'The palace is not for man, but for the Lord God.'--_David_.
'Now, there is in this gallant country a fair and delicate town, a
corporation, called Mansoul: a town for its building so curious, for its
situation so commodious, for its privileges so advantageous, that I may
say of it, there is not its equal under the whole heaven. Also, there
was reared up in the midst of this town a most famous and stately palace:
for strength, it might be called a castle; for pleasantness, a paradise;
and for largeness, a place so copious as to contain all the world. This
place the King intended for Himself alone, and not for another with Him,
so great was His delight in it.' Thus far, our excellent allegorical
author. But there are other authors that treat of this great matter now
in hand besides the allegorical authors. You will hear tell sometimes
about a class of authors called the Mystics. Well, listen at this stage
to one of them, and one of the best of them, on this present matter--the
human heart, that is. 'Our heart,' he says, 'is our manner of existence,
or the state in which we feel ourselves to be; it is an inward life, a
vital sensibility, which contains our manner of feeling what and how we
are; it is the state of our desires and tendencies, of inwardly seeing,
tasting, relishing, and feeling that which passes within us; our heart is
that to us inwardly with regard to ourselves which our senses of seeing,
hearing, feeling, and such like are with regard to things that are
without or external to us. Your heart is the best and greatest gift of
God to you. It is the highest, greatest, strongest, and noblest power of
your nature. It forms your whole life, be it what it will. All evil and
all good come from your heart. Your heart alone has the key of life and
death for you.' I was just about to ask you at this point which of our
two authors, our allegorical or our mystical author upon the heart, you
like best. But that would be a stupid and a wayward question since you
have them both before you, and both at their best, to possess and to
enjoy. To go back then to John Bunyan, and to his allegory of the human
heart.
1. To begin with, then, there was reared up in the midst of this town of
Mansoul a most famous and stately palace. And that palace and the town
immediately around it were the mirror and the glory of all that its
founder and maker had ever made. His palace was his very top-piece. It
was the metropolitan of the whole world round about it; and it had
positive commission and power to demand service and support of all
around. Yes. And all that is literally, evidently, and actually true of
the human heart. For all other earthly things are created and upheld,
are ordered and administered, with an eye to the human heart. The human
heart is the final cause, as our scholars would say, of absolutely all
other earthly things. Earth, air, water; light and heat; all the
successively existing worlds, mineral, vegetable, animal, spiritual;
grass, herbs, corn, fruit-trees, cattle and sheep, and all other living
creatures; all are upheld for the use and the support of man. And, then,
all that is in man himself is in him for the end and the use of his
heart. All his bodily senses; all his bodily members; every fearfully
and wonderfully made part of his body and of his mind; all administer to
his heart. She is the sovereign and sits supreme. And she is worthy and
is fully entitled so to sit. For there is nothing on the earth greater
or better than the heart, unless it is the Creator Himself, who planned
and executed the heart for Himself and not for another with Him. 'The
body exists,' says a philosophical biologist of our day, 'to furnish the
cerebral centres with prepared food, just as the vegetable world, viewed
biologically, exists to furnish the animal world with similar food. The
higher is the last formed, the most difficult, and the most complex; but
it is just this that is most precious and significant--all of which shows
His unrolling purpose. It is the last that alone explains all that went
before, and it is the coming that will alone explain the present. God
before all, through all, foreseeing all, and still preparing all; God in
all is profoundly evident.' Yes, profoundly evident to profound minds,
and experimentally and sweetly evident to religious minds, and to renewed
and loving and holy hearts.
2. For fame and for state a palace, while for strength it might be
called a castle. In sufficiently ancient times the king's palace was
always a castle also. David's palace on Mount Zion was as much a
military fortress as a royal residence; and King Priam's palace was the
protection both of itself and of the whole of the country around. In
those wild times great men built their houses on high places, and then
the weak and endangered people gathered around the strongholds of the
powerful, as we see in our own city. Our own steep and towering rock
invited to its top the castle-builder of a remote age, and then the
exposed country around began to gather itself together under the shelter
of the bourg. And thus it is that the military engineering of the _Holy
War_ makes that old allegorical book most excellent to read, not only for
common men like you and me, who are bent on the fortification and the
defence of our own hearts, but for the military historians of those old
times also, for the experts of to-day also, and for all good students of
fortification. And the New Testament of the Divine peace itself, as well
as the Old Testament so full of the wars of the Lord--they both support
and serve as an encouragement and an example to our spiritual author in
the elaboration of his military allegory. Every good soldier of Jesus
Christ has by heart the noble paradox of Paul to the Philippians--that
the peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep their hearts
and minds through Christ Jesus. Let God's peace, he says, be your man of
war. Let His surpassing peace do both the work of war and the work of
peace also in your hearts and in your minds. Let that peace both fortify
with walls, and garrison with soldiers, and watch every gate, and hold
every street and lane of your hearts and of your minds all around your
hearts. And all through the Prince of Peace, the Captain of all Holy
War, Jesus Christ Himself. No wonder, then, that in a strength--in a
kind and in a degree of strength--that passeth all understanding, this
stately palace of the heart is also here called a well-garrisoned castle.
