Transcribed from the 1895 Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier edition by David
Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
BUNYAN CHARACTERS--THIRD SERIES
Lectures Delivered in St. George's Free Church Edinburgh
By Alexander Whyte, D.D.
CHAPTER I--THE BOOK
'--the book of the wars of the Lord.'--_Moses_.
John Bunyan's _Holy War_ was first published in 1682, six years before
its illustrious author's death. Bunyan wrote this great book when he was
still in all the fulness of his intellectual power and in all the
ripeness of his spiritual experience. The _Holy War_ is not the
_Pilgrim's Progress_--there is only one _Pilgrim's Progress_. At the
same time, we have Lord Macaulay's word for it that if the _Pilgrim's
Progress_ did not exist the _Holy War_ would be the best allegory that
ever was written: and even Mr. Froude admits that the _Holy War_ alone
would have entitled its author to rank high up among the acknowledged
masters of English literature. The intellectual rank of the _Holy War_
has been fixed before that tribunal over which our accomplished and
competent critics preside; but for a full appreciation of its religious
rank and value we would need to hear the glad testimonies of tens of
thousands of God's saints, whose hard-beset faith and obedience have been
kindled and sustained by the study of this noble book. The _Pilgrim's
Progress_ sets forth the spiritual life under the scriptural figure of a
long and an uphill journey. The _Holy War_, on the other hand, is a
military history; it is full of soldiers and battles, defeats and
victories. And its devout author had much more scriptural suggestion and
support in the composition of the _Holy War_ than he had even in the
composition of the _Pilgrim's Progress_. For Holy Scripture is full of
wars and rumours of wars: the wars of the Lord; the wars of Joshua and
the Judges; the wars of David, with his and many other magnificent battle-
songs; till the best known name of the God of Israel in the Old Testament
is the Lord of Hosts; and then in the New Testament we have Jesus Christ
described as the Captain of our salvation. Paul's powerful use of armour
and of armed men is familiar to every student of his epistles; and then
the whole Bible is crowned with a book all sounding with the
battle-cries, the shouts, and the songs of soldiers, till it ends with
that city of peace where they hang the trumpet in the hall and study war
no more. Military metaphors had taken a powerful hold of our author's
imagination even in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, as his portraits of
Greatheart and Valiant-for-truth and other soldiers sufficiently show;
while the conflict with Apollyon and the destruction of Doubting Castle
are so many sure preludes of the coming _Holy War_. Bunyan's early
experiences in the great Civil War had taught him many memorable things
about the military art; memorable and suggestive things that he
afterwards put to the most splendid use in the siege, the capture, and
the subjugation of Mansoul.
The _Divine Comedy_ is beyond dispute the greatest book of personal and
experimental religion the world has ever seen. The consuming intensity
of its author's feelings about sin and holiness, the keenness and the
bitterness of his remorse, and the rigour and the severity of his
revenge, his superb intellect and his universal learning, all set ablaze
by his splendid imagination--all that combines to make the _Divine
Comedy_ the unapproachable masterpiece it is. John Bunyan, on the other
hand, had no learning to be called learning, but he had a strong and a
healthy English understanding, a conscience and a heart wholly given up
to the life of the best religion of his religious day, and then, by sheer
dint of his sanctified and soaring imagination and his exquisite style,
he stands forth the peer of the foremost men in the intellectual world.
And thus it is that the great unlettered religious world possesses in
John Bunyan all but all that the select and scholarly world possesses in
Dante. Both Dante and Bunyan devoted their splendid gifts to the noblest
of services--the service of spiritual, and especially of personal
religion; but for one appreciative reader that Dante has had Bunyan has
had a hundred. Happy in being so like his Master in so many things,
Bunyan is happy in being like his unlettered Master in this also, that
the common people hear him gladly and never weary of hearing him.
It gives by far its noblest interest to Dante's noble book that we have
Dante himself in every page of his book. Dante is taken down into Hell,
he is then led up through _Purgatory_, and after that still up and up
into the very Paradise of God. But that hell all the time is the hell
that Dante had dug and darkened and kindled for himself. In the
Purgatory, again, we see Dante working out his own salvation with fear
and trembling, God all the time working in Dante to will and to do of His
good pleasure. And then the Paradise, with all its sevenfold glory, is
just that place and that life which God hath prepared for them that love
Him and serve Him as Dante did. And so it is in the _Holy War_. John
Bunyan is in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, but there are more men and other
men than its author in that rich and populous book, and other experiences
and other attainments than his. But in the _Holy War_ we have Bunyan
himself as fully and as exclusively as we have Dante in the _Divine
Comedy_. In the first edition of the _Holy War_ there is a frontispiece
conceived and executed after the anatomical and symbolical manner which
was so common in that day, and which is to be seen at its perfection in
the English edition of Jacob Behmen. The frontispiece is a full-length
likeness of the author of the _Holy War_, with his whole soul laid open
and his hidden heart 'anatomised.' Why, asked Wordsworth, and Matthew
Arnold in our day has echoed the question--why does Homer still so live
and rule without a rival in the world of letters? And they answer that
it is because he always sang with his eye so fixed upon its object.
