"Be ye not unequally yoked."--_Paul_.
There were some severe precisians in John Bunyan's day who took the
objection to the author of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ that he sometimes
laughed too loud.
"One may (I think) say, both he laughs and cries,
May well be guessed at by his watery eyes.
Some things are of that nature as to make
One's fancy chuckle while his heart doth ake.
When Jacob saw his Rachel with the sheep,
At the same time he did both laugh and weep."
And even Dr. Cheever, in his excellent lectures on the _Pilgrim's
Progress_, confesses that though the Second Part never ceases for a
moment to tell the serious story of the Pilgrimage, at the same time, it
sometimes becomes so merry as almost to pass over into absolute comedy.
"There is one passage," says Cheever, "which for exquisite humour, quiet
satire, and naturalness in the development of character is scarcely
surpassed in the language. It is the account of the courtship between
Mr. Brisk and Mercy which took place at the House Beautiful."
Now, the insertion of such an episode as that of Mr. Brisk into such a
book as the _Pilgrim's Progress_ is only yet another proof of the health,
the strength, and the truth to nature of John Bunyan's mind. His was
eminently an honest, straightforward, manly, English understanding. A
smaller man would not have ventured on Mr. Brisk in such a book as the
_Pilgrim's Progress_. But there is no affectation, there is no prudery,
there is no superiority to nature in John Bunyan. He knew quite well
that of the thousands of men and women who were reading his _Pilgrim_
there was no subject, not even religion itself, that was taking up half
so much of their thoughts as just love-making and marriage. And, like
the wise man and the true teacher he was, he here points out to all his
readers how well true religion and the fullest satisfaction of the
warmest and the most universal of human affections can be both harmonised
and made mutually helpful. In Bunyan's day love was too much left to the
playwrights, just as in our day it is too much left to the poets and the
novelists. And thus it is that in too many instances affection and
passion have taken full possession of the hearts and the lives of our
young people before any moral or religious lesson on these all-important
subjects has been given to them: any lesson such as John Bunyan so
winningly and so beautifully gives here. "This incident," says Thomas
Scott, "is very properly introduced, and it is replete with instruction."
Now, Mr. Brisk, to begin with, was, so we are told, a young man of some
breeding,--that is to say, he was a young man of some social position,
some education, and of a certain good manner, at least on the surface. In
David Scott's Illustrations Mr. Brisk stands before us a handsome and
well-dressed young man of the period, with his well-belted doublet, his
voluminous ruffles, his heavily-studded cuffs, his small cane, his
divided hair, and his delicate hand,--altogether answering excellently to
his name, were it not for the dashed look of surprise with which he gets
his answer, and, with what jauntiness he can at the moment command, takes
his departure. "Mr. Brisk was a man of some breeding," says Bunyan, "and
that pretended to religion; but a man that stuck very close to the
world." That Mr. Brisk made any pretence to religion at any other time
and in any other place is not said; only that he put on that pretence
with his best clothes when he came once or twice or more to Mercy and
offered love to her at the House Beautiful. The man with the least
religion at other times, even the man with no pretence to religion at
other times at all, will pretend to some religion when he is in love with
a young woman of Mercy's mind. And yet it would not be fair to say that
it is all pretence even in such a man at such a time. Grant that a man
is really in love; then, since all love is of the nature of religion, for
the time, the true lover is really on the borders of a truly religious
life. It may with perfect truth be said of all men when they first fall
in love that they are, for the time, not very far away from the kingdom
of heaven. For all love is good, so far as it goes. God is Love; and
all love, in the long-run, has a touch of the divine nature in it. And
for once, if never again, every man who is deeply in love has a far-off
glimpse of the beauty of holiness, and a far-off taste of that ineffable
sweetness of which the satisfied saints of God sing so ecstatically. But,
in too many instances, a young man's love having been kindled only by the
creature, and, never rising from her to his and her Creator, as a rule,
it sooner or later burns low and at last burns out, and leaves nothing
but embers and ashes in his once so ardent heart. Mr. Brisk's
love-making might have ended in his becoming a pilgrim but for this fatal
flaw in his heart, that even in his love-making he stuck so fast to the
world. It is almost incredible: you may well refuse to believe it--that
any young man in love, and especially a young gentleman of Mr. Brisk's
breeding, would approach his mistress with the question how much she
could earn a day. As Mr. Brisk looks at Mercy's lap so full of hats and
hosen and says it, I can see his natty cane beginning to lengthen itself
out in his soft-skinned hand and to send out teeth like a muck-rake. Give
Mr. Brisk another thirty years or so and he will be an ancient churl,
raking to himself the sticks and the straws and the dust of the earth,
neither looking up to nor regarding the celestial crown that is still
offered to him in exchange for his instrument.
