"--when thou shalt enlarge my heart."--_David_.
On Sabbath, the 12th December 1886, I heard the late Canon Liddon preach
a sermon in St. Paul's Cathedral, in which he classed Oliver Cromwell
with Alexander the Sixth and with Richard the Third. I had taken my
estimate of the great Protector's character largely from Carlyle's famous
book, and you can judge with what feelings I heard the canon's
comparison. And, besides, I had been wont to think of the Protector as
having entered largely into John Bunyan's portrait of Greatheart, the
pilgrim guide. And the researches and the judgments of Dr. Gardiner have
only gone to convince me, the eloquent canon notwithstanding, that Bunyan
could not have chosen a better contemporary groundwork for his Greatheart
than just the great Puritan soldier. Cromwell's "mental struggles before
his conversion," his life-long "searchings of heart," his "utter absence
of vindictiveness," his unequalled capacity for "seeing into the heart of
a situation," and his own "all-embracing hospitality of heart"--all have
gone to reassure me that my first guess as to Bunyan's employment of the
Protector's matchless personality and services had not been so far
astray. And the oftener I read the noble history of Greatheart, the
better I seem to hear, beating behind his fine figure, by far the
greatest heart that ever ruled over the realm of England.
1. The first time that we catch a glimpse of Greatheart's weather-beaten
and sword-seamed face is when he is taking a stolen look out of the
window at Mr. Fearing, who is conducting himself more like a chicken than
a man around the Interpreter's door. And from that moment till Mr.
Fearing shouted "Grace reigns!" as he cleared the last river, never
sportsman surely stalked a startled deer so patiently and so skilfully
and so successfully as Greatheart circumvented that chicken-hearted
pilgrim. "At last I looked out of the window, and perceiving a man to be
up and down about the door, I went out to him and asked him what he was;
but, poor man, the water stood ill his eyes. So I perceived what he
wanted. I went in, therefore, and told it in the house, and we showed
the thing to our Lord. So He sent me out again to entreat him to come
in; but I dare say I had hard work to do it." Greatheart's whole account
of Mr. Fearing always brings the water to my eyes also. It is indeed a
delicious piece of English prose. If I were a professor of _belles
lettres_ instead of what I am, I would compel all my students, under pain
of rustication, to get those three or four classical pages by heart till
they could neither perpetrate nor tolerate bad English any more. This
camp-fire tale, told by an old soldier, about a troublesome young recruit
and all his adventures, touches, surely, the high-water mark of sweet and
undefiled English. Greatheart was not the first soldier who could handle
both the sword and the pen, and he has not been the last. But not Caesar
and not Napier themselves ever handled those two instruments better.
2. Greatheart had just returned to his Master's house from having seen
Mr. Fearing safely through all his troubles and well over the river,
when, behold, another caravan of pilgrims is ready for his convoy. For
Greatheart, you must know, was the Interpreter's armed servant. When at
any time Greatheart was off duty, which in those days was but seldom, he
took up his quarters again in the Interpreter's house. As he says
himself, he came back from the river-side only to look out of the
Interpreter's window to see if there was any more work on the way for him
to do. And, as good luck would have it, as has been said, the guide was
just come back from his adventures with Mr. Fearing when a pilgrim party,
than which he had never seen one more to his mind, was introduced to him
by his Master, the Interpreter. "The Interpreter," so we read at this
point, "then called for a man-servant of his, one Greatheart, and bid him
take sword, and helmet, and shield, and take these, my daughters," said
he, "and conduct them to the house called Beautiful, at which place they
will rest next. So he took his weapons and went before them, and the
Interpreter said, God-speed."
3. Now I saw in my dream that they went on, and Greatheart went before
them, so they came to the place where Christian's burden fell off his
back and tumbled into a sepulchre. Here, then, they made a pause, and
here also they blessed God. "Now," said Christiana, "it comes to my mind
what was said to us at the gate; to wit, that we should have pardon by
word and by deed. What it is to have pardon by deed, Mr. Greatheart, I
suppose you know; wherefore, if you please, let us hear your discourse
thereof." "So then, to speak to the question," said Greatheart. You
have all heard about the "question-day" at Highland communions. That day
is so called because questions that have arisen in the minds of "the men"
in connection with doctrine and with experience are on that day set
forth, debated out, and solved by much meditation and prayer; age,
saintliness, doctrinal and experimental reading, and personal experience
all making their contribution to the solution of the question in hand.