'Homer, to thee I turn.' And so it was with Dante. And so it was with
Bunyan. Bunyan's _Holy War_ has its great and abiding and commanding
power over us just because he composed it with his eye fixed on his own
heart.
My readers, I have somewhat else to do,
Than with vain stories thus to trouble you;
What here I say some men do know so well
They can with tears and joy the story tell . . .
Then lend thine ear to what I do relate,
Touching the town of Mansoul and her state:
For my part, I (myself) was in the town,
Both when 'twas set up and when pulling down.
Let no man then count me a fable-maker,
Nor make my name or credit a partaker
Of their derision: what is here in view
Of mine own knowledge, I dare say is true.
The characters in the _Holy War_ are not as a rule nearly so clear-cut or
so full of dramatic life and movement as their fellows are in the
_Pilgrim's Progress_, and Bunyan seems to have felt that to be the case.
He shows all an author's fondness for the children of his imagination in
the _Pilgrim's Progress_. He returns to and he lingers on their doings
and their sayings and their very names with all a foolish father's fond
delight. While, on the other hand, when we look to see him in his
confidential addresses to his readers returning upon some of the military
and municipal characters in the _Holy War_, to our disappointment he does
not so much as name a single one of them, though he dwells with all an
author's self-delectation on the outstanding scenes, situations, and
episodes of his remarkable book.
What, then, are some of the more outstanding scenes, situations, and
episodes, as well as military and municipal characters, in the book now
before us? And what are we to promise ourselves, and to expect, from the
study and the exposition of the _Holy War_ in these lectures? Well, to
begin with, we shall do our best to enter with mind, and heart, and
conscience, and imagination into Bunyan's great conception of the human
soul as a city, a fair and a delicate city and corporation, with its
situation, surroundings, privileges and fortunes. We shall then enter
under his guidance into the famous and stately palace of this
metropolitan city; a palace which for strength might be called a castle,
for pleasantness a paradise, and for largeness a place so copious as to
contain all the world. The walls and the gates of the city will then
occupy and instruct us for several Sabbath evenings, after which we shall
enter on the record of the wars and battles that rolled time after time
round those city walls, and surged up through its captured gates till
they quite overwhelmed the very palace of the king itself. Then we shall
spend, God willing, one Sabbath evening with Loth-to-stoop, and another
with old Ill-pause, the devil's orator, and another with Captain
Anything, and another with Lord Willbewill, and another with that
notorious villain Clip-promise, by whose doings so much of the king's
coin had been abused, and another with that so angry and so
ill-conditioned churl old Mr. Prejudice, with his sixty deaf men under
him. Dear Mr. Wet-eyes, with his rope upon his head, will have a fit
congregation one winter night, and Captain Self-denial another. We shall
have another painful but profitable evening before a communion season
with Mr. Prywell, and so we shall eat of that bread and drink of that
cup. Emmanuel's livery will occupy us one evening, Mansoul's Magna
Charta another, and her annual Feast-day another. Her Established Church
and her beneficed clergy will take up one evening, some Skulkers in
Mansoul another, the devil's last prank another, and then, to wind up
with, Emmanuel's last speech and charge to Mansoul from his chariot-step
till He comes again to accomplish her rapture. All that we shall see and
take part in; unless, indeed, our Captain comes in anger before the time,
and spears us to the earth when He finds us asleep at our post or in the
act of sin at it, which may His abounding mercy forbid!
And now take these three forewarnings and precautions.
1. First:--All who come here on these coming Sabbath evenings will not
understand the _Holy War_ all at once, and many will not understand it at
all. And little blame to them, and no wonder. For, fully to understand
this deep and intricate book demands far more mind, far more experience,
and far more specialised knowledge than the mass of men, as men are, can
possibly bring to it. This so exacting book demands of us, to begin
with, some little acquaintance with military engineering and
architecture; with the theory of, and if possible with some practice in,
attack and defence in sieges and storms, winter campaigns and long drawn-
out wars. And then, impossible as it sounds and is, along with all that
we would need to have a really profound, practical, and at first-hand
acquaintance with the anatomy of the human subject, and especially with
cardiac anatomy, as well as with all the conditions, diseases, regimen
and discipline of the corrupt heart of man. And then it is enough to
terrify any one to open this book or to enter this church when he is told
that if he comes here he must be ready and willing to have the whole of
this terrible and exacting book fulfilled and experienced in himself, in
his own body and in his own soul.
