CHRISTIAN

"The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch."--_Luke_.

"Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian."--_King Agrippa_.

"Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from

iniquity."--_Paul_.

All the other personages in the Pilgrim's Progress come and go; they all

ascend the stage for a longer or shorter time, and then pass off the

stage and so pass out of our sight; but Christian in the First Part, and

Christiana in the Second Part, are never for a single moment out of our

sight. And, accordingly, we have had repeated occasion and opportunity

to learn many excellent lessons from the chief pilgrim's upward walk and

heavenly conversation. But so full and so rich are his life and his

character, that some very important things still remain to be collected

before we finally close his history. "Gather up the fragments that

nothing be lost," said our Lord, after His miraculous meal of multiplied

loaves and fishes with His disciples. And in like manner I shall now

proceed to gather up some of the remaining fragments of Christian's life

and character and experience. And I shall collect these fragments into

the three baskets of his book, his burden, and his sealed roll and

certificate.

1. And first, a few things as to his book. "As I slept I dreamed, and

behold I saw a man clothed in rags standing in a certain place, with his

face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his

back. I looked and saw him open the book and read therein; and as he

read he wept and trembled; and not being able longer to contain he broke

out with a lamentable cry, saying, What shall I do?" We hear a great

deal in these advertising days, and not one word too much, about the

books that have influenced and gone largely to the making of our great

men; but Graceless, like John Bunyan, his biographer, was a man of but

one book. But, then, that book was the most influential of all books; it

was the Book of books; it was God's very own and peculiar Book. And

those of us who, like this man, have passed out of a graceless into a

gracious state will for ever remember how that same Book at that time

influenced us till it made us what we are and shall yet be. We read many

other good books at that epoch in our life, but it was the pure Bible

that we read and prayed over out of sight the most. We needed no

commentators or exegetes on our simple Bible in those days. The great

texts stood out to our eyes in those days as if they had been written

with a sunbeam; while all other books (and we read nothing but the best

books in those days) looked like twilight and rushlight beside our Bible.

In those immediate, direct, and intense days we would have satisfied

Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold themselves in the way we read our Bible

with our eye never off the object. The Four Last Things were ever before

us--death and judgment, heaven and hell. "O my dear wife," said

Graceless, "and you the children of my bowels, I your dear friend am in

myself undone by reason of a burden that lieth hard upon me; moreover, I

am for certain informed that this our city will be burned with fire from

heaven, in which fearful overthrow both myself, with thee my wife, and

you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I

see not) some way of escape can be found whereby we may be delivered." He

would walk also solitarily in the fields, sometimes reading and sometimes

praying; and thus for some days he spent his time. Graceless at that

time and at that stage would have satisfied the exigent author of the

_Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection_ where he says that "we are

too apt also to think that we have sufficiently read a book when we have

so read it as to know what it contains. This reading may be quite

sufficient as to many books; but as to the Bible we are not to think that

we have read it enough because we have often read and heard what it

teaches. We must read our Bible, not to know what it contains, but to

fill our hearts with the spirit of it." And, again, and on this same

point, "There is this unerring key to the right use of the Bible. The

Bible has only one intent, and that is to make a man know, resist, and

abhor the working of his fallen earthly nature, and to turn the faith,

hope, and longing desire of his heart to God; and therefore we are only

to read our Bibles with this view and to learn this one lesson from it .

. . The critic looks into his books to see how Latin and Greek authors

have used the words 'stranger' and 'pilgrim,' but the Christian, who

knows that man lives in labour and toil, in sickness and pain, in hunger

and thirst, in heat and cold among the beasts of the field, where evil

spirits like roaring lions seek to devour him--he only knows in what

truth and reality man is a poor stranger and a distressed pilgrim upon

the earth." John Bunyan read neither Plato nor Aristotle, but he read

David and Paul till he was the chief of sinners, and till he was first

the Graceless and then the Christian of his own next-to-the-Bible book.