Just such a question, then, and handled in such a manner, was that
question which whiled the way and cheated the toil till the pilgrims came
to the House Beautiful. The great doctrinal and experimental Puritans,
with Hooker at their head, put forth their full strength and laid out
their finest work just on this same question that Christiana gave out at
the place, somewhat ascending, upon which stood a cross, and a little
below, in the bottom, a sepulchre. But not the great Comment on The
Galatians itself, next to the Holy Bible as it is, as most fit for a
wounded conscience; no, nor that perfect mass of purest gold, The Learned
Discourse of Justification, nor anything else of that kind known to me,
is for one moment, to compare in beauty, in tenderness, in eloquence, in
scriptural depth, and in scriptural simplicity with Greatheart's noble
resolution of Christiana's question which he made on the way from the
Interpreter's house to the House Beautiful. "This is brave!" exclaimed
that mother in Israel, when the guide had come to an end. "Methinks it
makes my heart to bleed to think that He should bleed for me. O Thou
loving One! O Thou blessed One! Thou deservest to have me, for Thou
hast bought me. No marvel that this made the water to stand in my
husband's eyes, and that it made him trudge so nimbly on. O Mercy, that
thy father and thy mother were here; yea, and Mrs. Timorous too! Nay, I
wish now with all my heart that here was Madam Wanton too. Surely,
surely their hearts would be affected here!" Promise me to read at home
Greatheart's discourse on the Righteousness of Christ, and you will thank
me for having exacted the promise.
The incongruity of a soldier handling such questions, and especially in
such a style, has stumbled some of John Bunyan's fault-finding readers.
The same incongruity stumbled "the Honourable Colonel Hacker, at Peebles
or elsewhere," to whom Cromwell sent these from Edinburgh on the 25th
December 1650--"But indeed I was not satisfied with your last speech to
me about Empson, that he was a better preacher than fighter or soldier--or
words to that effect. Truly, I think that he that prays and preaches
best will fight best. I know nothing that will give like courage and
confidence as the knowledge of God in Christ will; and I bless God to see
any in this army able and willing to impart the knowledge they have for
the good of others. I pray you receive Captain Empson lovingly: I dare
assure you he is a good man and a good officer; I would we had no worse."
4. "Will you not go in and stay till morning?" said the porter to
Greatheart, at the gate of the House Beautiful. "No," said the guide; "I
will return to my lord to-night." "O sir!" cried Christiana and Mercy,
"we know not how to be willing you should leave us in our pilgrimage. Oh
that we might have your company till our journey's end." Then said
James, the youngest of the boys, "Pray be persuaded to go with us and
help us, because we are so weak and the way so dangerous as it is." "I
am at my lord's commandment," said Greatheart. "If he shall allow me to
be your guide quite through, I shall willingly wait upon you. But here
you failed at first; for when he bid me come thus far with you, then you
should have begged me of him to have gone quite through with you, and he
would have granted your request. However, at present, I must withdraw,
and so, good Christiana, Mercy, and my brave children, adieu!" "Help
lost for want of asking for," is our author's condemnatory comment on the
margin at this point in the history. And there is not a single page in
my history, or in yours, my brethren, on which the same marginal lament
is not written. What help we would have had on our Lord's promise if we
had but taken the trouble to ask for it! And what help we once had, and
have now lost, just because when we had it we did not ask for a
continuance of it! "No," said Greatheart to the porter, and to the two
women, and to James--"No. I will return to my lord to-night. I am at my
lord's commandment; only, if he shall still allot me I shall willingly
wait upon you."
