PLIABLE

'He hath not root in himself.'--Our Lord.

With one stroke of His pencil our Lord gives us this Flaxman-like outline

of one of his well-known hearers. And then John Bunyan takes up that so

expressive profile, and puts flesh and blood into it, till it becomes the

well-known Pliable of _The Pilgrim's Progress_. We call the text a

parable, but our Lord's parables are all portraits--portraits and groups

of portraits, rather than ordinary parables. Our Lord knew this man

quite well who had no root in himself. Our Lord had crowds of such men

always running after Him, and He threw off this rapid portrait from

hundreds of men and women who caused discredit to fall on His name and

His work, and burdened His heart continually. And John Bunyan, with all

his genius, could never have given us such speaking likenesses as that of

Pliable and Temporary and Talkative, unless he had had scores of them in

his own congregation.

Our Lord's short preliminary description of Pliable goes, like all His

descriptions, to the very bottom of the whole matter. Our Lord in this

passage is like one of those masterly artists who begin their portrait-

painting with the study of anatomy. All the great artists in this walk

build up their best portraits from the inside of their subjects. He hath

not root in himself, says our Lord, and we need no more than that to be

told us to foresee how all his outside religion will end. 'Without self-

knowledge,' says one of the greatest students of the human heart that

ever lived, 'you have no real root in yourselves. Real self-knowledge is

the root of all real religious knowledge. It is a deceit and a mischief

to think that the Christian doctrines can either be understood or aright

accepted by any outward means. It is just in proportion as we search our

own hearts and understand our own nature that we shall ever feel what a

blessing the removal of sin will be; redemption, pardon, sanctification,

are all otherwise mere words without meaning or power to us. God speaks

to us first in our own hearts.' Happily for us our Lord has annotated

His own text and has told us that an honest heart is the alone root of

all true religion. Honest, that is, with itself, and with God and man

about itself. As David says in his so honest psalm, 'Behold, Thou

desirest truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part Thou shalt

make me to know wisdom.' And, indeed, all the preachers and writers in

Scripture, and all Scriptural preachers and writers outside of Scripture,

are at one in this: that all true wisdom begins at home, and that it all

begins at the heart. And they all teach us that he is the wisest of men

who has the worst opinion of his own heart, as he is the foolishest of

men who does not know his own heart to be the worst heart that ever any

man was cursed with in this world. 'Here is wisdom': not to know the

number of the beast, but to know his mark, and to read it written so

indelibly in our own heart.

And where this first and best of all wisdom is not, there, in our Lord's

words, there is no deepness of earth, no root, and no fruit. And any

religion that most men have is of this outside, shallow, rootless

description. This was all the religion that poor Pliable ever had. This

poor creature had a certain slight root of something that looked like

religion for a short season, but even that slight root was all outside of

himself. His root, what he had of a root, was all in Christian's

companionship and impassioned appeals, and then in those impressive

passages of Scripture that Christian read to him. At your first

attention to these things you would think that no possible root could be

better planted than in the Bible and in earnest preaching. But even the

Bible, and, much more, the best preaching, is all really outside of a man

till true religion once gets its piercing roots down into himself. We

have perhaps all heard of men, and men of no small eminence, who were

brought up to believe the teaching of the Bible and the pulpit, but who,

when some of their inherited and external ideas about some things

connected with the Bible began to be shaken, straightway felt as if all

the grounds of their faith were shaken, and all the roots of their faith

pulled up. But where that happened, all that was because such men's

religion was all rooted outside of themselves; in the best things outside

of themselves, indeed, but because, in our Lord's words, their religion

was rooted in something outside of themselves and not inside, they were

by and by offended, and threw off their faith. There is another well-

known class of men all whose religion is rooted in their church, and in

their church not as a member of the body of Christ, but as a social

institution set up in this world. They believe in their church. They

worship their church. They suffer and make sacrifices for their church.