3. And then for pleasantness the human heart is a perfect paradise. For
pleasantness the human heart is like those famous royal parks of Nineveh
and Babylon that sprang up in after days as if to recover and restore the
Garden of Eden that had been lost to those eastern lands. But even
Adam's own paradise was but a poor outside imitation in earth and water,
in flowers and fruits, of the far better paradise God had planted within
him. Take another Mystic at this point upon paradise. 'My dear man,'
exclaims Jacob Behmen, 'the Garden of Eden is not paradise, neither does
Moses say so. Paradise is the divine joy, and that was in their own
hearts so long as they stood in the love of God. Paradise is the divine
and angelical joy, pure love, pure joy, pure gladness, in which there is
no fear, no misery, and no death. Which paradise neither death nor the
devil can touch. And yet it has no stone wall around it; only a great
gulf which no man or angel can cross but by that new birth of which
Christ spoke to Nicodemus. Reason asks, Where is paradise to be found?
Is it far off or near? Is it in this world or is it above the stars?
Where is that desirable native country where there is no death? Beloved,
there is nothing nearer you at this moment than paradise, if you incline
that way. God beckons you back into paradise at this moment, and calls
you by name to come. Come, He says, and be one of My paradise children.
In paradise,' the Teutonic Philosopher goes on, 'there is nothing but
hearty love, a meek and a gentle love; a most friendly and most courteous
discourse: a gracious, amiable, and blessed society, where the one is
always glad to see the other, and to honour the other. They know of no
malice in paradise, no cunning, no subtlety, and no sly deceit. But the
fruits of the Spirit of God are common among them in paradise, and one
may make use of all the good things of paradise without causing
disfavour, or hatred, or envy, for there is no contrary affection there,
but all hearts there are knit together in love. In paradise they love
one another, and rejoice in the beauty, loveliness, and gladness of one
another. No one esteems or accounts himself more excellent than another
in paradise; but every one has great joy in another, and rejoices in
another's fair beauty, whence their love to one another continually
increases, so that they lead one another by the hand, and so friendly
kiss one another.' Thus the blessed Behmen saw paradise and had it in
his heart as he sat over his hammer and lapstone in his solitary stall.
For of such as Jacob Behmen and John Bunyan is the kingdom of heaven, and
all such saintly souls have paradise restored again and improved upon in
their own hearts.
4. And for largeness a place so copious as to contain all the world.
Over against the word 'copious' Bunyan hangs for a key, Ecclesiastes
third and eleventh; and under it Miss Peacock adds this as a
note--'_Copious_, spacious. Old French, _copieux_; Latin, _copiosus_,
plentiful.' The human heart, as we have already read to-night, is the
highest, greatest, strongest, and noblest part of human nature. And so
it is. Fearfully and wonderfully made as is the whole of human nature,
that fear and that wonder surpass themselves in the spaciousness and the
copiousness of the human heart. For what is it that the human heart has
not space for, and to spare? After the whole world is received home into
a human heart, there is room, and, indeed, hunger, for another world, and
after that for still another. The sun is--I forget how many times bigger
than our whole world, and yet we can open our heart and take down the sun
into it, and shut him out again and restore him to his immeasurable
distances in the heavens, and all in the twinkling of an eye. As for
instance. As I wrote these lines I read a report of a lecture by Sir
Robert Ball in which that distinguished astronomer discoursed on recent
solar discoveries. A globe of coal, Sir Robert said, as big as our
earth, and all set ablaze at the same moment, would not give out so much
heat to the worlds around as the sun gives out in a thousandth part of a
second. Well, as I read that, and ere ever I was aware what was going
on, my heart had opened over my newspaper, and the sun had swept down
from the sky, and had rushed into my heart, and before I knew where I was
the cry had escaped my lips, 'Great and marvellous are Thy works, Lord
God Almighty! Who shall not fear Thee and glorify thy name?' And then
this reflection as suddenly came to me: How good it is to be at peace
with God, and to be able and willing to say, My Father! That the whole
of the surging and flaming sun was actually down in my straitened and
hampered heart at that idle moment over my paper is scientifically
demonstrable; for only that which is in the heart of a man can kindle the
passions that are in the heart of that man; and nothing is more sure to
me than that the great passions of fear and love, wonder and rapture were
at that moment at a burning point within me. There is a passage well on
in the _Holy War_, which for terror and for horror, and at the same time
for truth and for power, equals anything either in Dante or in Milton.
