BY-ENDS

'Ye seek Me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat

of the loaves.'--Our Lord.

In no part of John Bunyan's ingenious book is his strong sense and his

sarcastic and humorous vein better displayed than just in his description

of By-ends, and in the full and particular account he gives of the

kinsfolk and affinity of By-ends. Is there another single stroke in all

sacred literature better fitted at once to teach the gayest and to make

the gravest smile than just John Bunyan's sketch of By-ends'

great-grandfather, the founder of the egoistical family of Fairspeech,

who was, to begin with, but a waterman who always looked one way and

rowed another? By-ends' wife also is a true helpmate to her husband. She

was my Lady Feigning's favourite daughter, under whose nurture and

example the young lady had early come to a quite extraordinary pitch of

good breeding; and now that she was a married woman, she and her husband

had, so their biographer tells us, two firm points of family religion in

which they were always agreed and according to which they brought up all

their children, namely, never to strive too much against wind and tide,

and always to watch when Religion was walking on the sunny side of the

street in his silver slippers, and then at once to cross over and take

his arm. But abundantly amusing and entertaining as John Bunyan is at

the expense of By-ends and his family and friends, he has far other aims

in view than the amusement and entertainment of his readers. Bunyan uses

all his great gifts of insight and sense and humour and scorn so as to

mark unmistakably the road and to guide the progress of his reader's soul

to God, his chiefest end and his everlasting portion.

It was no small part of our Lord's life of humiliation on the earth,--much

more so than His being born in a low condition and being made under the

law,--to have to go about all His days among men, knowing in every case

and on every occasion what was in man. It was a real humiliation to our

Lord to see those watermen of the sea of Tiberias sweating at their oars

as they rowed round and round the lake after Him; and His humiliation

came still more home to Him as often as He saw His own disciples

disputing and pressing who should get closest to Him while for a short

season He walked in the sunshine; just as it was His estate of exaltation

already begun, when He could enter into Himself and see to the bottom of

His own heart, till He was able to say that it was His very meat and

drink to do His father's will, and to finish the work His Father had

given Him to do. The men of Capernaum went out after our Lord in their

boats because they had eaten of the multiplied loaves and hoped to do so

again. Zebedee's children had forsaken all and followed our Lord,

because they counted to sit the one on His right hand and the other on

His left hand in His soon-coming kingdom. The pain and the shame all

that cost our Lord, we can only remotely imagine. But as for Himself,

our Lord never once had to blush in secret at His own motives. He never

once had to hang down His head at the discovery of His own selfish aims

and by-ends. Happy man! The thought of what He should eat or what He

should drink or wherewithal He should be clothed never troubled His head.

The thought of success, as His poor-spirited disciples counted success,

the thought of honour and power and praise, never once rose in His heart.

All these things, and all things like them, had no attraction for Him;

they awoke nothing but indifference and contempt in him. But to please

His Father and to hear from time to time His Father's voice saying that

He was well pleased with His beloved Son,--that was better than life to

our Lord. To find out and follow every new day His Father's mind and

will, and to finish every night another part of His Father's appointed

work,--that was more than His necessary food to our Lord. The great

schoolmen, as they meditated on these deep matters, had a saying to the

effect that all created things take their true goodness or their true

evil from the end they aim at. And thus it was that our Lord, aiming

only at His Father's ends and never at His own, both manifested and

attained to a Divine goodness, just as the greedy crowds of Galilee and

the disputatious disciples, as long and as far as they made their belly

or their honour their end and aim, to that extent fell short of all true

goodness, all true satisfaction, and all true acceptance.