They are proud of the size and the income of their church; her past

contendings and sufferings, and present dangers, all endear their church

to their heart. But if tribulation and persecution arise, that is to

say, if anything arises to vex or thwart or disappoint them with their

church, they incontinently pull up their roots and their religion with

it, and transplant both to any other church that for the time better

pleases them, or to no church at all. Others, again, have all their

religiosity rooted in their family life. Their religion is all made up

of domestic sentiment. They love their earthly home with that supreme

satisfaction and that all-absorbing affection that truly religious men

entertain for their heavenly home. And thus it is that when anything

happens to disturb or break up their earthly home their rootless

religiosity goes with it. Other men's religion, again, and all their

interest in it, is rooted in their shop; you can make them anything or

nothing in religion, according as you do or do not do business in their

shop. Companionship, also, accounts for the fluctuations of many men's,

and almost all women's, religious lives. If they happen to fall in with

godly lovers and friends, they are sincerely godly with them; but if

their companions are indifferent or hostile to true religion, they

gradually fall into the same temper and attitude. We sometimes see

students destined for the Christian ministry also with all their religion

so without root in themselves that a session in an unsympathetic class, a

sceptical book, sometimes just a sneer or a scoff, will wither all the

promise of their coming service. And so on through the whole of human

life. He that hath not the root of the matter in himself dureth for a

while, but by and by, for one reason or another, he is sure to be

offended.

So much, then,--not enough, nor good enough--for our Lord's swift stroke

at the heart of His hearers. But let us now pass on to Pliable, as he so

soon and so completely discovers himself to us under John Bunyan's so

skilful hand. Look well at our author's speaking portrait of a

well-known man in Bedford who had no root in himself, and who, as a

consequence, was pliable to any influence, good or bad, that happened to

come across him. 'Don't revile,' are the first words that come from

Pliable's lips, and they are not unpromising words. Pliable is hurt with

Obstinate's coarse abuse of the Christian life, till he is downright

ashamed to be seen in his company. Pliable, at least, is a gentleman

compared with Obstinate, and his gentlemanly feelings and his good

manners make him at once take sides with Christian. Obstinate's foul

tongue has almost made Pliable a Christian. And this finely-conceived

scene on the plain outside the city gate is enacted over again every day

among ourselves. Where men are in dead earnest about religion it always

arouses the bad passions of bad men; and where earnest preachers and

devoted workers are assailed with violence or with bad language, there is

always enough love of fair play in the bystanders to compel them to take

sides, for the time at least, with those who suffer for the truth. And

we are sometimes too apt to count all that love of common fairness, and

that hatred of foul play, as a sure sign of some sympathy with the hated

truth itself. When an onlooker says 'Don't revile,' we are too ready to

set down that expression of civility as at least the first beginning of

true religion. But the religion of Jesus Christ cuts far deeper into the

heart of man than to the dividing asunder of justice and injustice,

civility and incivility, ribaldry and good manners. And it is always

found in the long-run that the cross of Christ and its crucifixion of the

human heart goes quite as hard with the gentlemanly-mannered man, the

civil and urbane man, as it does with the man of bad behaviour and of

brutish manners. 'Civil men,' says Thomas Goodwin, 'are this world's

saints.' And poor Pliable was one of them. 'My heart really inclines to

go with my neighbour,' said Pliable next. 'Yes,' he said, 'I begin to

come to a point. I really think I will go along with this good man. Yes,

I will cast in my lot with him. Come, good neighbour, let us be going.'

The apocalyptic side of some men's imaginations is very easily worked

upon. No kind of book sells better among those of our people who have no

root in themselves than just picture-books about heaven. Our

missionaries make use of lantern-slides to bring home the scenes in the

Gospels to the dull minds of their village hearers, and with good

success. And at home a magic-lantern filled with the splendours of the

New Jerusalem would carry multitudes of rootless hearts quite captive for

a time. 'Well said; and what else? This is excellent; and what else?'

Christian could not tell Pliable fast enough about the glories of heaven.

'There we shall be with seraphim and cherubim, creatures that will dazzle

your eyes to look on them. There also you shall meet with thousands and

ten thousands who have gone before us to that place. Elders with golden

crowns, and holy virgins with golden harps, and all clothed with

immortality as with a garment.' 'The hearing of all this,' cried

Pliable, 'is enough to ravish one's heart.' 'An overly faith,' says old

Thomas Shepard, 'is easily wrought.'

As if the text itself was not graphic enough, Bunyan's racy, humorous,

pathetic style overflows the text and enriches the very margins of his

pages, as every possessor of a good edition of _The Pilgrim_ knows.