Lucifer has stood up at the council board to second the scheme of
Beelzebub. 'Yes,' he said, amid the plaudits of his fellow-princes--'Yes,
I swear it. Let us fill Mansoul full with our abundance. Let us make of
this castle, as they vainly call it, a warehouse, as the name is in some
of their cities above. For if we can only get Mansoul to fill herself
full with much goods she is henceforth ours. My peers,' he said, 'you
all know His parable of how unblessed riches choke the word; and, again,
we know what happens when the hearts of men are overcharged with
surfeiting and with drunkenness. Let us give them all that, then, to
their heart's desire.' This advice of Lucifer, our history tells us, was
highly applauded in hell, and ever since it has proved their masterpiece
to choke Mansoul with the fulness of this world, and to surfeit the heart
with the good things thereof. But, my brethren, you will outwit hell
herself and all her counsellors and all her machinations, if, out of all
the riches, pleasures, cares, and possessions, that both heaven and earth
and hell can heap into your heart, those riches, pleasures, cares, and
possessions but produce corresponding passions and affections towards God
and man. Only let fear, and love, and thankfulness, and helpfulness be
kindled and fed to all their fulness in your heart, and all the world and
all that it contains will only leave the more room in your boundless
heart for God and for your brother. All that God has made, or could make
with all His counsel and all His power laid out, will not fill your
boundless and bottomless heart. He must come down and come into your
boundless and bottomless heart Himself. Himself: your Father, your
Redeemer, and your Sanctifier and Comforter also. Let the whole universe
try to fill your heart, O man of God, and after it all we shall hear you
singing in famine and in loneliness the doleful ditty:
'O come to my heart, Lord Jesus,
There is room in my heart for Thee.
5. 'Madame,' said a holy solitary to Madame Guyon in her misery--'Madame,
you are disappointed and perplexed because you seek without what you have
within. Accustom yourself to seek for God in your own heart and you will
always find Him there.' From that hour that gifted woman was a Mystic.
The secret of the interior life flashed upon her in a moment. She had
been starving in the midst of fulness; God was near and not far off; the
kingdom of heaven was within her. The love of God from that hour took
possession of her soul with an inexpressible happiness. Prayer, which
had before been so difficult, was now delightful and indispensable; hours
passed away like moments: she could scarcely cease from praying. Her
domestic trials seemed great to her no longer; her inward joy consumed
like a fire the reluctance, the murmur, and the sorrow, which all had
their birth in herself. A spirit of comforting peace, a sense of
rejoicing possession, pervaded all her days. God was continually with
her, and she seemed continually yielded up to God. 'Madame,' said the
solitary, 'you seek without for what you have within.' Where do you seek
for God when you pray, my brethren? To what place do you direct your
eyes? Is it to the roof of your closet? Is it to the east end of your
consecrated chapel? Is it to that wooden table in the east end of your
chapel? Or, passing out of all houses made with hands and consecrated
with holy oil, do you lift up your eyes to the skies where the sun and
the moon and the stars dwell alone? 'What a folly!' exclaims Theophilus,
in the golden dialogue, 'for no way is the true way to God but by the way
of our own heart. God is nowhere else to be found. And the heart itself
cannot find Him but by its own love of Him, faith in Him, dependence upon
Him, resignation to Him, and expectation of all from Him.' 'You have
quite carried your point with me,' answered Theogenes after he had heard
all that Theophilus had to say. 'The God of meekness, of patience, and
of love is henceforth the one God of my heart. It is now the one bent
and desire of my soul to seek for all my salvation in and through the
merits and mediation of the meek, humble, patient, resigned, suffering
Lamb of God, who alone has power to bring forth the blessed birth of
those heavenly virtues in my soul. What a comfort it is to think that
this Lamb of God, Son of the Father, Light of the World; this Glory of
heaven and this Joy of angels is as near to us, is as truly in the midst
of us, as He is in the midst of heaven. And that not a thought, look, or
desire of our heart that presses toward Him, longing to catch one small
spark of His heavenly nature, but is as sure a way of finding Him, as the
woman's way was who was healed of her deadly disease by longing to touch
but the border of His garment.'
To sum up. 'There is reared up in the midst of Mansoul a most famous and
stately palace: for strength, it may be called a castle; for
pleasantness, a paradise; and for largeness, a place so copious as to
contain all the world. This palace the King intends but for Himself
alone, and not another with Him, and He commits the keeping of that
palace day and night to the men of the town.'