CHAPTER VI—MY LORD WILLBEWILL

—‘to will is present with me.’—Paul

There is a large and a learned literature on the subject of the will. There is a philosophical and a theological, and there is a religious and an experimental literature on the will. Jonathan Edwards’s well-known work stands out conspicuously at the head of the philosophical and theological literature on the will, while our own Thomas Boston’sFourfold Stateis a very able and impressive treatise on the more practical and experimental side of the same subject. The Westminster Confession of Faith devotes one of its very best chapters to the teaching of the word of God on the will of man, and the Shorter Catechism touches on the same subject in Effectual Calling. Outstanding philosophical and theological schools have been formed around the will, and both able and learned and earnest men have taken opposite sides on the subject of the will under the party names of Necessitarians and Libertarians. This is not the time, nor am I the man, to discuss such abstruse subjects; but those students who wish to master this great matter of the will, so far as it can be mastered in books, are recommended to begin with Dr. William Cunningham’s works, and then to go on from them to a treatise that will reward all their talent and all their enterprise, Jonathan Edwards’s perfect masterpiece.

1. But, to come to my Lord Willbewill, one of the gentry of the famous town of Mansoul:—well, this Lord Willbewill was as high-born as any man in Mansoul, and was as much a freeholder as any of them were, if not more. Besides, if I remember my tale aright, he had some privileges peculiar to himself in that famous town. Now, together with these, he was a man of great strength, resolution, and courage; nor in his occasion could any turn him away. But whether he was too proud of his high estate, privileges, and strength, or what (but sure it was through pride of something), he scorns now to be a slave in Mansoul, as his own proud word is, so that now, next to Diabolus himself, who but my Lord Willbewill in all that town? Nor could anything now be done but at his beck and good pleasure throughout that town. Indeed, it will not out of my thoughts what a desperate fellow this Willbewill was when full power was put into his hand. All which—how this apostate prince lost power and got it again, and lost it and got it again—the interested and curious reader will find set forth with great fulness and clearness in many powerful pages of theHoly War.

John Bunyan was as hard put to it to get the right name for this head of the gentry of Mansoul as Paul was to get the right name for sin in the seventh of the Romans. In that profoundest and intensest of all his profound and intense passages, the apostle has occasion to seek about for some expression, some epithet, some adjective, as we say, to apply to sin so as to help him to bring out to his Roman readers something of the malignity, deadliness, and unspeakable evil of sin as he had sin living and working in himself. But all the resources of the Greek language, that most resourceful of languages, utterly failed Paul for his pressing purpose. And thus it is that, as if in scorn of the feebleness and futility of that boasted tongue, he tramples its grammars and its dictionaries under his feet, and makes new and unheard-of words and combinations of words on the spot for himself and for his subject. He heaps up a hyperbole the like of which no orator or rhetorician of Greece or Rome had ever needed or had ever imagined before. He takes sin, and he makes a name for sin out of itself. The only way to describe sin, he feels, the only way to characterise sin, the only way to aggravate sin, is just to call it sin; sinful sin; ‘sin by the commandment became exceeding sinful.’ And, in like manner, John Bunyan, who has only his own mother tongue to work with, in his straits to get a proper name for this terrible fellow who was next to Diabolus himself, cannot find a proud enough name for him but just by giving him his own name, and then doubling it. Add will to will, multiply will by will, and multiply it again, and after you have done all you are no nearer to a proper name for that apostate, who, for pride, and insolence, and headstrongness, in one word, for wilfulness, is next to Diabolus himself. But as Willbewill, if he is to be named and described at all, is best named and described by his own naked name; so Bunyan is always best illustrated out of his own works. And I turn accordingly to theHeavenly Footmanfor an excellent illustration of the wilfulness of the will both in a good man and in a bad; as, thus: ‘Your self-willed people, nobody knows what to do with them. We use to say, He will have his own will, do all we can. If a man be willing, then any argument shall be matter of encouragement; but if unwilling, then any argument shall give discouragement. The saints of old, they being willing and resolved for heaven, what could stop them? Could fire and fagot, sword or halter, dungeons, whips, bears, bulls, lions, cruel rackings, stonings, starvings, nakedness? So willing had they been made in the day of His power. And see, on the other side, the children of the devil, because they are not willing, how many shifts and starting-holes they will have! I have married a wife; I have a farm; I shall offend my landlord; I shall lose my trade; I shall be mocked and scoffed at, and therefore I cannot come. But, alas! the thing is, they are not willing. For, were they once soundly willing, these, and a thousand things such as these, would hold them no faster than the cords held Samson when he broke them like flax. I tell you the will is all. The Lord give thee a will, then, and courage of heart.’