'Christian and Obstinate pull for Pliable's soul' is the eloquent summary

set down on the side of the sufficiently eloquent page. As the picture

of a man's soul being pulled for rises before my mind, I can think of no

better companion picture to that of Pliable than that of poor, hard-beset

Brodie of Brodie, as he lets us see the pull for his soul in the honest

pages of his inward diary. Under the head of 'Pliable' in my Bunyan note-

book I find a crowd of references to Brodie; and if only to illustrate

our author's marginal note, I shall transcribe one or two of them. 'The

writer of this diary desires to be cast down under the facileness and

plausibleness of his nature, by which he labours to please men more than

God, and whence it comes that the wicked speak good of him . . . The Lord

pity the proneness of his heart to comply with the men who have the power

. . . Lord, he is unsound and double in his heart, politically crafty,

selfish, not savouring nor discerning the things of God . . . Let not

self-love, wit, craft, and timorousness corrupt his mind, but indue him

with fortitude, patience, steadfastness, tenderness, mortification . . .

Shall I expose myself and my family to danger at this time? A grain of

sound faith would solve all my questions.' 'Die Dom. I stayed at home,

partly to decline the ill-will and rage of men and to decline

observation.' Or, take another Sabbath-day entry: 'Die Dom. I stayed at

home, because of the time, and the observation, and the Earl of Moray . .

. Came to Cuttiehillock. I am neither cold nor hot. I am not rightly

principled as to the time. I suspect that it is not all conscience that

makes me conform, but wit, and to avoid suffering; Lord, deliver me from

all this unsoundness of heart.' And after this miserable fashion do

heaven and earth, duty and self-interest, the covenant and the crown pull

for Lord Brodie's soul through 422 quarto pages. Brodie's diary is one

of the most humiliating, heart-searching, and heart-instructing books I

ever read. Let all public men tempted and afflicted with a facile,

pliable, time-serving heart have honest Brodie at their elbow.

'Glad I am, my good companion,' said Pliable, after the passage about the

cherubim and the seraphim, and the golden crowns and the golden harps,

'it ravishes my very heart to hear all this. Come on, let us mend our

pace.' This is delightful, this is perfect. How often have we ourselves

heard these very words of challenge and reproof from the pliable

frequenters of emotional meetings, and from the emotional members of an

emotional but rootless ministry. Come on, let us mend our pace! 'I am

sorry to say,' replied the man with the burden on his back, 'that I

cannot go so fast as I would.' 'Christian,' says Mr. Kerr Bain, 'has

more to carry than Pliable has, as, indeed, he would still have if he

were carrying nothing but himself; and he does have about him, besides, a

few sobering thoughts as to the length and labour and some of the

unforeseen chances of the way.' And as Dean Paget says in his profound

and powerful sermon on 'The Disasters of Shallowness': 'Yes, but there is

something else first; something else without which that inexpensive

brightness, that easy hopefulness, is apt to be a frail resourceless

growth, withering away when the sun is up and the hot winds of trial are

sweeping over it. We must open our hearts to our religion; we must have

the inward soil broken up, freely and deeply its roots must penetrate our

inner being. We must take to ourselves in silence and in sincerity its

words of judgment with its words of hope, its sternness with its

encouragement, its denunciations with its promises, its requirements,

with its offers, its absolute intolerance of sin with its inconceivable

and divine long-suffering towards sinners.' But preaching like this

would have frightened away poor Pliable. He would not have understood

it, and what he did understand of it he would have hated with all his

shallow heart.

'Where are we now?' called Pliable to his companion, as they both went

over head and ears into the Slough of Despond. 'Truly,' said Christian,

'I do not know.'--No work of man is perfect, not even the all-but-perfect

_Pilgrim's Progress_. Christian was bound to fall sooner or later into a

slough filled with his own despondency about himself, his past guilt, his

present sinfulness, and his anxious future. But Pliable had not

knowledge enough of himself to make him ever despond. He was always

ready and able to mend his pace. He had no burden on his back, and

therefore no doubt in his heart. But Christian had enough of both for

any ten men, and it was Christian's overflowing despondency and doubt at

this point of the road that suddenly filled his own slough, and, I

suppose, overflowed into a slough for Pliable also. Had Pliable only had

a genuine and original slough of his own to so sink and be bedaubed in,

he would have got out of it at the right side of it, and been a tender-

stepping pilgrim all his days.--'Is this the happiness you have told me

all this while of? May I get out of this with my life, you may possess

the brave country alone for me.' And with that he gave a desperate

struggle or two, and got out of the mire on that side of the slough which

was next his own house; so he went away, and Christian saw him no more.

'The side of the slough which was next his own house.' Let us close with

that. Let us go home thinking about that. And in this trial of faith

and patience, and in that, in this temptation to sin, and in that, in

this actual transgression, and in that, let us always ask ourselves which

is the side of the slough that is farthest away from our own house, and

let us still struggle to that side of the slough, and it will all be well

with us at the last.