"Now, Mercy was of a fair countenance, and, therefore, all the more
alluring." But her fair countenance was really no temptation to her.
"Sit still, my daughter," said Naomi to Ruth in the Old Testament. And
it was entirely Mercy's maidenly nature to sit still. Even before she
had come to her full womanhood under Christiana's motherly care she would
have been an example to Ruth. Long ago, while Mercy was still a mere
girl, when Mrs. Light-mind said something to her one day that made her
blush, Mercy at last looked up in real anger and said, We women should be
wooed; we were not made to woo. And thus it was that all their time at
the House Beautiful Mercy stayed close at home and worked with her needle
and thread just as if she had been the plainest girl in all the town. "I
might have had husbands afore now," she said, with a cast of her head
over the coat that lay on her lap, "though I spake not of it to any. But
they were such as did not like my conditions, though never did any of
them find fault with my person. So they and I could not agree." Once
Mercy's mouth was opened on the subject of possible husbands it is a
miracle that she did not go on in confidence to name some of the husbands
she might have had. Mercy was too truthful and too honourable a maiden
to have said even on that subject what she did say if it had not been
true. No doubt she believed it true. And the belief so long as she
mentioned no names, did not break any man's bones and did not spoil any
man's market. Don't set up too prudishly and say that it is a pity that
Mercy so far forgot herself as to make her little confidential boast. We
would not have had her without that little boast. Keep-at-home,
sit-still, hats and hosen and all--her little boast only proves Mercy to
have been at heart a true daughter of Eve after all.
There is an old-fashioned word that comes up again and again in the
account of Mr. Brisk's courtship,--a word that contains far more interest
and instruction for us than might on the surface appear. When Mr. Brisk
was rallied upon his ill-success with Mercy, he was wont to say that
undoubtedly Mistress Mercy was a very pretty lass, only she was troubled
with ill conditions. And then, when Mercy was confiding to Prudence all
about her possible husbands, she said that they were all such as did not
like her conditions. To which Prudence, keeping her countenance,
replied, that the men were but few in their day that could abide the
practice that was set forth by such conditions as those of Mercy. Well,
tossed out Mercy, if nobody will have me I will die a maid, or my
conditions shall be to me as a husband! As I came again and again across
that old seventeenth-century word "conditions," I said to myself, I feel
sure that Dr. Murray of the Oxford Scriptorium will have noted this
striking passage. And on turning up the Sixth Part of the _New English
Dictionary_, there, to be sure, was the old word standing in this present
setting. Five long, rich, closely packed columns stood under the head of
"Condition"; and amid a thousand illustrations of its use, the text:
"1684, Bunyan, Pilgr., ii. 84. He said that Mercy was a pretty lass, but
troubled with ill conditions." Poor illiterate John Bunyan stood in the
centre of a group of learned and famous men, composed of Chaucer, Wyclif,
Skelton, Palsgrave, Raleigh, Featly, Richard Steel, and Walter Scott--all
agreeing in their use of our word, and all supplying examples of its use
in the best English books. By Mercy's conditions, then, is just meant
her cast of mind, her moral nature, her temper and her temperament, her
dispositions and her inclinations, her habits of thought, habits of
heart, habits of life, and so on.
