"The vine of Sodom."--_Moses_.
With infinite delicacy John Bunyan here tells us the sad story of
Matthew's sore sickness at the House Beautiful. The cause of the sore
sickness, its symptoms, its serious nature, and its complete cures are
all told with the utmost plainness; but, at the same time, with the most
exquisite delicacy. Bunyan calls the ancient physician who is summoned
in and who effects the cure, Mr. Skill, but you must believe that Bunyan
himself is Mr. Skill; and I question if this skilful writer ever wrote a
more skilful page than just this page that now lies open before him who
has the eyes to read it.
Matthew, it must always be remembered, was by this time a young man. He
was the eldest son of Christiana his mother, and for some time now she
had been a sorely burdened widow. Matthew's father was no longer near
his son to watch over him and to warn him against the temptations and the
dangers that wait on opening manhood. And thus his mother, with all her
other cares, had to be both father and mother to her eldest son; and,
with all her good sense and all her long and close acquaintance with the
world, she was too fond a mother to suspect any evil of her eldest son.
And thus it was that Christiana had nearly lost her eldest son before her
eyes were open to the terrible dangers he had for a long time been
running. For it was so, that the upward way that this household without
a head had to travel lay through a land full of all kinds of dangers both
to the bodies and to the souls of such travellers as they were. And what
well-nigh proved a fatal danger to Matthew lay right in his way. It was
Beelzebub's orchard. Not that this young man's way lay through that
orchard exactly; yet, walled up as was that orchard with all its
forbidden fruit, that evil fruit would hang over the wall so that if any
lusty youth wished to taste it, he had only to reach up to the
over-hanging branches and plash down on himself some of the forbidden
bunches. Now, that was just what Matthew had done. Till we have him
lying at the House Beautiful, not only not able to enjoy the delights of
the House and of the season, but so pained in his bowels and so pulled
together with inward pains, that he sometimes cried out as if he were
being torn to pieces. At that moment Mr. Skill, the ancient physician,
entered the sick-room, when, having a little observed Matthew's intense
agony, with a certain mixture of goodness and severity he recited these
professional verses over the trembling bed:
"O conscience, who can stand against thy power?
Endure thy gripes and agonies one hour?
Stone, gout, strappado, racks, whatever is
Dreadful to sense, are only toys to this--
No pleasures, riches, honours, friends can tell
How to give ease to this, 'tis like to hell."
And then, turning to the sick man's mother, who stood at the bed's head
wringing her hands, the ancient leech said to her: "This boy of yours has
been tampering with the forbidden fruit!" At which the angry mother
turned on the well-approved physician as if he had caused all the trouble
that he had come to cure. But the ancient man knew both the son and the
mother too, and therefore he addressed her with some asperity: "I tell
you both that strong measures must be taken instantly, else he will die."
When Mr. Skill had seen that the first purge was too weak, he made him
one to the purpose; and it was made, as he so learnedly said, _ex carne
et sanguine Christi_. The pills were to be taken three at a time,
fasting, in half a quarter of a pint of the tears of repentance. After
some coaxing, such as mothers know best how to use, Matthew took the
medicine and was soon walking about again with a staff, and was able to
go from room to room of the hospitable and happy house. Understandest
thou what thou readest? said Philip the deacon to Queen Candace's
treasurer as he sat down beside him in the chariot and opened up to him
the fifty-third of the prophet Isaiah. And, understandest thou what thou
here readest in Matthew and Mr. Skill?
1. Now, on this almost too closely veiled case I shall venture to
remark, in the first place, that multitudes of boys grow up into young
men, and go out of our most godly homes and into a whole world of
temptation without due warning being given them as to where they are
going. "I do marvel that none did warn him of it," said Mr. Skill, with
some anger. What Matthew's father might have done in this matter had he
been still in this world when his son became a man in it we can only
guess. As it was, it never entered his mother's too fond mind to take
her fatherless boy by himself when she saw Beelzebub's orchard before
him, and tell him what Solomon told his son, and to point out to him the
prophecy that King Lemuel's mother prophesied to her son. Poor Matthew
was a young man before his mother was aware of it. And, poor woman, she
only found that out when Mr. Skill was in the sick-room and was looking
at her with eyes that seemed to say to her that she had murdered her
child. She had loved too long to look on her first-born as still a
child. When he went at any time for a season out of her sight, she had
never followed him with her knowledge of the world; she had never
prevented him with an awakened and an anxious imagination; till now she
had got him home with no rest in his bones because of his sin. And then
she began to cry too late, O naughty boy, and, O careless mother, what
shall I do for my son!
2. "That food, to wit, that fruit," said Mr. Skill, "is even the most
hurtful of all. It is the fruit of Beelzebub's orchard." So it is.