By-ends was so called because he was full of low, mean, selfish motives,

and of nothing else. All that this wretched creature did, he did with a

single eye to himself. The best things that he did became bad things in

his self-seeking hands. His very religion stank in those men's nostrils

who knew what was in his heart. By-ends was one of our Lord's whited

sepulchres. And so deep, so pervading, and so abiding is this corrupt

taint in human nature, that long after a man has had his attention called

to it, and is far on to a clean escape from it, he still--nay, he all the

more--languishes and faints and is ready to die under it. Just hear what

two great servants of God have said on this humiliating and degrading

matter. Writing on this subject with all his wonted depth and solemnity,

Hooker says, 'Even in the good things that we do, how many defects are

there intermingled! For God in that which is done, respecteth especially

the mind and intention of the doer. Cut off, then, all those things

wherein we have regarded our own glory, those things which we do to

please men, or to satisfy our own liking, those things which we do with

any by-respect, and not sincerely and purely for the love of God, and a

small score will serve for the number of our righteous deeds. Let the

holiest and best things we do be considered. We are never better

affected to God than when we pray; yet, when we pray, how are our

affections many times distracted! How little reverence do we show to

that God unto whom we speak! How little remorse of our own miseries! How

little taste of the sweet influence of His tender mercy do we feel! The

little fruit we have in holiness, it is, God knoweth, corrupt and

unsound; we put no confidence at all in it, we challenge nothing in the

world for it, we dare not call God to a reckoning as if we had Him in our

debt-books; our continued suit to Him is, and must be, to bear with our

infirmities, and to pardon our offences.' And Thomas Shepard, a divine

of a very different school, as we say, but a saint and a scholar equal to

the best, and indeed with few to equal him, thus writes in his _Spiritual

Experiences_:--'On Sabbath morning I saw that I had a secret eye to my

own name in all that I did, for which I judged myself worthy of death. On

another Sabbath, when I came home, I saw the deep hypocrisy of my heart,

that in my ministry I sought to comfort and quicken others, that the

glory might reflect on me as well as on God. On the evening before the

sacrament I saw that mine own ends were to procure honour, pleasure, gain

to myself, and not to the Lord, and I saw how impossible it was for me to

seek the Lord for Himself, and to lay up all my honour and all my

pleasures in Him. On Sabbath-day, when the Lord had given me some

comfortable enlargements, I searched my heart and found my sin. I saw

that though I did to some extent seek Christ's glory, yet I sought it not

alone, but my own glory too. After my Wednesday sermon I saw the pride

of my heart acting thus, that presently my heart would look out and ask

whether I had done well or ill. Hereupon I saw my vileness to make men's

opinions my rule. The Lord thus gave me some glimpse of myself and a

good day that was to me.' One would think that this was By-ends himself

climbed up into the ministry. And so it was. And yet David Brainerd

could write on his deathbed about Thomas Shepard in this way. 'He valued

nothing in religion that was not done to the glory of God, and, oh! that

others would lay the stress of religion here also. His method of

examining his ends and aims and the temper of his mind both before and

after preaching, is an excellent example for all who bear the sacred

character. By this means they are like to gain a large acquaintance with

their own hearts, as it is evident he had with his.'

But it is not those who bear the sacred character of the ministry alone

who are full of by-ends. We all are. You all are. And there is not one

all-reaching, all-exposing, and all-humbling way of salvation appointed

for ministers, and another, a more external, superficial, easy, and self-

satisfied way for their people. No. Not only must the ambitious and

disputing disciples enter into themselves and become witnesses and judges

and executioners within themselves before they can be saved or be of any

use in the salvation of others--not only they, but the fishermen of the

Lake of Tiberias, they also must open their hearts to these stabbing

words of Christ, and see how true it is that they had followed Him for

loaves and fishes, and not for His grace and His truth. And only when

they had seen and submitted to that humiliating self-discovery would

their true acquaintance with Christ and their true search after Him

begin. Come, then, all my brethren, and not ministers only, waken up to

the tremendous importance of that which you have utterly neglected, it

may be ostentatiously neglected, up to this hour,--the true nature, the

true character, of your motives and your ends. Enter into yourselves. Be

not strangers and foreigners to yourselves. Let not the day of judgment

be any surprise to you. Witness against, judge, and execute yourselves,

and that especially because of your by-aims and by-ends. Take up the

touchstone of truth and lay it upon your most secret heart. Do not be

afraid to discover how double-minded and deceitful your heart is. Hunt

your heart down. Track it to its most secret lair. Put its true name,

and continue to put its true name, upon the main motive of your life.