2. Let that, then, suffice for this man’s name and nature, and let us look at him now when his name and his nature have both become evil; that is to say, when Willbewill has become Illwill. You can imagine; no, you cannot imagine unless you already know, how evil, and how set upon evil, Illwill was. His whole mind, we are told, now stood bending itself to evil. Nay, so set was he now upon sheer evil that he would act it of his own accord, and without any instigation at all from Diabolus. And that went on till he was looked on in the city as next in wickedness to very Diabolus himself. Parable apart, my ill-willed brethren, our ill-will has made us very fiends in human shape. What a fall, what a fate, what a curse it is to be possessed of a devil of ill-will! Who can put proper words on it after Paul had to confess himself silent before it? Who can utter the diabolical nature, the depth and the secrecy, the subtlety and the spirituality, the range and the reach-out of an ill-will? Our hearts are full of ill-will at those we meet and shake hands with every day. At men also we have never seen, and who are totally ignorant even of our existence. Over a thousand miles we dart our viperous hearts at innocent men. At great statesmen we have ill-will, and at small; at great churchmen and at small; at great authors and at small; at great, and famous, and successful men in all lines of life; for it is enough for ill-will that another man be praised, and well-paid, and prosperous, and then placed in our eye. No amount of suffering will satiate ill-will; the very grave has no seal against it. And, now and then, you have it thrust upon you that other men have the same devil in them as deeply and as actively as he is in you. You will suddenly run across a man on the street. His face was shining with some praise he had just had spoken to him, or with some recognition he had just received from some great one; or with some good news for himself he had just heard, before he caught sight of you. But the light suddenly dies on his face, and darkness comes up out of his heart at his sudden glimpse of you. What is the matter? you ask yourself as he scowls past you. What have you done so to darken any man’s heart to you? And as you stumble on in the sickening cloud he has left behind him, you suddenly recollect that you were once compelled to vote against that man on a public question: on some question of home franchise, or foreign war, or church government, or city business; or perchance, a family has left his shop to do business in yours, or his church to worship God in yours, or such like. It will be a certain relief to you to recollect such things. But with it all there will be a shame and a humiliation and a deep inward pain that will escape into a cry of prayer for him and for yourself and for all such sinners on the same street. If you do not find an escape from your sharp resentment in ejaculatory prayer and in a heart-cleansing great good-will, your heart, before you are a hundred steps on, will be as black with ill-will as his is. But that must not again be. Would you hate or strike back at a blind man who stumbled and fell against you on the street? Would you retaliate at a maniac who gnashed his teeth and shook his fist at you on his way past you to the madhouse? Or at a corpse being carried past you that had been too long without burial? And shall you retaliate on a miserable man driven mad with diabolical passion? Or at a poor sinner whose heart is as rotten as the grave? Ill-will is abroad in our learned and religious city at all hours of the day and night. He glares at us under the sun by day, and under the street lamps at night. We suddenly feel his baleful eye on us as we thoughtlessly pass under his overlooking windows: it will be a side street and an unfrequented, where you will not be ashamed and shocked and pained at heart to meet him. Public men; much purchased and much praised men; rich and prosperous men; men high in talent and in place; and, indeed, all manner of men,—walk abroad in this life softly. Keep out of sight. Take the side streets, and return home quickly. You have no idea what an offence and what a snare you are to men you know, and to men you do not know. If you are a public man, and if your name is much in men’s mouths, then the place you hold, the prices and the praises you get, do not give you one-tenth of the pleasure that they give a thousand other men pain. Men you never heard of, and who would not know you if they met you, gnaw their hearts at the mere mention of your name. Desire, then, to be unknown, as À Kempis says. O teach me to love to be concealed, prays Jeremy Taylor. Be ambitious to be unknown, Archbishop Leighton also instructs us. And the great Fénelon tookAma nescirifor his crest and for his motto. No wonder that an apostle cried out under the agony and the shame of ill-will. No wonder that to kill it in the hearts of men the Son of God died under it on the cross. And no wonder that all the gates of hell are wide open, day and night, for there is no day there, to receive home all those who will entertain ill-will in their hearts, and all the gates of heaven shut close to keep all ill-will for ever out.