There is no fruit that hurts at all like that fruit. How it hurts at the
time, we see in Matthew's sick-room; and how it hurts all a man's after
days we see in Jacob, and in Job, and in David, and in a thousand sin-
sick souls of whose psalms of remorse and repentance the world cannot
contain all the books that should be written. "And yet I marvel," said
the indignant physician, "that none did warn him of it; many have died
thereof." Oh if I could but get the ears of all the sons of godly
fathers and mothers who are beginning to tamper with Beelzebub's orchard-
trees, I feel as if I could warn them to-night, and out of this text, of
what they are doing! I have known so many who have died thereof. Oh if
I could but save them in time from those gripes of conscience that will
pull them to pieces on the softest and the most fragrant bed that shall
ever be made for them on earth! It will be well with them if they do not
lie down torn to pieces on their bed in hell, and curse the day they
first plashed down into their youthful hands the vine of Sodom. Both the
way to hell and the way to heaven are full of many kinds of hurtful
fruits; but that species of fruit that poor misguided Matthew plucked and
ate after he had well passed the gate that is at the head of the way is,
by all men's testimony, by far the most hurtful of all forbidden fruits.
3. The whole scene in Matthew's sick-room reads, after all, less like a
skilful invention than a real occurrence. Inventive and realistic as
John Bunyan is, there is surely something here that goes beyond even his
genius. After making all allowance for Bunyan's unparalleled powers of
creation and narration, I am inclined to think, the oftener I read it,
that, after all, we have not so much John Bunyan here as very Nature
herself. Yes; John Gifford surely was Mr. Skill. Sister Bosworth surely
was Matthew's mother. And Matthew himself was Sister Bosworth's eldest
son, while one John Bunyan, a travelling tinker, was busy with his
furnaces and his soldering-irons in Dame Bosworth's kitchen. Young
Bunyan, with all his blackguardism, had never plashed down Beelzebub's
orchard. He swears he never did, and we are bound to believe him. But
young Bosworth had been tampering with the forbidden fruit, and Gifford
saw at a glance what was wrong. John Gifford was first an officer in the
Royalist army, then a doctor in Bedford, and now a Baptist Puritan
pastor; and the young tinker looked up to Gifford as the most wonderful
man for learning in books and in bodies and souls of men in all the
world. And when Gifford talked over young Bosworth's bed half to himself
and half to them about a medicine made _ex carne et sanguine Christi_,
the future author of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ never forgot the phrase. At
a glance Gifford saw what was the whole matter with the sick man. And
painful as the truth was to the sick man's mother, and humiliating with a
life-long humiliation to the sick man himself, Gifford was not the man or
the minister to beat about the bush at such a solemn moment. "This boy
has been tampering with that which will kill him unless he gets it taken
off his conscience and out of his heart immediately." Now, this same
divination into our pastoral cases is by far and away the most difficult
part of a minister's work. It is easy and pleasant with a fluent tongue
to get through our pulpit work; but to descend the pulpit stairs and deal
with life, and with this and that sin in the lives of our people,--that
is another matter. "We must labour," says Richard Baxter in his
_Reformed Pastor_, "to be acquainted with the state of all our people as
fully as we can; both to know the persons and their inclinations and
conversation; to know what sins they are most in danger of, what duties
they neglect, and what temptations they are most liable to. For, if we
know not their temperament or their disease, we are likely to prove but
unsuccessful physicians." But when we begin to reform our pastorate to
that pattern, we are soon compelled to set down such entries in our
secret diary as that of Thomas Shepard of Harvard University: "Sabbath,
5th April 1641. Nothing I do, nay, none under my shadow prosper. I so
want wisdom for my place, and to guide others." Yes; for what wisdom is
needed for the place of a minister like John Gifford, John Bunyan,
Richard Baxter, and Thomas Shepard! What wisdom, what divine genius, to
dive into and divine the secret history of a soul from a twinge of
conscience, even from a drop of the eye, a tone of the voice, or a
gesture of the hand or of the head! And yet, with some natural taste for
the holy work, with study, with experience, and with life-long expert
reading, even a plain minister with no genius, but with some grace and
truth, may come to great eminence in the matters of the soul. And then,
with what an interest, solemn and awful, with what a sleepless interest
such a pastor goes about among his diseased, sin-torn, and scattered
flock! All their souls are naked and open under his divining eye. They
need not to tell him where they ail, and of what sickness they are nigh
unto death. That food, he says, with some sternness over their sick-bed,
I warned you of it; I told you with all plainness that many have died of
eating that fruit! "We must be ready," Baxter continues, "to give advice
to those that come to us with cases of conscience. A minister is not
only for public preaching, but to be a known counsellor for his people's
souls as the lawyer is for their estates, and the physician is for their
bodies. And because the people are grown unacquainted with this office
of the ministry, and their own necessity and duty herein, it belongeth to
us to acquaint them herewith, and to press them publicly to come to us
for advice concerning their souls. We must not only be willing of the
trouble, but draw it upon ourselves by inviting them hereto. To this end
it is very necessary to be acquainted with practical cases and able to
assist them in trying their states. One word of seasonable and prudent
advice hath done that good that many sermons would not have done."