Extort an answer by boot and by wheel, only extort an answer from the

inner man of the heart, to the torturing question as to what is his

treasure, his hope, his deepest wish, his daily dream. Watch not against

any outward enemy, keep all your eyes and all your ears to your own

thoughts. God keeps His awful eye on your thoughts. His eye goes at

every glance to that great depth in you. Even His all-seeing eye can go

no deeper into you than to your secret thoughts. Go you as deep as God

goes, and you will be a wise man; go as deep and as often as He does, and

then you will soon come to see eye to eye with God, not only about your

own thoughts, but about His thoughts too, and about everything else. Till

you begin to watch your own thoughts, and to watch them especially in

their aims and their ends, you will have no idea what that moral and

spiritual life is that all God's saints live; that life that Christ

lived, and which He this night summons you all to enter henceforth upon.

It is such a happy fact that it cannot be too often told, that in the

things of the soul really and truly to know and feel the disease is to

have already entered on the remedy. You will not feel, indeed, that you

have entered on the remedy; but that does not much matter so long as you

really have. And there is nothing more certain among all the certainties

of divine things than that he who feels himself to be in death and hell

with his heart so full of by-ends is all the time as far from death and

hell as any one can be who is still on this side of heaven. When a man's

whole will and desire is set on God, as is now and then the case, that

man is perilously near a sudden and an abundant entrance into that life

and that presence where his heart has for so long been. When a man is

half mad with his own heart, as Thomas Shepard for one was, that stranger

on the earth is at last within a step of that happy coast where all

wishes end. Watch that man. Take a last look at that man. He will soon

be taken out of your sight. Ere ever he is himself aware, he will be

rapt up into that life where saints and angels seek not their own will,

labour not for their own profit or promotion, listen not for their own

praises, but find their blessedness, the half of which had not here been

told them, in glorifying God and in enjoying Him for ever.

You must all have heard the name of a book that has helped many a saint

now in glory to the examination and the keeping of his own heart. I

refer to Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_. Take two or three of

Taylor's excellent rules with you as you go down from God's house

to-night. 'If you would really live a holy life and die a holy death,'

says Taylor, 'learn to reflect in your every action on your secret end in

it; consider with yourself why you do it, and what you propound to

yourself for your reward. Pray importunately that all your purposes and

all your motives may be sanctified. Renew and rekindle your purest

purposes by such ejaculations as these: "Not unto us, O God, not unto us,

but to Thy name be all the praise. I am in this Thy servant; let all the

gain be Thine." In great and eminent actions let there be a special and

peculiar act of resignation or oblation made to God; and in smaller and

more frequent actions fail not to secure a pious habitual intention.' And

so on. And above all, I will add, labour and pray till you feel in your

heart that you love God with a supreme and an ever-growing love. And,

far as that may be above you as yet, impress your heart with the

assurance that such a love is possible to you also, and that you can

never be safe or happy till you attain to that love. Other men once as

far from the supreme love of God as you are have afterwards attained to

it; and so will you if you continue to set it before yourself. Think

often on God; read the best books about God; call continually upon God;

hold an intimate communion with God, till you feel that you also actually

and certainly love God. And though you begin with loving God because He

first loved you, you will, beginning with that, rise far above that till

you come to love Him for what He is in Himself as well as for what He has

done for you. 'I have done this in order to have a seat in the Academy,'

said a young man, handing the solution of a problem to an old

philosopher. 'Sir,' was the reply, 'with such dispositions you will

never earn a seat there. Science must be loved for its own sake, and not

for any advantage to be derived from it.' And much more is that true of

the highest of all the sciences, the knowledge and the love of God. Love

Him, then, till you arrive at loving Him for Himself, and then you shall

be for ever delivered from all self-love and by-ends, and shall both

glorify and enjoy God for ever. As all they now do who engaged their

hearts on earth to the service and the love and the enjoyment of God is

such psalms and prayers as these: 'Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and

there is no one on earth that I desire beside Thee. How excellent is Thy

loving-kindness, O God! The children of men shall put their trust under

the shadow of Thy wings. For with Thee is the fountain of life, and in

Thy light shall we see light. As for me, I will behold Thy face in

righteousness: I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness. Thou

wilt show me the path of life; in Thy presence is fullness of joy, and at

Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.'