to crucifixion, to
more and more inwardness of holiness, and to higher and higher heights of
heavenly-mindedness, that the apostle was fain to cry out continually,
Who is sufficient for these things! But so well did Paul learn that
gospel which he preached to others that amid all his insufficiency he was
able to hear his Master saying to him every day, My grace is sufficient
for thee, and, My strength is made perfect in thy weakness! And to come
down to the truly Pauline succession of ministers in our own lands and in
our own churches, what preachers and what pastors Christ gave to
Kidderminster, and to Bedford, and to Down and Connor, and to Sodor and
Man, and to Anwoth, and to Ettrick, and to New England, and to St.
Andrews, and places too many to mention. With all its infirmity and all
its inefficiency, what a truly heavenly power the pulpit is when it is
filled by a man of God who gives his whole mind and heart, his whole time
and thought to it, and to the pastorate that lies around it. His mind
may be small, and his heart may be full of corruption; his time may be
full of manifold interruptions, and his best study may yield but a poor
result; but if Heaven ever helps those who honestly help themselves, then
that is certainly the case in the Christian ministry. Let the choicest
of our children, then, be sought out and consecrated to that service; let
our most gifted and most gracious-minded sons be sent to where they shall
be best prepared for the pulpit and the pastorate,--till by the blessing
of her Head all the congregations and all the parishes, all the pulpits
and all the lectureships in the Church, shall be one garden of the Lord.
And then we shall escape that last curse of a ministry such as John
Bunyan saw all around him in the England of his day, and which, had he
been alive in the England and Scotland of our day, he would have painted
again in colours we have neither the boldness nor the skill to mix nor to
put on the canvas. But let all ministers put it every day to themselves
to what descent and succession they belong. Let those even who believe
that they have within themselves the best seal and evidence attainable
here that they have been ordained of Emmanuel, let them all the more look
well every day and every Sabbath day how much of another master's
doctrine and discipline, motives, and manners still mixes up with their
best ministry. And the surest seal that, with all our insufficiency, we
are still the ministers of Christ will be set on us by this, that the
harder we work and the more in secret we pray, the more and ever the more
shall we discover and confess our shameful insufficiency, and the more
shall we, till the day of our death, every day still begin our ministry
of labour and of prayer anew. Let us do that, for the devil, with all
his boldness and all his subtilty, never threw a card first or last like
that.

6. After offering a sufficient ministry to Mansoul, and that, too, at
his own proper cost and charge, Diabolus undertook also to see that the
absolute necessity of a reformation should be preached and pressed from
the pulpit he set up. Now, reformation is all good and necessary, in its
own time and place and order, but God sent His Son not to be a Reformer
but to be a Redeemer. John came to preach reformation, but Jesus came to
preach regeneration. Except a man be born again, Jesus persistently
preached to Nicodemus. 'Did it begin with regeneration?' was Dr.
Duncan's reply when a sermon on sanctification was praised in his
hearing. And like so much else that the learned and profound Dr. John
Duncan said on theology and philosophy, that question went at once to the
root of the matter. For sanctification, that is to say, salvation, is no
mere reformation of morals or refinement of manners. It is a maxim in
sound morals that the morality of the man must precede the morality of
his actions. And much more is it the evangelical law of Jesus Christ.
Make the tree good, our Lawgiver aphoristically said. Reformation and
sanctification differ, says Dr. Hodge, as clean clothes differ from a
clean heart. Now, Diabolus was all for clean clothes when he saw that
Mansoul was slipping out of his hands. He would have all the drunkards
to become moderate drinkers, if not total abstainers; and all the
sensualists to become, if need be, ascetics; and all those who had sowed
out their wild oats to settle down as heads of houses, and members, if
not ministers and elders, in his set-up church. But we are too well
taught, surely; we have gone too long to another church than that which
Diabolus ever sets up, to be satisfied with his superficial doctrine and
his skin-deep discipline. We know, do we not, that we may do all that
his last card asks us to do, and yet be as far, ay, and far farther from
salvation than the heathen are who never heard the name. A hundred
Scriptures tell us that; and our hearts know too much of their own plague
and corruption ever now to be satisfied short of a full regeneration and
a complete sanctification. 'Create in me a clean heart and renew a right
spirit within me. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. And the
very God of peace sanctify you wholly. And I pray God your whole spirit
and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ.' The last card has many Scriptures cunningly copied upon
it; but not these. Its pulpit orators handle many Scripture texts, but
never these.

