'Goodwill.'--Luke 2. 14.
'So in process of time Christian got up to the gate. Now there was
written over the gate, _Knock_, _and it shall be opened unto you_. He
knocked, therefore, more than once or twice, saying, May I now enter
here? when at last there came a grave person to the gate, named Goodwill,
who asked him who was there?' The gravity of the gatekeeper was the
first thing that struck the pilgrim. And it was the same thing that so
struck some of the men who saw most of our Lord that they handed down to
their children the true tradition that He was often seen in tears, but
that no one had ever seen or heard Him laugh. The prophecy in the
prophet concerning our Lord was fulfilled to the letter. He was indeed a
man of sorrows, and He early and all His life long had a close
acquaintance with grief. Our Lord had come into this world on a very sad
errand. We are so stupefied and besotted with sin, that we have no
conception how sad an errand our Lord had been sent on, and how sad a
task He soon discovered it to be. To be a man without sin, a man hating
sin, and hating nothing else but sin, and yet to have to spend all His
days in a world lying in sin, and in the end to have all that world of
sin laid upon Him till He was Himself made sin,--how sad a task was that!
Great, no doubt, as was the joy that was set before our Lord, and sure as
He was of one day entering on that joy, yet the daily sight of so much
sin in all men around Him, and the cross and the shame that lay right
before Him, made Him, in spite of the future joy, all the Man of Sorrow
Isaiah had said He would be, and made light-mindedness and laughter
impossible to our Lord,--as it is, indeed, to all men among ourselves who
have anything of His mind about this present world and the sin of this
world, they also are men of sorrow, and of His sorrow. They, too, are
acquainted with grief. Their tears, like His, will never be wiped off in
this world. They will not laugh with all their heart till they laugh
where He now laughs. Then it will be said of them, too, that they began
to be merry. 'What was the matter with you that you did laugh in your
sleep last night? asked Christiana of Mercy in the morning. I suppose
you were in a dream. So I was, said Mercy, but are you sure that I
laughed? Yes, you laughed heartily; but, prithee, Mercy, tell me thy
dream. Well, I dreamed that I was in a solitary place and all alone, and
was there bemoaning the hardness of my heart, when methought I saw one
coming with wings towards me. So he came directly to me, and said,
Mercy, what aileth thee? Now, when he heard my complaint, he said, Peace
be to thee. He also wiped mine eyes with his handkerchief, and clad me
in silver and gold; he put a chain about my neck also, and earrings in
mine ears, and a beautiful crown upon my head. So he went up. I
followed him till we came to a golden gate; and I thought I saw your
husband there. But did I laugh? Laugh! ay, and well you might, to see
yourself so well.'
But to return and begin again. Goodwill, who opened the gate, was, as we
saw, a person of a very grave and commanding aspect; so much so, that in
his sudden joy our pilgrim was a good deal overawed as he looked on the
countenance of the man who stood in the gate, and it was some time
afterwards before he understood why he wore such a grave and almost sad
aspect. But afterwards, as he went up the way, and sometimes returned in
thought to the wicket-gate, he came to see very good reason why the
keeper of that gate looked as he did look. The site and situation of the
gate, for one thing, was of itself enough to banish all light-mindedness
from the man who was stationed there. For the gatehouse stood just above
the Slough of Despond, and that itself filled the air of the place with a
dampness and a depression that could be felt. And then out of the
downward windows of the gate, the watcher's eye always fell on the City
of Destruction in the distance, and on her sister cities sitting like her
daughters round about her. And that also made mirth and hilarity
impossible at that gate. And then the kind of characters who came
knocking all hours of the day and the night at that gate. Goodwill never
saw a happy face or heard a cheerful voice from one year's end to the
other. And when any one so far forgot himself as to put on an untimely
confidence and self-satisfaction, the gatekeeper would soon put him
through such questions as quickly sobered him if he had anything at all
of the root of the matter in him. Terror, horror, despair, remorse,
chased men and women up to that gate. They would often fall before his
threshold more dead than alive. And then, after the gate was opened and
the pilgrims pulled in, the gate had only opened on a path of such
painfulness, toil, and terrible risk, that at whatever window Goodwill
looked out, he always saw enough to make him and keep him a grave, if not
a sad, man. It was, as he sometimes said, his meat and his drink to keep
the gate open for pilgrims; but the class of men who came calling
themselves pilgrims; the condition they came in; the past, that in spite
of all both he and they could do, still came in through his gate after
them, and went up all the way with them; their ignorance of the way, on
which he could only start them; the multitudes who started, and the
handfuls who held on; the many who for a time ran well, but afterwards
left their bones to bleach by the wayside; and all the impossible-to-be-
told troubles, dangers, sorrows, shipwrecks that certainly lay before the
most steadfast and single-hearted pilgrim--all that was more than enough
to give the man at the gate his grave and anxious aspect.