2. In the second place, and as to his burden. We are supplied with no

particulars as to the first beginnings, the gradual make-up, and at last

the terrible size of Christian's burden. What this pilgrim's youthful

life must have been in such a city as his native city was, and while he

was still a young man of such a name and such a character in such a city,

we are left to ourselves to think and consider. Graceless was his name

by nature, and his life was as his name and his nature were. Still, as I

have said, we have no detailed and particular account of his early life

when his burden was still day and night in the making up. How long into

your life were you graceless, my brother? And what kind of life did you

lead day and night before you were persuaded or alarmed, as the case may

have been with you, into being a Christian? What burdens do you carry on

your broken back to this day that were made up in the daylight or in the

darkness by your own hands in your early days? Were you early or were

you too late in your conversion? Or are you truly converted to God and

to salvation even yet? And are you at this moment still binding a burden

on your back that you shall never lay down on this side your grave--it

may be, not on this side your burning bed in hell? Ask yourselves all

that before God and before your own conscience, and make yourselves

absolutely sure that God at any rate is not mocked; and, therefore that

you, too, shall in the end reap exactly as you from the beginning have

sown. "How camest thou by thy burden at first?" asked Mr.

Worldly-Wiseman at the trembling pilgrim. "By reading this book in my

hand," he answered. And, in the long run, it is always the Bible that

best creates a sinner's burden, binds it on his back, and makes it so

terribly heavy to bear. Fear of death and judgment will sometimes make

up and bind on a sinner's burden; and sometimes the fear of man's

judgment on this side of death will do it. Fear of being found out in

some cases will make a man's secret sin far too heavy for him to bear.

The throne of public opinion is not a very white throne; at the same

time, it is a coarse forecast and a rough foretaste of the last judgment;

and the fear of it not seldom makes a man's burden simply intolerable to

him. Sometimes a great sinner's burden leads him to flight and outlawry;

sometimes to madness and self-murder; and sometimes, by the timeous and

sufficient grace of God, to the way of escape that our pilgrim took.

Tenderness of conscience, also, simple softness of heart and conscience,

will sometimes make a terrible burden out of what other men would call a

very light matter. Bind a burden on that iron pillar standing there, and

it will feel nothing and say nothing. But, bind the same burden on that

man in whose seat that dead pillar takes up a sitter's room, and he will

make all that are in the house hear his sighs and his groans. And lay an

act of sin--an evil word or evil work or evil thought--on one man among

us, and he will walk about the streets with as erect a head and as

smiling a countenance and as light a step as if he were an innocent

child; while, lay half as much on his neighbour, and it will so bruise

him to the earth that all men will take knowledge of him that he is a

miserable man. Our Lord could no doubt have carried His cross from the

hall of judgment to the hill-top without help had His back not been wet

with blood. What with a whole and an unwealed body, a well-rested and

well-nourished body, He could easily have carried, with His broken body

and broken heart He quite sank under. And so it is with His people. One

of His heart-broken, heart-bleeding people will sink down to death and

hell under a burden of sin and corruption that another of them will

scarcely feel or know or believe that it is there. Some sins again in

themselves, and by reason of several aggravations, are far more heavy to

bear than others, and by some sinners than others. I was reading Bishop

Andrewes to myself last night and came upon this pertinent passage. "Sin:

its measure, its harm, its scandal. Its quality: how often--how long.

The person by whom: his age, condition, state, enlightenment. Its

manner, motive, time, and place. The folly of it, the ingratitude of it,

the hardness of it, the presumptuousness of it. By heart, by mouth, by

deed. Against God, my neighbours, my own body. By knowledge, by

ignorance. Willingly and unwillingly. Of old and of late. In boyhood

and youth, in mature and old age. Things done once, repeated often,

hidden and open. Things done in anger, and from the lust of the flesh

and of the world. Before and after my call. Asleep by night and awake

by day. Things remembered and things forgotten. Through the fiery darts

of the enemy, through the unclean desires of the flesh--I have sinned

against Thee. Have mercy on me, O God, and forgive me!" That is the way

some men's burdens are made up to such gigantic proportions and then

bound on by such acute cords. That is the way that Lancelot Andrewes and

John Bunyan walked solitarily in the fields, sometimes reading and

sometimes praying, till the one of them put himself into his immortal

_Devotions_, and the other into his immortal _Grace Abounding_ and

_Pilgrim's Progress_.