3. But, bad enough as all that is, the half has not been told, and never will be told in this life. Butler has a passage that has long stumbled me, and it stumbles me the more the longer I live and study him and observe myself. ‘Resentment,’ he says, in a very deep and a very serious passage—‘Resentment being out of the case, there is not, properly speaking, any such thing as direct ill-will in one man towards another.’ Well, great and undisputed as Butler’s authority is in all these matters, at the same time he would be the first to admit and to assert that a man’s inward experience transcends all outward authority. Well, I am filled with shame and pain and repentance and remorse to have to say it, but my experience carries me right in the teeth of Butler’s doctrine. I have dutifully tried to look at Butler’s inviting and exonerating doctrine in all possible lights, and from all possible points of view, in the anxious wish to prove it true; but I dare not say that I have succeeded. The truth for thee—my heart would continually call to me—the best truth for thee is in me, and not in any Butler! And when looking as closely as I can at my own heart in the matter of ill-will, what do I find—and what will you find? You will find that after subtracting all that can in any proper sense come under the head of real resentment, and in cases where real resentment is out of the question; in cases where you have received no injury, no neglect, no contempt, no anything whatsoever of that kind, you will find that there are men innocent of all that to you, yet men to whom you entertain feelings, animosities, antipathies, that can be called by no other name than that of ill-will. Look within and see. Watch within and see. And I am sure you will come to subscribe with me to the humbling and heart-breaking truth, that, even where there is no resentment, and no other explanation, excuse, or palliation of that kind, yet that festering, secret, malignant ill-will is working in the bottom of your heart. If you doubt that, if you deny that, if all that kind of self-observation and self-sentencing is new to you, then observe yourself, say, for one week, and report at the end of it whether or no you have had feelings and thoughts and wishes in your secret heart toward men who never in any way hurt you, which can only be truthfully described as pure ill-will; that is to say, you have not felt and thought and wished toward them as you would have them, and all men, feel and think and wish toward you.

4. ‘To will is present with me, but how to perform I find not,’ says the apostle; and again, ‘Ye cannot do the things that ye would.’ Or, as Dante has it,

‘The power which willsBears not supreme control; laughter and tearsFollow so closely on the passion prompts them,They wait not for the motion of the willIn natures most sincere.’

Now, just here lies a deep distinction that has not been enough taken account of by our popular, or even by our more profound, spiritual writers. The will is often regenerate and right; the will often bends, as Bunyan has it, to that which is good; but behind the will and beneath the will the heart is still full of passions, affections, inclinations, dispositions that are evil; instinctively, impulsively, involuntarily evil, even ‘in natures most sincere.’ And hence arises a conflict, a combat, a death-grip, an agony, a hell on earth, that every regenerate and advancing soul of man is full of His will is right. If his will is wrong; if he chooses evil; then there is no mystery in the matter so far as he is concerned. He is a bad man, and he is so intentionally and deliberately and of set purpose; and it is a rule in divine truth that ‘wilfulness in sinning is the measure of our sinfulness.’ But his will is right. To will is present with him. He is every day like Thomas Boston one Sabbath-day: ‘Though I cannot be free of sin, God Himself knows that He would be welcome to make havoc of my sins and to make me holy. I know no lust that I would not be content to part with to-night. My will, bound hand and foot, I desire to lay at His feet.’ Now, is it not as clear as noonday that in the case of such a man as Boston his mind is one thing and his heart another? Is it not plain that he has both a good-will and an ill-will within him? A will that immediately and resolutely chooses for God, and for truth, and for righteousness, and for love; and another law in his members warring against that law of his mind? ‘Before conversion,’ says Thomas Shepard, ‘the main wound of a man is in his will. And then, after conversion, though his will is changed, yet,ex infirmitate, there are many things that he cannot do, so strong is the remnant of malignity that is still in his heart. Let him get Christ to help him here.’ In all that ye see your calling, my brethren.