7. Yes, the devil comes in even here with that so late, so subtle, and
so contradicting card of his. Where is it in this world that he does not
come in with some of his cards? And he comes in here as a very angel of
evangelical light. He puts on the gown of Geneva here, and he ascends
Emmanuel's own maintained pulpit here, and from that pulpit he preaches,
and where he so preaches he preaches nothing else but the very highest
articles of the Reformed faith. Carnal-security was strong on assurance,
no other man in Mansoul was so strong; and the devil will let us
preachers be as strong and as often on election, and justification, and
indefectible grace, and the perseverance of the saints as we and our
people like, if we but keep in season and out of season on these
transcendent subjects and keep off morals and manners, walk and
conversation, conduct and character. In Hooker's and Travers' day,
Thomas Fuller tells us, the Temple pulpit preached pure Canterbury in the
morning and pure Geneva in the afternoon. And you will get the highest
Calvinism off the last card in one pulpit, and the strictest and most
urgent morality off the same card in another; but never, if the devil can
help it, never both in one and the same pulpit; never both in one and the
same sermon; and never both in one and the same minister. You have all
heard of the difficulty the voyager had in steering between Scylla and
Charybdis in the Latin adage. Well, the true preacher's difficulty is
just like that. Indeed, it is beyond the wit of man, and it takes all
the wit of God, aright to unite the doctrine of our utter inability with
the companion doctrine of our strict responsibility; free grace with a
full reward; the cross of Christ once for all, with the saint's continual
crucifixion; the Saviour's blood with the sinner's; and atonement with
attainment; in short, salvation without works with no salvation without
works. Deft steersman as the devil is, he never yet took his ship clear
through those Charybdic passages.

One thing there is that I must have preached continually in all my
pulpits and expounded and illustrated and enforced in all my
lectureships, said Emmanuel, and that is, my new example and my new law
of _motive_. My own motives always made me in all I said and did to be
well-pleasing in My Father's eyes, and at any cost I must have preachers
and lecturers set up in Mansoul who shall assist Me in making Mansoul as
well-pleasing in My Father's sight as I was Myself.

'For I am ware it is the seed of act
God holds appraising in His hollow palm,
Not act grown great thence as the world believes,
Leafage and branchage vulgar eyes admire.'

Motives! gnashed Diabolus. And he tore his last card into a thousand
shreds and cast the shreds under his feet in his rage and exasperation.
Motives! New motives! Truly Thou art the threatened Seed of the woman!
Truly Thou art the threatened Son of God!--Let all our preachers, then,
preach much on motive to their people. The commonplace crowd of their
people will not all like that preaching any more than Diabolus did; but
their best people will all afterwards rise up in their salvation and
bless them for it. On reformation also, let them every Sabbath preach,
but only on the reformation that rises out of a reformed motive, and that
again out of a reformed heart. And if a reformed motive, a reformed
heart, and a reformed life are found both by preacher and hearer to be
impossible; if all that only brings out the hopelessness of their
salvation by reason of the guilt and the pollution and power of sin; then
all that will only be to them that same ever deeper entering of the law
into their hearts which led Paul to an ever deeper faith and trust in
Jesus Christ. With a guilt, and a pollution, and a slavery to sin like
ours, salvation from sin would be absolutely impossible. Absolutely
impossible, that is, but for our Saviour, Jesus Christ. But with His
atoning blood and His Holy Spirit all things are possible--even our
salvation.

Let us choose, then, a minister like Mr. John Menzies. Let us read the
great books that make salvation difficult. Let us work out our own
salvation, day and night, with fear and trembling, and when Wisdom is
justified in her children, we shall be found justified among them. We
shall be openly acknowledged and acquitted in the day of judgment, and
made perfectly blessed in the full enjoying of God to all eternity.




CHAPTER XV--MR. PRYWELL


'Search me, O God, and know my heart.'--_David_.

'Let a man examine himself.'--_Paul_.

'Look to yourselves.'--_John_.

'Know thyself.'--_Apollo_.