2. And, then, you will not all like the _Holy War_. The mass of men
could not be expected to like any such book. How could the vain and
blind citizen of a vain and blind city like to be wakened up, as Paris
was wakened up within our own remembrance, to find all her gates in the
hands of an iron-hearted enemy? And how could her sons like to be
reminded, as they sit in their wine gardens, that they are thereby fast
preparing their city for that threatened day when she is to be hung up on
her own walls and bled to the white? Who would not hate and revile the
book or the preacher who prophesied such rough things as that? Who could
love the author or the preacher who told him to his face that his eyes
and his ears and all the passes to his heart were already in the hands of
a cruel, ruthless, and masterful enemy? No wonder that you never read
the _Holy War_. No wonder that the bulk of men have never once opened
it. The Downfall is not a favourite book in the night-gardens of Paris.
3. And then, few, very few, it is to be feared, will be any better of
the _Holy War_. For, to be any better of such a terrible book as this
is, we must at all costs lay it, and lay it all, and lay it all at once,
to heart. We must submit ourselves to see ourselves continually in its
blazing glass. We must stoop to be told that it is all, in all its
terrors and in all its horrors, literally true of ourselves. We must
deliberately and resolutely set open every gate that opens in on our
heart--Ear-gate and Eye-gate and all the gates of sense and intellect,
day and night, to Jesus Christ to enter in; and we must shut and bolt and
bar every such gate in the devil's very face, and in the face of all his
scouts and orators, day and night also. But who that thinks, and that
knows by experience what all that means, will feel himself sufficient for
all that? No man: no sinful man. But, among many other noble and
blessed things, the _Holy War_ will show us that our sufficiency in this
impossibility also is all of God. Who, then, will enlist? Who will risk
all and enlist? Who will matriculate in the military school of Mansoul?
Who will submit himself to all the severity of its divine discipline? Who
will be made willing to throw open and to keep open his whole soul, with
all the gates and doors thereof, to all the sieges, assaults,
capitulations, submissions, occupations, and such like of the war of
gospel holiness? And who will enlist under that banner now?
'Set down my name, sir,' said a man of a very stout countenance to him
who had the inkhorn at the outer gate. At which those who walked upon
the top of the palace broke out in a very pleasant voice,
'Come in, come in;
Eternal glory thou shalt win.'
We have no longer, after what we have come through, any such stoutness in
our countenance, yet will we say to-night with him who had it, Set down
my name also, sir!
CHAPTER II--THE CITY OF MANSOUL AND ITS CINQUE PORTS
'--a besieged city.'--_Isaiah_.
Our greatest historians have been wont to leave their books behind them
and to make long journeys in order to see with their own eyes the ruined
sites of ancient cities and the famous fields where the great battles of
the world were lost and won. We all remember how Macaulay made a long
winter journey to see the Pass of Killiecrankie before he sat down to
write upon it; and Carlyle's magnificent battle-pieces are not all
imagination; even that wonderful writer had to see Frederick's
battlefields with his own eyes before he could trust himself to describe
them. And he tells us himself how Cromwell's splendid generalship all
came up before him as he looked down on the town of Dunbar and out upon
the ever-memorable country round about it. John Bunyan was not a great
historian; he was only a common soldier in the great Civil War of the
seventeenth century; but what would we not give for a description from
his vivid pen of the famous fields and the great sieges in which he took
part? What a find John Bunyan's 'Journals' and 'Letters Home from the
Seat of War' would be to our historians and to their readers! But, alas!
such journals and letters do not exist. Bunyan's complete silence in all
his books about the battles and the sieges he took his part in is very
remarkable, and his silence is full of significance. The Puritan soldier
keeps all his military experiences to work them all up into his _Holy
War_, the one and only war that ever kindled all his passions and filled
his every waking thought. But since John Bunyan was a man of genius,
equal in his own way to Cromwell and Milton themselves, if I were a
soldier I would keep ever before me the great book in which Bunyan's
experiences and observations and reflections as a soldier are all worked
up. I would set that classical book on the same shelf with Caesar's
_Commentaries_ and Napier's _Peninsula_, and Carlyle's glorious battle-
pieces. Even Caesar has been accused of too great dryness and coldness
in his Commentaries, but there is neither dryness nor coldness in John
Bunyan's _Holy War_. To read Bunyan kindles our cold civilian blood like
the waving of a banner and like the sound of a trumpet.