Now, what with the House Beautiful, so full of the most delightful
company; what with music in the house and music in the heart; what with
Mr. Brisk's courtship of Mercy, Matthew's illness, Mr. Skill's cure of
the sick man, and what not--a whole month passed by like a day in that so
happy house. But at last Christiana and Mercy signified it to those of
the house that it was time for them to be up and going. Then said Joseph
to his mother, "It is convenient that you send back to the house of Mr.
Interpreter to pray him to grant that Mr. Greatheart should be sent to us
that he may be our conductor the rest of our way." "Good boy," said she,
"I had almost forgot." So she drew up a petition and prayed Mr. Watchful
the porter to send it by some fit man to her good friend, Mr.
Interpreter; who, when it was come and he had seen the contents of the
petition, said to the messenger, "Go, tell them that I will send him." .
. . Now, about this time one knocked at the door. So the porter opened,
and, behold, Mr. Greatheart was there! But when he came in, what joy was
there! Then said Mr. Greatheart to the two women, "My lord has sent each
of you a bottle of wine, and also some parched corn, together with a
couple of pomegranates. He has also sent the boys some figs and raisins
to refresh you on your way." "The weak may sometimes call the strong to
prayers," I read again in the margin opposite the mention of Joseph's
name. Not that I am strong, and not that she is weak, but one of my
people I spent an hour with last afternoon whom you would to a certainty
have called weak had you seen her and her surrounding,--she so called me
to prayer that I had to hurry home and go straight to it. And all last
night and all this morning I have had as many pomegranates as I could eat
and as much wine as I could drink. Yes; you attend to what the weakest
will sometimes say to you, and they will often put you on the way to get
Greatheart back again with a load of wines and fruits and corn on his
shoulder to refresh you on your journey. "Good boy!" said Christiana to
Joseph her youngest son, "Good boy! I had almost forgot!"
5. When old Mr. Honest began to nod after the good supper that Gaius
mine host gave to the pilgrims, "What, sir," cried Greatheart, "you begin
to be drowsy; come, rub up; now here's a riddle for you." Then said Mr.
Honest, "Let's hear it." Then said Mr. Greatheart,
"He that will kill, must first be overcome;
Who live abroad would, first must die at home."
"Hah!" said Mr. Honest, "it is a hard one; hard to expound, and harder
still to practise." Yes; this after-supper riddle of Mr. Greatheart is a
hard one in both respects; and for this reason, because the learned and
much experienced guide--learned with all that his life-long quarters in
the Interpreter's House could teach him, and experienced with a
lifetime's accumulated experience of the pilgrim life--has put all his
learning and all his life into these two mysterious lines. But old
Honest, once he had sufficiently rubbed up his eyes and his intellects,
gave the answer:
"He first by grace must conquered be
That sin would mortify.
And who, that lives, would convince me,
Unto himself must die."
Exactly; shrewd old Honest; you have hit off both Greatheart and his
riddle too. You have dived into the deepest heart of the Interpreter's
man-servant. "The magnanimous man" was Aristotle's masterpiece. That
great teacher of mind and morals created for the Greek world their
Greatheart. But, "thou must understand," says Bunyan to his readers,
"that I never went to school to Aristotle or Plato. No; but to Paul, who
taught Bunyan that what Aristotle calls magnanimity is really
pride--taught him that, till there is far more of the Christian religion
in those two doggerel lines at Gaius's supper-table than there is in all
The Ethics taken together. And it is only from a personal experience of
the same life as that which the guide puts here into his riddle that any
man's proud heart will become really humble and thus really great, really
enlarged, and of an all-embracing hospitality like Cromwell's and
Greatheart's and John Bunyan's own. Would you, then, become a Greatheart
too? And would you be employed in your day as they were employed in
their day? Then expound to yourself, and practise, and follow out that
deep riddle with which Greatheart so woke up old Honest:
"He that will kill, must first be overcome;
Who live abroad would, first must die at home.