The year 1668 saw the publication of one of the deepest books in the
whole world, Dr. John Owen's _Remainders of Indwelling Sin in Believers_.
The heart-searching depth; the clear, fearless, humbling truth, the
intense spirituality, and the massive and masculine strength of John
Owen's book have all combined to make it one of the acknowledged
masterpieces of the great Puritan school. Had John Owen's style been at
all equal to his great learning, to the depth and the grasp of his mind,
and to the lofty holiness of his life, John Owen would have stood in the
very foremost and selectest rank of apostolical and evangelical
theologians. But in all his books Owen labours under the fatal drawback
of a bad style. A fine style, a style like that of Hooker, or Taylor, or
Bunyan, or Howe, or Leighton, or Law, is such a winning introduction to
their works and such an abiding charm and spell. The full title of Dr.
Owen's great work runs thus: _The Nature, Power, Deceit, and Prevalency
of the Remainders of Indwelling Sin in Believers_--a title that will tell
all true students what awaits them when they have courage and enterprise
enough to address themselves to this supreme and all-essential subject.
Fourteen years after the publication of Dr. Owen's epoch-making book,
John Bunyan's _Holy War_ first saw the light. Equal in scriptural and in
experimental depth, as also in their spiritual loftiness and intensity,
those two books are as different as any two books, written in the same
language, and written on the same subject, could by any possibility be.
John Owen's book is the book of a great scholar who has read the Fathers
and the Schoolmen and the Reformers till he knows them by heart, and till
he has been able to digest all that is true to Scripture and to
experience in them into his rich and ripe book. A powerful reasoner, a
severe, bald, muscular writer, John Owen in all these respects stands at
the very opposite pole to that of John Bunyan. The author of the _Holy
War_ had no learning, but he had a mind of immense natural sagacity,
combined with a habit of close and deep observation of human life, and
especially of religious life, and he had now a lifetime of most fruitful
experience as a Christian man and as a Christian minister behind him;
and, all that, taken up into Bunyan's splendid imagination, enabled him
to produce this extraordinarily able and impressive book. A model of
English style as the _Holy War_ is, at the same time it does not attain
at all to the rank of the _Pilgrim's Progress_; but then, to be second to
the _Pilgrim's Progress_ is reward and honour enough for any book. Let
all genuine students, then, who would know the best that has been written
on experimental religion, and who would preach to the deepest and
divinest experience of their best people, let them keep continually
within their reach John Owen's _Temptation_, his _Mortification of Sin in
Believers_, his _Nature and Power of Indwelling Sin_, and John Bunyan's
_Holy War made for the Regaining of the Metropolis of this World_.

Well, then, as He who dwells on high would have it, there was one whose
name was Mr. Prywell, a great lover of Mansoul. And he, as his manner
was, did go listening up and down in Mansoul to see and hear, if at any
time he might, whether there was any design against it or no. For he was
always a jealous man, and feared some mischief would befall it, either
from within or from some power without. Mr. Prywell was always a lover
of Mansoul, a sober and a judicious man, a man that was no tattler, nor a
raiser of false reports, but one that loves to look into the very bottom
of matters, and talks nothing of news but by very solid arguments. And
then, after our historian has told us some of the eminent services that
Mr. Prywell was able to perform both for the King and for the city, he
goes on to tell us how the captains determined that public thanks should
be given by the town of Mansoul to Mr. Prywell for his so diligent
seeking of the welfare of the town; and, further, that, forasmuch as he
was so naturally inclined to seek their good, and also to undermine their
foes, they gave him the commission of Scoutmaster-general for the good of
Mansoul. And Mr. Prywell managed his charge and the trust that Mansoul
had put into his hands with great conscience and good fidelity; for he
gave himself wholly up to his employ, and that not only within the town,
but he also went outside of the town to pry, to see, and to hear. Now,
that being so, it may interest and perhaps instruct you to-night to look
for a little at some of the features and at some of the feats of the
Scoutmaster-general of the Holy War, Mr. Prywell, of the town of Mansoul.