Not that his great gravity, with all the causes of it, ever made him a
melancholy, a morose, a despairing, or even a desponding man. Far from
that. The man of sorrows Himself sometimes rejoiced in spirit. Not
sometimes only, but often He lifted up His heart and thanked His Father
for the work His Father had given Him to do, and for the success that had
been granted to Him in the doing of it. And as often as He looked
forward to the time when he should finish His work and receive His
discharge, and return to His Father's house, at the thought of that He
straightway forgot all His present sorrows. And somewhat so was it with
Goodwill at his gate. No man could be but at bottom happy, and even
joyful, who had a post like his to occupy, a gate like his to keep, and,
altogether, a work like his to do. No man with his name and his nature
can ever in any circumstances be really unhappy. 'Happiness is the bloom
that always lies on a life of true goodness,' and this gatehouse was full
of the happiness that follows on and always dwells with true goodness.
Goodwill cannot have more happiness till he shuts in his last pilgrim
into the Celestial City, and then himself enters in after him as a
shepherd after a lost sheep.
The happy, heavenly, divine disposition of the gatekeeper was such, that
it overflowed from the pilgrim who stood beside him and descended upon
his wife and children who remained behind him in the doomed city. So
full of love was the gatekeeper's heart, that it ran out upon Obstinate
and Pliable also. His heart was so large and so hospitable, that he was
not satisfied with one pilgrim received and assisted that day. How is
it, he asked, that you have come here alone? Did any of your neighbours
know of your coming? And why did he who came so far not come through?
Alas, poor man, said Goodwill, is the celestial glory of so little esteem
with him that he counteth it not worth running the hazards of a few
difficulties to obtain it? Our pilgrim got a lifelong lesson in goodwill
to all men at that gate that day. The gatekeeper showed such deep and
patient and genuine interest in all the pilgrim's past history, and in
all his family and personal affairs, that Christian all his days could
never show impatience, or haste, or lack of interest in the most long-
winded and egotistical pilgrim he ever met. He always remembered, when
he was becoming impatient, how much of his precious time and of his
loving attention his old friend Goodwill had given to him. Our pilgrim
got tired of talking about himself long before Goodwill had ceased to ask
questions and to listen to the answers. So much was Christian taken with
the courtesy and the kindness of Goodwill, that had it not been for his
crushing burden, he would have offered to remain in Goodwill's house to
run his errands, to light his fires, and to sweep his floors. So much
was he taken captive with Goodwill's extraordinary kindness and unwearied
attention. And since he could not remain at the gate, but must go on to
the city of all goodwill itself, our pilgrim set himself all his days to
copy this gatekeeper when he met with any fellow-pilgrim who had any
story that he wished to tell. And many were the lonely and forgotten
souls that Christian cheered and helped on, not by his gold or his
silver, nor by anything else, but just by his open ear. To listen with
patience and with attention to a fellow-pilgrim's wrongs and sorrows, and
even his smallest interests, said this Christian to himself, is just what
Goodwill so winningly did to me.