5. ‘Now, if I do that I would not,’ adds the apostle, extricating himself and giving himself fair-play and his simple due among all his misery and self-accusation—‘Now, if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.’ Or, again, as William Law has it: ‘All our natural evil ceases to be our own evil as soon as our will turns away from it. Our natural evil then changes its nature and loses all its poison and death, and becomes an holy cross on which we die to self and this life and enter the kingdom of heaven.’ My dear brethren, tell me, is your sin your cross? Is your sinfulness your cross? Is the evil that is ever present with you your holy cross? For, every other cross beside sin is a cross of straw, a cross of feathers, a paste-board and a painted cross, and not a real and genuine cross at all. The wood and the nails and the spear all taken together were not our Lord’s real cross. His real cross was sin; our sin laid on His hands, and on His heart, and on His imagination, and on His conscience, till it was all but His very own sin. Our sin was so fearfully and wonderfully laid upon Christ that He was as good as a sinner Himself under it. So much so that all the nails and all the spears, all the thirst and all the darkness that His body and His soul could hold were as nothing beside the sin that was laid upon Him. And so it is with us; with as many of us as are His true disciples. Our sin is our cross; not our actual transgressions, any more than His; but our inward sinfulness. And not the sinfulness of our will; that is no real cross to any man; but the sinfulness of our hearts against our will, and beneath our will, and behind our will. And this is such a cross that if Christ had something in His cross that we have not, then we have something in ours that He had not. He made many sad and sore Psalms His own; but even if He had lived on earth to read the seventh of the Romans, He could not have made it His own. His true people are beyond Him here. The disciple is above his Master here. The Master had His own cross, and it was a sufficient cross; but we can challenge Him to come down and look and say if He ever saw a cross like our cross. He was made a curse. He was hanged on the tree. He bore our sins in His own body on the tree. But his people are beyond Him in the real agony and crucifixion of sin. For He never in Gethsemane or on Calvary either cried as Paul once cried, and as you and I cry every day—To will is present with me! But the good that I would I do not! And, oh! the body of this death!

6. Now, if any total stranger to all that shall ask me: What good there is in all that? and, Why I so labour in such a world of unaccustomed and unpleasant things as that? I have many answers to his censure. For example, and first, I labour and will continue to labour more and more in this world of things, and less and less in any other world, because here we begin to see things as they are—the deepest things of God and of man, that is. Also, because I have the precept, and the example, and the experience of God’s greatest and best saints before me here. Because, also, our full and true salvation begins here, goes on here, and ends here. Because, also, teaching these things and learning these things will infallibly make us the humblest of men, the most contrite, the most self-despising, the most prayerful, and the most patient, meek, and loving of men. And, students, I labour in this because this is science; because this is the first in order and the most fruitful of all the sciences, if not the noblest and the most glorious of all the sciences. There is all that good for us in this subject of the will and the heart, and whole worlds of good lie away out beyond this subject that eye hath not seen nor ear heard.

‘This know, that men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, unthankful, without natural affection, truce-breakers, false accusers, traitors, heady, high-minded: from all such turn away.’—Paul.