"Then I saw in my dream that Christian asked the Gatekeeper further if he

could not help him off with his burden that was upon his back, for as yet

he had not got rid of it, nor could he by any means get it off without

help. 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 off thy

back itself.' Now I saw in my dream that the highway up which Christian

was to go was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall is

Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run, but not

without great difficulty, because of the load on his back. He ran thus

till he came to a place somewhat ascending, and upon that place stood a

cross, and a little below in the bottom a sepulchre. So I saw in my

dream that just as Christian came up with the cross his burden loosed

from off his back, and began to tumble and so continued to do till it

came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in and I saw it no

more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry

heart, 'He hath given me rest by His sorrow, and life by His death!'"

"Blest Cross! blest Sepulchre! Blest rather be

The Man that there was put to shame for me."

But, then, how it could be that this so happy man was scarcely a stone-

cast past the cross when he had begun again to burden himself with fresh

sin, and thus to disinter all his former sin? How a true pilgrim comes

to have so many burdens to bear, and that till he ceases to be any longer

a pilgrim,--a burden of guilt, a burden of corruption, and a burden of

bare creaturehood,--I must leave all that, and all the questions

connected with all that, for you all to think out and work out for

yourselves; and you will not say any morning on this earth, like Mrs.

Timorous, that you have little to do.

3. The third of the three Shining Ones who saluted Christian at the

cross set a mark on his forehead, and put a roll with a seal set upon it

into his hand. A roll and a seal which he bid him look on as he ran, and

that he should give that roll in at the Celestial Gate. Bunyan does not

in all places come up to his usual clearness in what he says about the

sealed roll. We must believe that he understood his own meaning and

intention in all that he says, first and last, about the roll, but he has

not always made his meaning clear, at least to one of his readers.

Theological students, and, indeed, all thoughtful Christian men, are

invited to read Dr. Cunningham's powerful paper on Assurance in his

_Reformers_. The whole literature of Assurance is there taken up and

weighed and sifted with all that great writer's incomparable learning and

power and judgment. Our Larger Catechism, also, is excellent on this

subject; and this subject is a favourite commonplace with all our best

Calvinistic, Puritan, and Evangelical authors. Let us take two or three

passages out of those authors just as a specimen, and so close.

"Can true believers"--Larger Catechism, Question 80--"Can true believers

be infallibly assured that they are in an estate of grace, and that they

shall persevere therein to the end? _Answer_: Such as truly believe in

Christ, and endeavour to walk in all good conscience before Him may,

without extraordinary revelation, by faith grounded upon the truth of

God's promise, and by the Spirit enabling them to discern in themselves

those graces to which the promises of eternal life are made, and bearing

witness with their spirits that they are the children of God, they may be

infallibly assured that they are in the estate of grace, and shall

persevere therein unto salvation." Question 81: "Are all true believers

at all times assured of their present being in a state of grace, and that

they shall be saved? _Answer_: Assurance of grace and salvation not

being of the essence of faith, true believers may wait long before they

obtain it, and, after the enjoyment thereof, may have it weakened and

intermitted through manifold distempers, sins, temptations, and

desertions; yet are they never left without such a presence and support

of the Spirit of God as keeps them from sinking into utter despair." "A

Christian's assurance," says Fraser of Brea, "though it does not firstly

flow from his holiness, yet is ever after proportionable to his holy

walking. Faith is kept in a pure conscience. Sin is like a blot of ink

fallen upon our evidence. This I found to be a truth." "It was the

speech of one to me," says Thomas Shepard of New England, "next to the

donation of Christ, no mercy like this, to deny assurance long; and why?

For if the Lord had not, I should have given way to a loose heart and

life. And this is a rule I have long held--long denial of assurance is

like fire to burn out some sin and then the Lord will speak peace."

"Serve your God day and night faithfully," says Dr. Goodwin. "Walk

humbly; and there is a promise of the Holy Ghost to come and fill your

hearts with joy unspeakable and glorious to rear you up to the day of

redemption. Sue this promise out, wait for it, rest not in believing

only, rest not in assurance by graces only; there is a further assurance

to be had." "I would not give a straw for that assurance," says John

Newton, "which sin will not damp. If David had come from his adultery

and still have talked of his assurance, I should have despised his

speech." "When we want the faith of assurance," says Matthew Henry, "let

us live by the faith of adherence." And then the whole truth is in a

nutshell in Isaiah and in John: "The effect of righteousness shall be

quietness and assurance for ever," and "My little children, let us not

love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth. And hereby we

shall know that we are of the truth, and so shall assure our hearts

before Him."