6. Greatheart again and again at the river-side, Greatheart sending
pilgrim after pilgrim over the river with rapture, and he himself still
summoned to turn his back on the Celestial City, and to retrace his steps
through the land of Beulah, through the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
and through the Valley of Humiliation, and back to the Interpreter's
house to take on another and another and another convoy of fresh
pilgrims, and his own abundant entrance still put off and never to
come,--our hearts bleed for poor Greatheart. Back and forward, back and
forward, year after year, this noble soul uncomplainingly goes. And,
ever as he waves his hand to another pilgrim entering with trumpets
within the gates, he salutes his next pilgrim charge with the brave
words: "Yet what I shall choose I wot not. For I am in a strait betwixt
two: having a desire to depart and to be with Christ. Nevertheless to
abide in the flesh is more needful for you, for your furtherance and joy
of faith by my coming to you again." If Greatheart could not "usher
himself out of this life" along with Christiana, and Mercy, and Mr.
Honest, and Standfast, and Valiant-for-truth--if he had still to toil
back and bleed his way up again at the head of another happy band of
pilgrims--well, after all is said, what had the Celestial City itself to
give to Greatheart better than such blessed work? With every such
returning journey he got a more and more enlarged, detached, hospitable,
and Christ-like heart, and the King's palace in very glory itself had
nothing better in store for this soldier-guide than that. A nobler
heaven Greatheart could not taste than he had already in himself, as he
championed another and another pilgrim company from his Master's earthly
gate to his Master's heavenly gate. Like Paul, his apostolic prototype,
Greatheart sometimes vacillated just for a moment when he came a little
too near heaven, and felt its magnificent and almost dissolving
attractions full in his soul. You will see Greatheart's mind staggering
for a moment between rest and labour, between war and peace, between
"Christ" on earth and "Christ" in heaven--you will see all that set forth
with great sympathy and great ability in Principal Rainy's new book on
Paul's Epistle to the Philippians, and in the chapter entitled, The
Apostle's Choice between Living and Dying.
Then there came a summons for Mr. Standfast. At which he called to him
Mr. Greatheart, and said unto him, "Sir, although it was not my hap to be
much in your good company in the days of my pilgrimage, yet, since the
time I knew you, you have been profitable to me. When I came from home I
left behind me a wife and five small children. Let me entreat you, at
your return (for I know that you will go and return to your master's
house in hopes that you may be a conductor to more of the holy pilgrims),
that you send to my family and let them be acquainted with all that hath
and shall happen to me. Tell them, moreover, of my happy arrival to this
place, and of the present late blessed condition I am in, and so on for
many other messages and charges." Yes, Mr. Standfast; very good. But I
would have liked you on your deathbed much better if you had had a word
to spare from yourself and your wife and your children for poor
Greatheart himself, who had neither wife nor children, nor near hope of
heaven, but only your trust and charge and many suchlike trusts and
charges to carry out when you are at home and free of all trust and all
charge and all care. But yours is the way of all the pilgrims--so long,
at least, as they are in this selfish life. Let them and their children
only be well looked after, and they have not many thoughts or many words
left for those who sweat and bleed to death for them and theirs. They
lean on this and that Greatheart all their own way up, and then they
leave their widows and children to lean on whatever Greatheart is sent to
meet them; but it is not one pilgrim in ten who takes the thought or has
the heart to send a message to Mr. Greatheart himself for his own
consolation and support. I read that Mr. Ready-to-halt alone, good soul,
had the good feeling to do it. He thanked Mr. Greatheart for his conduct
and for his kindness, and so addressed himself to his journey. All the
same, noble Greatheart! go on in thy magnanimous work. Take back all
their errands. Seek out at any trouble all their wives and children.
Embark again and again on all thy former battles and hardships for the
good of other men. But be assured that all this thy labour is not in
vain in thy Lord. Be well assured that not one drop of thy blood or thy
sweat or thy tears shall fall to the ground on that day when they that be
wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn
many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever. Go back, then,
from thy well-earned rest, O brave Greatheart! go back to thy waiting
task. Put on again thy whole armour. Receive again, and again fulfil,
thy Master's commission, till He has no more commissions left for thy
brave heart and thy bold hand to execute. And, one glorious day, while
thou art still returning to thy task, it shall suddenly sound in thy
dutiful ears:--"Well done! good and faithful servant!" And then thou too
"Shalt hang thy trumpet in the hall
And study war no more."