‘Pray, sir, said Academicus, tell me more plainly just what this self of ours actually is. Self, replied Theophilus, is hell, it is the devil, it is darkness, pain, and disquiet. It is the one and only enemy of Christ. It is the great antichrist. It is the scarlet whore, it is the fiery dragon, it is the old serpent that is mentioned in the Revelation of St John. You rather terrify me than instruct me by this description, said Academicus. It is indeed a very frightful matter, returned Theophilus; for it contains everything that man has to dread and to hate, to resist and to avoid. Yet be assured, my friend, that, careless and merry as this world is, every man that is born into this world has all those enemies to overcome within himself; and every man, till he is in the way of regeneration, is more or less governed by those enemies. No hell in any remote place, no devil that is separate from you, no darkness or pain that is not within you, no antichrist either at Rome or in England, no furious beast, no fiery dragon, without you or apart from you, can do you any real hurt. It is your own hell, your own devil, your own beast, your own antichrist, your own dragon that lives in your own heart’s blood that alone can hurt you. Die to this self, to this inward nature, and then all outward enemies are overcome. Live to this self, and then, when this life is out, all that is within you, and all that is without you, will be nothing else but a mere seeing and feeling this hell, serpent, beast, and fiery dragon. But, said Theogenes, a third party who stood by, I would, if I could, more perfectly understand the precise nature of self, or what it is that makes it to be so full of evil and misery. To whom Theophilus turned and replied: Covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath are the four elements of self. And hence it is that the whole life of self can be nothing else but a plague and torment of covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath, all of which is precisely sinful nature, self, or hell. Whilst man lives, indeed, among the vanities of time, his covetousness, his envy, his pride, and his wrath, may be in a tolerable state, and may help him to a mixture of peace and trouble; they may have their gratifications as well as their torments. But when death has put an end to the vanity of all earthly cheats, the soul that is not born again of the supernatural Word and Spirit of God must find itself unavoidably devoured by itself, shut up in its own insatiable, unchangeable, self-tormenting covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath. O Theogenes! that I had power from God to take those dreadful scales off men’s eyes that hinder them from seeing and feeling the infinite importance of this most certain truth! God give a blessing, Theophilus, to your good prayer. And then let me tell you that you have quite satisfied my question about the nature of self. I shall never forget it, nor can I ever possibly after this have any doubt about the truth of it.’

1. ‘All my theology,’ said an old friend of mine to me not long ago—‘all my theology is out of Thomas Goodwin to the Ephesians.’ Well, I find Thomas Goodwin saying in that great book that self is the very quintessence of original sin; and, again, he says, study self-love for a thousand years and it is the top and the bottom of original sin; self is the sin that dwelleth in us and that doth most easily beset us. Now, that is just what Academicus and Theophilus and Theogenes have been saying to us in their own powerful way in their incomparable dialogue. All sin and all misery; all covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath,—trace it all back to its roots, travel it all up to its source, and, as sure as you do that, self and self-love are that source, that root, and that black bottom. I do not forget that Butler has said in some stately pages of his that self-love is morally good; that self-love is coincident with the principle of virtue and part of the idea; and that it is a proper motive for man. But the deep bishop, in saying all that, is away back at the creation-scheme and Eden-state of human nature. He has not as yet come down to human nature in its present state of overthrow, dismemberment, and self-destruction. But when he does condescend and comes close to the mind and the heart of man as they now are in all men, even Butler becomes as outspoken, and as eloquent, and as full of passion and pathos as if he were an evangelical Puritan. Self-love, Butler startles his sober-minded reader as he bursts out—self-love rends and distorts the mind of man! Now, you are a man. Well, then, do you feel and confess that rending and distorting to have taken place in you? Butler is a philosopher, and Goodwin is a preacher, but you are more: you are a man. You are the owner of a human heart, and you can say whether or no it is a rent and a distorted heart. Is your mind warped and wrenched by self-love, and is your heart rent and torn by the same wicked hands? Do you really feel that it needs nothing more to take you back again to paradise but that your heart be delivered from self-love? Do you now understand that the foundations of heaven itself must be laid in a heart healed and cleansed and delivered from self-love? If you do, then your knowledge of your own heart has set you abreast of the greatest of philosophers and theologians and preachers. Nay, before multitudes of men who are called such. It is my meditation all the day, you say. I have more understanding now than all my teachers; for Thy testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the ancients; because now I keep Thy precepts.