The situation of the city of Mansoul occupies one of the most beautiful
pages of this whole book. The opening of the _Holy War_, simply as a
piece of English, is worthy to stand beside the best page of the
_Pilgrim's Progress_ itself, and what more can I say than that? Now, the
situation of a city is a matter of the very first importance. Indeed,
the insight and the foresight of the great statesmen and the great
soldiers of past ages are seen in nothing more than in the sites they
chose for their citadels and for their defenced cities. Well, then, as
to the situation of Mansoul, 'it lieth,' says our military author, 'just
between the two worlds.' That is to say: very much as Germany in our day
lies between France and Russia, and very much as Palestine in her day lay
between Egypt and Assyria, so does Mansoul lie between two immense
empires also. And, surely, I do not need to explain to any man here who
has a man's soul in his bosom that the two armed empires that besiege his
soul are Heaven above and Hell beneath, and that both Heaven and Hell
would give their best blood and their best treasure to subdue and to
possess his soul. We do not value our souls at all as Heaven and Hell
value them. There are savage tribes in Africa and in Asia who inhabit
territories that are sleeplessly envied by the expanding and extending
nations of Europe. Ancient and mighty empires in Europe raise armies,
and build navies, and levy taxes, and spill the blood of their bravest
sons like water in order to possess the harbours, and the rivers, and the
mountains, and the woods amid which their besotted owners roam in utter
ignorance of all the plots and preparations of the Western world. And
Heaven and Hell are not unlike those ancient and over-peopled nations of
Europe whose teeming millions must have an outlet to other lands. Their
life and their activity are too large and too rich for their original
territories, and thus they are compelled to seek out colonies and
dependencies, so that their surplus population may have a home. And, in
like manner, Heaven is too full of love and of blessedness to have all
that for ever shut up within itself, and Hell is too full of envy and ill-
will, and thus there continually come about those contentions and
collisions of which the _Holy War_ is full. And, besides, it is with
Mansoul and her neighbour states of Heaven and Hell just as it is with
some of our great European empires in this also. There is no neutral
zone, no buffer state, no silver streak between Mansoul and her immediate
and military neighbours. And thus it is that her statesmen, and her
soldiers, and even her very common-soldier sentries must be for ever on
the watch; they must never say peace, peace; they must never leave for
one moment their appointed post.
And then, as for the wall of the city, hear our excellent historian's own
words about that. 'The wall of the town was well built,' so he says.
'Yea, so fast and firm was it knit and compact together that, had it not
been for the townsmen themselves, it could not have been shaken or broken
down for ever. For here lay the excellent wisdom of Him that builded
Mansoul, that the walls could never be broken down nor hurt by the most
mighty adverse potentate unless the townsmen gave their consent thereto.'
Now, what would the military engineers of Chatham and Paris and Berlin,
who are now at their wits' end, not give for a secret like that! A wall
impregnable and insurmountable and not to be sapped or mined from the
outside: a wall that could only suffer hurt from the inside! And then
that wonderful wall was pierced from within with five magnificently
answerable gates. That is to say, the gates could neither be burst in
nor any way forced from without. 'This famous town of Mansoul had five
gates, in at which to come, out of which to go; and these were made
likewise answerable to the walls; to wit, impregnable, and such as could
never be opened or forced but by the will and leave of those within. The
names of the gates were these: Ear-gate, Eye-gate, Mouth-gate; in short,
'the five senses,' as we say.
In the south of England, in the time of Edward the Confessor and after
the battle of Hastings, there were five cities which had special
immunities and peculiar privileges bestowed upon them, in recognition of
the special dangers to which they were exposed and the eminent services
they performed as facing the hostile shores of France. Owing to their
privileges and their position, the 'Cinque Ports' came to be cities of
great strength, till, as time went on, they became a positive weakness
rather than a strength to the land that lay behind them. Privilege bred
pride, and in their pride the Cinque Ports proclaimed wars and formed
alliances on their own account: piracies by sea and robberies by land
were hatched within their walls; and it took centuries to reduce those
pampered and arrogant ports to the safe and peaceful rank of ordinary
English cities. The Revolution of 1688 did something, and the Reform
Bill of 1832 did more to make Dover and her insolent sisters like the
other free and equal cities of England; but to this day there are
remnants of public shows and pageantries left in those old towns
sufficient to witness to the former privileges, power, and pride of the
famous Cinque Ports. Now, Mansoul, in like manner, has her cinque ports.