With all his goodwill the grave gatekeeper could not say that the way to
the Celestial City was other than a narrow, a stringent, and a
heart-searching way. 'Come,' he said, 'and I will tell thee the way thou
must go.' There are many wide ways to hell, and many there be who crowd
them, but there is only one way to heaven, and you will sometimes think
you must have gone off it, there are so few companions; sometimes there
will be only one footprint, with here and there a stream of blood, and
always as you proceed, it becomes more and more narrow, till it strips a
man bare, and sometimes threatens to close upon him and crush him to the
earth altogether. Our Lord in as many words tells us all that. Strive,
He says, strive every day. For many shall seek to enter into the way of
salvation, but because they do not early enough, and long enough, and
painfully enough strive, they come short, and are shut out. Have you,
then, anything in your religious life that Christ will at last accept as
the striving He intended and demanded? Does your religion cause you any
real effort--Christ calls it _agony_? Have you ever had, do you ever
have, anything that He would so describe? What cross do you every day
take up? In what thing do you every day deny yourself? Name it. Put
your finger on it. Write it in cipher on the margin of your Bible. Would
the most liberal judgment be able to say of you that you have any fear
and trembling in the work of your salvation? If not, I am afraid there
must be some mistake somewhere. There must be great guilt somewhere. At
your parents' door, or at your minister's, or, if their hands are clean,
then at your own. Christ has made it plain to a proverb, and John Bunyan
has made it a nursery and a schoolboy story, that the way to heaven is
steep and narrow and lonely and perilous. And that, remember, not a few
of the first miles of the way, but all the way, and even through the dark
valley itself. 'Almost all that is said in the New Testament of men's
watching, giving earnest heed to themselves, running the race that is set
before them, striving and agonising, fighting, putting on the whole
armour of God, pressing forward, reaching forth, crying to God day and
night; I say, almost all that we have in the New Testament on these
subjects is spoken and directed to the saints. Where those things are
applied to sinners seeking salvation once, they are spoken of the saints'
prosecution of their salvation ten times' (Jonathan Edwards). If you
have a life at all like that, you will be sorely tempted to think that
such suffering and struggle, increasing rather than diminishing as life
goes on, is a sign that you are so bad as not to be a true Christian at
all. You will be tempted to think and say so. But all the time the
truth is, that he who has not that labouring, striving, agonising,
fearing, and trembling in himself, knows nothing at all about the
religion of Christ and the way to heaven; and if he thinks he does, then
that but proves him a hypocrite, a self-deceived, self-satisfied
hypocrite; there is not an ounce of a true Christian in him. Says Samuel
Rutherford on this matter: 'Christ commandeth His hearers to a strict and
narrow way, in mortifying heart-lusts, in loving our enemy, in feeding
him when he is hungry, in suffering for Christ's sake and the gospel's,
in bearing His cross, in denying ourselves, in becoming humble as
children, in being to all men and at all times meek and lowly in heart.'
Let any man lay all that intelligently and imaginatively alongside of his
own daily life. Let him name some such heart-lust. Let him name also
some enemy, and ask himself what it is to love that man, and to feed him
in his hunger; what it is in which he is called to suffer for Christ's
sake and the gospel's, in his reputation, in his property, in his
business, in his feelings. Let him put his finger on something in which
he is every day to deny himself, and to be humble and teachable, and to
keep himself out of sight like a little child; and if that man does not
find out how narrow and heart-searching the way to heaven is, he will be
the first who has so found his way thither. No, no; be not deceived.
Deceive not yourself, and let no man deceive you. God is not mocked,
neither are His true saints. 'Would to God I were back in my pulpit but
for one Sabbath,' said a dying minister in Aberdeen. 'What would you
do?' asked a brother minister at his bedside. 'I would preach to the
people the difficulty of salvation,' he said. All which things are told,
not for purposes of debate or defiance, but to comfort and instruct God's
true people who are finding salvation far more difficult than anybody had
ever told them it would be. Comfort My people, saith your God. Speak
comfortably to My people. Come, said Goodwill, and I will teach thee
about the way thou must go. Look before thee, dost thou see that narrow
way? That is the way thou must go. And then thou mayest always
distinguish the right way from the wrong. The wrong is crooked and wide,
and the right is straight as a rule can make it,--straight and narrow.
Goodwill said all that in order to direct and to comfort the pilgrim; but
that was not all that this good man said with that end. For, when
Christian asked him if he could not help him off with his burden that was
upon his back, he told him: 'As to thy burden, be content to bear it
until thou comest to the place of deliverance, for there it will fall
from thy back of itself.' Get you into the straight and narrow way, says
Goodwill, with his much experience of the ways and fortunes of true
pilgrims; get you sure into the right way, and leave your burden to God.
He appoints the place of deliverance, and it lies before thee. The place
of thy deliverance cannot be behind thee, and it is not in my house, else
thy burden would have been already off. But it is before thee. Be
earnest, therefore, in the way. Look not behind thee. Go not into any
crooked way; and one day, before you know, and when you are not pulling
at it, your burden will fall off of itself. Be content to bear it till
then, says bold and honest Goodwill, speaking so true to pilgrim
experience. Yes; be content, O ye people of God, crying with this
pilgrim for release from your burden of guilt, and no less those of you
who are calling with Paul for release from the still more bitter and
crushing burden made up of combined guilt and corruption. Be content
till the place and the time of deliverance; nay, even under your burden
and your bonds be glad, as Paul was, and go up the narrow way, still
chanting to yourself, I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. It is
only becoming that a great sinner should tarry the Lord's leisure; all
the more that the greatest sinner may be sure the Lord will come, and
will not tarry. The time is long, but the thing is sure.