2. ‘Self-love has made us all malicious,’ says John Calvin. We are Calvinists, were we to call any man master. But we are to call no man master, and least of all in the matters of the heart. Every man must be his own philosopher, his own moralist, and his own theologian in the matters of the heart. He who has a heart in his bosom and an eye in his head can need no Calvin, no Butler, no Goodwin, and no Law to tell him what goes on in his own heart. And, on the other hand, his own heart will soon tell him whether or no Calvin, and Butler, and Goodwin, and Law know anything about those matters on which some men would set them up as our masters. Well, come away all of you who own a human heart. Come and say whether or no your heart, and the self-love of which it is full, have made you a malicious man. I do not ask if you are always and to everybody full of maliciousness. No; I know quite well that you are sometimes as sweet as honey and as soft as butter. For, has not even Theophilus said that whilst a man still lives among the vanities of time, his covetousness, his envy, his pride, and his wrath may be in a tolerable state, and may help him to a mixture of peace and trouble; these vices may have their gratifications as well as their torments. No; I do not trifle with you and with this serious matter so as to ask if you are full of malice at all times and to all men. No. For, let a man be fortunate enough to be on your side; let him pass over to your party; let him become profitable to you; let him be clever enough and mean enough to praise and to flatter you up to the top of your appetite for praise and flattery, and, no doubt, you will love that man. Or, if that is not exactly love, at least it is no longer hate. But let that man unfortunately be led to leave your party; let him cease being profitable to you; let him weary of flattering you with his praise; let him forget you, neglect you, despise you, and go against you, and then look at your own heart. Do you care now to know what malice is? Well, that is malice that distorts and rends your heart as often as you meet that man on the street or even pass by his door. That is malice that dances in your eyes when you see his name in print. That is malice with which you always break out when his name is mentioned in conversation. That is malice that heats your heart when you suddenly recollect him in the multitude of your thoughts within you. And you are in good company all the time. ‘We, ourselves,’ says Paul to Titus, ‘we also at one time lived in malice and in envy. We were hateful and we hated one another.’ ‘Hateful,’ Goodwin goes on in his great book, ‘every man is to another man more or less; he is hated of another and he hateth another more or less; and if his nature were let out to the full, there is that in him, “every man is against every man,” as is said of Ishmael.Homo homini lupus,’ adds our brave preacher. And Abbé Grou speaks out with the same challenge from the opposite church pole, and says: ‘Yes; self-love makes us touchy, ready to take offence, ill-tempered, suspicious, severe, exacting, easily offended; it keeps alive in our hearts a certain malignity, a secret joy at the mortifications which befall our neighbour; it nourishes our readiness to criticise, our dislike at certain persons, our ill-feeling, our bitterness, and a thousand other things prejudicial to charity.’

3. ‘Myself is my own worst enemy,’ says Abbé Grou. That is to say, we may have enemies who hate us more than we hate ourselves, and enemies who would hurt us, if they could, as much as we hurt ourselves; but the Abbé’s point is that they cannot. And he is right. No man has ever hurt me as I have hurt myself. There are men who hate me so much that they would poison my life of all its peace and happiness if they could. But they cannot. They cannot; but let them not be cast down on that account, for there is one who can do, and who will do as long as he lives, what they cannot do. A man’s foes, to be called foes, are in his own house: they are in his own heart. Let our enemies attend to their own peace and happiness, and our self-love will do all, and more than all, that they would fain do. At the most, they and their ill-will can only give occasion to our self-love; but it is our self-love that seizes upon the occasion, and through it rends and distorts our own hearts. And were our hearts only pure of self-love, were our hearts only clothed with meekness and humility, we could laugh at all the ill-will of our enemies as leviathan laughs at the shaking of a spear. ‘Know thou,’ says À Kempis to his son, ‘that the love of thyself doth do thee more hurt than anything in the whole world.’ Yes; but we shall never know that by merely readingThe Imitation. We must read ourselves. We must study, as we study nothing else, our own rent and distorted hearts. Our own hearts must be our daily discovery. We must watch the wounds our hearts take every day; and we must give all our powers of mind to tracing all our wounds back to their true causes. We must say: ‘that sore blow came on my mind and on my heart from such and such a quarter, from such and such a hand, from such and such a weapon; but this pain, this rankling, poisoned, and ever-festering wound, this sleepless, gnawing, cancerous sore, comes from the covetousness, the pride, the envy, and the wrath of my own heart.’ When we begin to say that, we shall then begin to understand and to love Thomas; we shall sit daily at his feet and shall be numbered among his sons.