And the whole of the _Holy War_ is one long and detailed history of how
the five senses are clothed with such power as they possess; how they
abuse and misuse their power; what disloyalty and despite they show to
their sovereign; what conspiracies and depredations they enter into; what
untold miseries they let in upon themselves and upon the land that lies
behind them; what years and years of siege, legislation, and rule it
takes to reduce our bodily senses, those proud and licentious gates, to
their true and proper allegiance, and to make their possessors a people
loyal and contented, law-abiding and happy.
The Apostle has a terrible passage to the Corinthians, in which he treats
of the soul and the senses with tremendous and overwhelming power. 'Your
bodies and your bodily members,' he argues, with crushing indignation,
'are not your own to do with them as you like. Your bodies and your
souls are both Christ's. He has bought your body and your soul at an
incalculable cost. What! know ye not that your body is nothing less than
the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, and ye are not any more
your own? know ye not that your bodies are the very members of Christ?'
And then he says a thing so terrible that I tremble to transcribe it. For
a more terrible thing was never written. 'Shall I then,' filled with
shame he demands, 'take the members of Christ and make them the members
of an harlot?' O God, have mercy on me! I knew all the time that I was
abusing and polluting myself, but I did not know, I did not think, I was
never told that I was abusing and polluting Thy Son, Jesus Christ. Oh,
too awful thought. And yet, stupid sinner that I am, I had often read
that if any man defile the temple of God and the members of Christ, him
shall God destroy. O God, destroy me not as I see now that I deserve.
Spare me that I may cleanse and sanctify myself and the members of Christ
in me, which I have so often embruted and defiled. Assist me to summon
up my imagination henceforth to my sanctification as Thine apostle has
here taught me the way. Let me henceforth look at my whole body in all
its senses and in all its members, the most open and the most secret, as
in reality no more my own. Let me henceforth look at myself with Paul's
deep and holy eyes. Let me henceforth seat Christ, my Redeemer and my
King, in the very throne of my heart, and then keep every gate of my body
and every avenue of my mind as all not any more mine own but His. Let me
open my eye, and my ear, and my mouth, as if in all that I were opening
Christ's eye and Christ's ear and Christ's mouth; and let me thrust in
nothing on Him as He dwells within me that will make Him ashamed or
angry, or that will defile and pollute Him. That thought, O God, I feel
that it will often arrest me in time to come in the very act of sin. It
will make me start back before I make Christ cruel or false, a
wine-bibber, a glutton, or unclean. I feel at this moment as if I shall
yet come to ask Him at every meal, and at every other opportunity and
temptation of every kind, what He would have and what He would do before
I go on to take or to do anything myself. What a check, what a
restraint, what an awful scrupulosity that will henceforth work in me!
But, through that, what a pure, blameless, noble, holy and heavenly life
I shall then lead! What bodily pains, diseases, premature decays; what
mental remorses, what shames and scandals, what self-loathings and what
self-disgusts, what cups bitterer to drink than blood, I shall then
escape! Yes, O Paul, I shall henceforth hold with thee that my body is
the temple of Christ, and that I am not my own, but that I am bought with
a transporting price, and can, therefore, do nothing less than glorify
God in my body and in my spirit which are God's. 'This place,' says the
Pauline author of the _Holy War_--'This place the King intended but for
Himself alone, and not for another with Him.'
But, my brethren, lay this well, and as never before, to heart--this,
namely, that when you thus begin to keep any gate for Christ, your King
and Captain and Better-self,--Ear-gate, or Eye-gate, or Mouth-gate, or
any other gate--you will have taken up a task that shall have no end with
you in this life. Till you begin in dead earnest to watch your heart,
and all the doors of your heart, as if you were watching Christ's heart
for Him and all the doors of His heart, you will have no idea of the
arduousness and the endurance, the sleeplessness and the self-denial, of
the undertaking.
'Mansoul! Her wars seemed endless in her eyes;
She's lost by one, becomes another's prize.
Mansoul! Her mighty wars, they did portend
Her weal or woe and that world without end.
Wherefore she must be more concern'd than they
Whose fears begin and end the self-same day.'
'We all thought one battle would decide it,' says Richard Baxter, writing
about the Civil War. 'But we were all very much mistaken,' sardonically
adds Carlyle. Yes; and you will be very much mistaken too if you enter
on the war with sin in your soul, in your senses and in your members,
with powder and shot for one engagement only. When you enlist here, lay
well to heart that it is for life. There is no discharge in this war.
There are no ornamental old pensioners here. It is a warfare for eternal
life, and nothing will end it but the end of your evil days on earth.