1. 'Well, now, as He who dwells on high would have it, there was one
whose name was Mr. Prywell, a great lover of the town of Mansoul.' In
other words: self-observation, self-examination, strict, jealous,
sleepless self-examination, is of God. Our God who searches our hearts
and tries our reins would have it so. And if He does not have it so in
us, our souls are not as our God would have them to be. 'Bunyan employs
_pry_,' says Miss Peacock in her excellent notes, 'in a more favourable
sense than it now bears. As, for instance, it is said in another part of
this same book that the men of Mansoul were allowed to _pry_ into the
words of the Holy Ghost and to expound them to their best advantage.
Honest anxiety for the welfare of his fellow-townsmen was Mr. Prywell's
chief characteristic. _Pry_ is another form of _peer_--to look narrowly,
to look closely.' And God, says John Bunyan, would have it so.

2. 'A great lover of Mansoul,' 'always a lover of Mansoul'; again and
again that is testified concerning Mr. Prywell. It was not love for the
work that led Mr. Prywell to give up his days and his nights as his
history tells us he did. Mr. Prywell ran himself into many dangerous
situations both within and without the city, and he lost himself far more
friends than he made by his devotion to his thankless task. But
necessity was laid upon him. And what held him up was the sure and
certain knowledge that his King would have that service at his hands.
That, and his love for the city, for the safety and the deliverance of
the city,--all that kept Mr. Prywell's heart fixed. Am I therefore your
enemy? he would say to some who would have had it otherwise than the King
would have it. But it is a good thing to be zealously affected in a work
like mine, he would say, in self-defence and in self-encouragement. And
then, though not many, there were always some in the city who said, Let
him smite me and it shall be a kindness; let him reprove me and it shall
be an excellent oil which shall not break my head. It was in Mansoul
with Mr. Prywell as it was in Kidderminster with Richard Baxter, when
some of his people said to one another, 'We will take all things well
from one that we know doth entirely love us.' 'Love them,' said
Augustine, 'and then say anything you like to them.' Now, that was Mr.
Prywell's way. He loved Mansoul, and then he said many things to her
that a false lover and a flatterer would never have dared to say.

3. Then, as the saying is, it goes without saying that 'Mr. Prywell was
always a jealous man.' Great lovers are always jealous men, and Mr.
Prywell showed himself to be a great lover by the great heat of his
jealousy also. 'Vigilant,' says the excellent editress again; 'cautious
against dishonour, reasonably mistrustful--low Latin _zelosus_, full of
zeal. "And he said, I have been very jealous for the Lord God of
hosts."' Now, it so happened that some of Mr. Prywell's most private and
not at all professional papers--papers evidently, and on the face of
them, connected with the state of the spy's own soul--came into my hands
as good lot would have it just the other night. The moth-eaten chest was
full of his old papers, but the pieces that took my heart most were, as
it looked to me, actually gnashed through with his remorseful teeth, and
soaked and sodden past recognition with his sweat and his tears and his
agonising hands. But after some late hours over those remnants I managed
to make some sense to myself out of them. There are some parts of the
parchments that pass me; but, if only to show you that this arch-spy's so
vigilant jealousy was not all directed against other people's bad hearts
and bad habits, I shall copy some lines out of the old box. 'Have I
penitence?' he begins without any preface. 'Have I grief, shame, pain,
horror, weariness for my sin? Do I pray and repent, if not seven times a
day as David did, yet at least three times, as Daniel? If not as
Solomon, at length, yet shortly as the publican? If not like Christ, the
whole night, at least for one hour? If not on the ground and in ashes,
at least not in my bed? If not in sackcloth, at least not in purple and
fine linen? If not altogether freed from all, at least from immoderate
desires? Do I give, if not as Zaccheus did, fourfold, as the law
commands, with the fifth part added? If not as the rich, yet as the
widow? If not the half, yet the thirtieth part? If not above my power,
yet up to my power?' And then over the page there are some illegible
pencillings from old authors of his such as this from Augustine: 'A good
man would rather know his own infirmity than the foundations of the earth
or the heights of the heavens.' And this from Cicero: 'There are many
hiding-places and recesses in the mind.' And this from Seneca: 'You must
know yourself before you can amend yourself. An unknown sin grows worse
and worse and is deprived of cure.' And this from Cicero again: 'Cato
exacted from himself an account of every day's business at night'; and
also Pythagoras,

'Nor let sweet sleep upon thine eyes descend
Till thou hast judged its deeds at each day's end.'