"Well," said Mercy proudly, "if nobody will have me, I will die a maid,
or my conditions shall be to me as a husband. For I cannot change my
nature, and to have one that lies cross to me in this,--that I purpose
never to admit of as long as I live." By this time, though she is still
little more than a girl, Mercy had her habits formed, her character cast,
and, more than all, her whole heart irrevocably set on her soul's
salvation. And everything--husband and children and all--must condition
themselves to that, else she will have none of them. She had sought
first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and she will seek
nothing, she will accept nothing--no, not even a husband--who crosses her
choice in that. She has chosen her life, and her husband with it. Not
the man as yet, but the whole manner of the man. The conditions of the
man, as she said about herself; else she will boldly and bravely die a
maid. And there are multitudes of married women who, when they read this
page about Mercy, will gnash their teeth at the madness of their youth,
and will wildly wish that they only were maids again; and, then, like
Mercy, they would take good care to make for themselves husbands of their
own conditions too--of their own means, their own dispositions,
inclinations, tastes, and pursuits. For, according as our conditions to
one another are or are not in our marriages,
"They locally contain or heaven or hell;
There is no third place in them."
What untold good, then, may all our young women not get out of the loving
study of Mercy's sweet, steadfast, noble character! And what untold
misery may they not escape! From first to last--and we are not yet come
to her last--I most affectionately recommend Mercy to the hearts and
minds of all young women here. Single and married; setting out on
pilgrimage and steadfastly persevering in it; sitting still till the
husband with the right conditions comes, and then rising up with her
warm, well-kept heart to meet him--if any maiden here has no mother, or
no elder sister, or no wise and prudent friend like Prudence or
Christiana to take counsel of--and even if she has--let Mercy be her
meditation and her model through all her maidenly days.
"Nay, then," said Mercy, "I will look no more on him, for I purpose never
to have a clog to my soul." A pungent resolve for every husband to read
and to think to himself about, who has married a wife with a soul. Let
all husbands who have such wives halt here and ask themselves with some
imagination as to what may sometimes go on, at communion times, say, in
the souls of their wives. It is not every wife, it is true, who has a
soul to clog; but some of our wives have. Well, now, let us ask
ourselves: How do we stand related to their souls? Do our wives, when
examining the state of their souls since they married us, have to say
that at one time they had hoped to be further on in the life of the soul
than they yet are? And are they compelled before God to admit that the
marriage they have made, and would make, has terribly hindered them?
Would they have been better women, would they have been living a better
life, and doing far more good in the world, if they had taken their
maidenly ideals, like Mercy, for a husband? Let us sometimes imagine
ourselves into the secrets of our wives' souls, and ask if they ever feel
that they are unequally and injuriously yoked in their deepest and best
life. Do we ever see a tear falling in secret, or hear a stolen sigh
heaved, or stumble on them at a stealthy prayer? A Roman lady on being
asked why she sometimes let a sob escape her and a tear fall, when she
had such a gentleman of breeding and rank and riches to her husband,
touched her slipper with her finger and said: "Is not that a well-made, a
neat, and a costly shoe? And yet you would not believe how it pinches
and pains me sometimes."
But some every whit as good women as Mercy was have purposed as nobly and
as firmly as Mercy did, and yet have wakened up, when it was too late, to
find that, with all their high ideals, and with all their prudence, their
husband is not in himself, and is not to them, what they at one time felt
sure he would be. Mercy had a sister named Bountiful, who made that
mistake and that dreadful discovery; and what Mercy had seen of married
life in her sister's house almost absolutely turned her against marriage
altogether. "The one thing certain," says Thomas Mozley in his chapter
on Ideal Wife and Husband, "is that both wife and husband are different
in the result from the expectation. Age, illness, an increasing family,
no family at all, household cares, want of means, isolation, incompatible
prejudices, quarrels, social difficulties, and such like, all tell on
married people, and make them far other than they once promised to be."
When that awakening comes there is only one solace, and women take to
that supreme solace much more often than men. And that solace, as you
all know, is true, if too late, religion. And even where true religion
has already been, there is still a deeper and a more inward religion
suited to the new experiences and the new needs of life. And if both
husband and wife in such a crisis truly betake themselves to Him who
gathereth the solitary into families, the result will be such a
remarriage of depth and tenderness, loyalty and mutual help, as their
early dreams never came within sight of. Not early love, not children,
not plenty of means, not all the best amenities of married life taken
together, will repair a marriage and keep a marriage in repair for one
moment like a living and an intense faith in God; a living and an intense
love to God; and then that faith in and love for one another that spring
out of God and out of His love alone.
"The tree
Sucks kindlier nurture from a soil enriched
By its own fallen leaves; and man is made,
In heart and spirit, from deciduous hopes
And things that seem to perish."