4. And this suffering at our own hands goes on till at last the tables are completely turned against self-love, and till what was once to us the dearest thing in the whole world becomes, as Pascal says, the most hateful. We begin life by hating the men, and the things, who hurt us. We hate the men who oppose us and hinder us; the men who speak, and write, and act, and go in any way against us. We bitterly hate all who humble us, despise us, trample upon us, and in any way ill-use us. But afterwards, when we have become men, men in experience of this life, and, especially, of ourselves in this life; after we gain some real insight and attain to some real skill in the life of the heart, we come round to forgive those we once hated. We have come now to see why they did it. We see now exactly how much they hurt us after all, and how little. And, especially, we have come to see,—what at one time we could not have believed,—that all our hurt, to be called hurt, has come to us from ourselves. And thus that great revolution of mind and that great revulsion of feeling and of passion has taken place, after which we are left with no one henceforth to hate, to be called hating, but ourselves. We may still continue to avoid our enemies, and we may do that too long and too much; we may continue to fear them and be on the watch against them far too much; but to deliberately hate them is henceforth impossible. All our hatred,—all our deliberate, steady, rooted, active hatred,—is now at ourselves; at ourselves, that is, so far and so long as we remain under the malignant and hateful dominion of self-love. When Butler gets our self-love restored to reasonableness, and made coincident with virtue and part of the idea; when our self-love becomes uniformly coincident with the principle of obedience to God’s commands, then we shall love ourselves as our neighbour, and our neighbour as ourselves, and both in God. But, till then, there is nothing and no one on earth or in hell so hateful to us as ourselves and our own hateful hearts. And if in that we are treading the winepress alone as far as our fellow-men are concerned, all the more we have Him with us in all our agony who wept over the heart of man because He knew what was in it, and what must always come out of it. Evil thoughts, He said, and fornications, and murders, and thefts, and covetousness, and wickedness, and deceit, and an evil eye, and pride, and folly, and what not. And Paul has the mind of Christ with him in the text. I do not need to repeat again the hateful words. Now, what do you say? was Pascal beyond the truth, was he deeper than the truth or more deadly than the truth when he said with a stab that self is hateful? I think not.

5. ‘Oh that I were free, then, of myself,’ wrote Samuel Rutherford from Aberdeen in 1637 to John Ferguson of Ochiltree. ‘What need we all have to be ransomed and redeemed from that master-tyrant, that cruel and lawless lord, ourself! Even when I am most out of myself, and am best serving Christ, I have a squint eye on myself.’ And to the Laird of Cally in the same year and from the same place: ‘Myself is the master idol we all bow down to. Every man blameth the devil for his sins, but the house devil of every man that eateth with him and lieth in his bosom is himself. Oh blessed are they who can deny themselves!’ And to the Irish ministers the year after: ‘Except men martyr and slay the body of sin in sanctified self-denial, they shall never be Christ’s. Oh, if I could but be master of myself, my own mind, my own will, my own credit, my own love, how blessed were I! But alas! I shall die only minting and aiming at being a Christian.’

‘Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?’—Naaman.‘Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?’—Nathanael.‘ . . observe these things without prejudice, doing nothing by partiality.’—Paul.

‘Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?’—Naaman.

‘Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?’—Nathanael.

‘ . . observe these things without prejudice, doing nothing by partiality.’—Paul.

Old Mr. Prejudice was well known in the wars of Mansoul as an angry, unhappy, and ill-conditioned old churl. Old Mr. Prejudice was placed by Diabolus, his master, as keeper of the ward at the post of Ear-gate, and for that fatal service he had sixty completely deaf men put under him as his company. Men eminently advantageous for that fatal service. Eminently advantageous,—inasmuch as it mattered not one atom to them what was spoken in their ear either by God or by man.