4. As he went on pounding and preparing his well-approved pill, the (at
the bottom of his heart) kind old leech talked encouragingly to the
mother and to her sick son, and said: "Come, come; after all, do not he
too much cast down. Had we lived in the days of the old medicine, I
would have been compounding a purge out of the blood of a goat, and the
ashes of an heifer, and the juice of hyssop. But I have a far better
medicine under my hands here. This moment I will make you a purge to the
purpose." And then the learned man, half-doctor, half-divine, chanted
again the sacred incantation as he bent over his pestle and mortar,
saying: _Ex carne et sanguine Christi_! Those shrewd old eyes soon saw
that, in spite of all their defences and all their denials, damage had
been done to the conscience and the heart that nothing would set right
but a frank admission of the evil that had been done, and a prompt
submission to the regimen appointed and the medicine prepared. And how
often we ministers puddle and peddle with goat's blood and heifer's ashes
and hyssop juice when we should instantly prescribe stern fasting and
secret prayer and long spaces of repentance, and then the body and the
blood of Christ. How often our people cheat us into healing their hurt
slightly! How often they succeed in putting us off, after we are called
in, with their own account of their cases, and set us out on a wild-goose
chase! I myself have more than once presented young men in their trouble
with apologetic books, University sermons, and watered-down explanations
of the Confession and the Catechism, when, had I known all I came
afterwards to know, I would have sent them Bunyan's _Sighs from Hell_. I
have sent soul-sick women also _The Bruised Reed_, and _The Mission of
the Comforter_ with sympathising inscriptions, and sweet scriptures
written inside, when, had I had Mr. Skill's keen eyes in my stupid head,
I would have gone to them with the total abstinence pledge in my one
hand, and Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_ in my other. "No diet
but that which is wholesome!" almost in anger answered the sick man's
mother. "I tell you," the honest leech replied, in more anger, "this boy
has been tampering with Beelzebub's orchard. And many have died of it!"
5. It was while all the rest of the House Beautiful were supping on lamb
and wine, and while there was such music in the House that made Mercy
exclaim over it with wonder--it was at the smell of the supper and at the
sound of the psalmody that Matthew's gripes seized upon him worse than
ever. All the time the others sat late into the night Matthew lay on the
rack pulled to pieces. After William Law's death at King's Cliffe, his
executors found among his most secret papers a prayer he had composed for
his own alone use on a certain communion day when he was self-debarred
from the Lord's table. I do not know for certain just what fruit the
young non-juror had stolen out of Beelzebub's orchard before that
communion season; but I can see that he was in poor Matthew's exact
experience that communion night,--literally torn to pieces with agonies
of conscience while all his fellow-worshippers were at the table of the
Lord. While the psalms and hymns are being sung at the supper-table, lay
your ear to Law's closet door. "Whilst all Thy faithful servants are on
this day offering to Thee the comfortable sacrifice of the body and the
blood of Christ, and feasting at that holy table which Thou hast ordained
for the refreshment, joy, and comfort of their souls, I, unhappy wretch,
full of guilt, am justly denied any share of these comforts that are
common to the Christian world. O my God, I am an unclean worm, a dead
dog, a stinking carcass, justly removed from that society of saints who
this day kneel about Thine altar. But, oh! suffer me to look toward Thy
holy Sanctuary; suffer my soul again to be in the place where Thine
honour dwelleth. Reject not the sacrifice of a broken heart, and do Thou
be with me in secret, though I am not fit to appear in Thy public
worship. Lord, if Thou wilt Thou canst make me clean. Lord, speak but
the word, and Thy servant shall be healed." It is the fruit of
Beelzebub's orchard. Many have died thereof.
6. "Pray, sir, make me up twelve boxes of them; for if I can get these,
I will never take other physic." "These same pills," he replied, "are
good also to prevent diseases as well as to cure when one is sick. But,
good woman, thou must take these pills no other way but as I have
prescribed; for if you do, they will do no good." I have taken one
illustration from William Law's life; I shall take another from that
world of such illustrations and so close. "O God, let me never see such
another day as this. Let the dreadful punishment of this day never be
out of my mind." And it never was. For, after that day in hell, Law
never laid down his head on his pillow that he did not seem to remember
that dreadful day. William Law would have satisfied Dr. Skill for a
convalescent. For he never felt that he had any right to touch the body
and blood of Christ, either at communion times, or a thousand times every
day, till he had again got ready his heart of true repentance. My
brethren, self-destroyed out of Beelzebub's orchard, and all my brethren,
live a life henceforth of true repentance. Not out of the sins of your
youth only, but out of the best, the most watchful, and the most
blameless day you ever live, distil your half-pint of repentance every
night before you sleep. For, as dear old Skill said, unless you do,
neither flesh nor blood of Christ, nor anything else, will do you any
genuine good.