1. Now, to begin with, this churlish old man had already earned for himself a very evil name. For what name could well be more full of evil memories and of evil omens than just this name of Prejudice? Just consider what prejudice is. Prejudice, when we stop over it and take it to pieces and look well at it,—prejudice is so bad and so abominable that you would not believe it could be so bad till you had looked at it and at how it acts in your own case. For prejudice gives judgment on your case and gives orders for your execution before your defence has been heard, before your witnesses have been called, before your summons has been served, ay, and even before your indictment has been drawn out. What a scandal and what an uproar a malfeasance of justice like that would cause if it were to take place in any of our courts of law! Only, the thing is impossible; you cannot even imagine it. We shall have Magna Charta up before us in the course of these lectures. Well, ever since Magna Charta was extorted from King John, such a scandal as I have supposed has been impossible either in England or in Scotland. And that such cases should still be possible in Russia and in Turkey places those two old despotisms outside the pale of the civilised world. And yet, loudly as we all denounce the Czar and the Sultan, eloquently as we boast over Magna Charta, Habeas Corpus, and what not, every day you and I are doing what would cost an English king his crown, and an English judge his head. We all do it every day, and it never enters one mind out of a hundred that we are trampling down truth, and righteousness, and fair-play, and brotherly love. We do not know what a diabolical wickedness we are perpetrating every day. The best men among us are guilty of that iniquity every day, and they never confess it to themselves; no one ever accuses them of it; and they go down to death and judgment unsuspicious of the discovery that they will soon make there. You would not steal a stick or a straw that belonged to me; but you steal from me every day what all your gold and mine can never redeem; you murder me every day in my best and my noblest life. You me, and I you.

2. Old Mr. Prejudice. Now, there is a golden passage in Jonathan Edwards’sDiarythat all old men should lay well to heart and conscience. ‘I observe,’ Edwards enters, ‘that old men seldom have any advantage of new discoveries, because these discoveries are beside a way of thinking they have been long used to. Resolved, therefore, that, if ever I live to years, I will be impartial to hear the reasons of all pretended discoveries, and receive them, if rational, how long soever I have been used to another way of thinking. I am too dogmatical; I have too much of egotism; my disposition is always to be telling of my dislike and my scorn.’ What a fine, fresh, fruitful, progressive, and peaceful world we should soon have if all our old and all our fast-ageing men would enter that extract into their diary! How the young would then love and honour and lean upon the old; and how all the fathers would always abide young and full of youthful life like their children! Then the righteous should flourish like the palm-tree; he should grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They that be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing. What a free scope would then be given to all God’s unfolding providences, and what a warm welcome to all His advancing truths! What sore and spreading wounds would then be salved, what health and what vigour would fill all the body political, as well as all the body mystical! May the Lord turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest the earth be smitten with a curse!

3. Mr. Prejudice was an old man; and this also has been handed down about him, that he was almost always angry. And if you keep your eyes open you will soon see how true to the life that feature of old Mr. Prejudice still is. In every conversation, discussion, debate, correspondence, the angry man is invariably the prejudiced man; and, according to the age and the depth, the rootedness and the intensity of his prejudices, so is the ferocity and the savagery of his anger. He has already settled this case that you are irritating and wronging him so much by your still insisting on bringing up. It is a reproach to his understanding for you to think that there is anything to be said in that matter that he has not long ago heard said and fully answered. Has he not denounced that bad man and that bad cause for years? You insult me, sir, by again opening up that matter in my presence. He will have none of you or of your arguments either. You are as bad yourself as that bad man is whose advocate you are. We all know men whose hearts are full of coals of juniper, burning coals of hate and rage, just by reason of their ferocious prejudices. Hate is too feeble a word for their gnashing rage against this man and that cause, this movement and that institution. There is an absolutely murderous light in their eye as they work themselves up against the men and the things they hate. Charity rejoices not in iniquity; but you will see otherwise Christian and charitable men so jockeyed by the devil that they actually rejoice in iniquity and do not know what they are doing, or who it is that is egging them on to do it. You will see otherwise and at other times good men so full of the rage and madness of prejudice and partiality that they will storm at every report of goodness and truth and prosperity in the man, or in the cause, or in the church, or in the party, they are so demented against. Jockey is not the word. There is the last triumph of pure devilry in the way that the prince of the devils turns old Prejudice’s very best things—his love of his fathers, his love of the past, his love of order, his love of loyalty, his love of the old paths, and his very truest and best religion itself—into so much fat fuel for the fires of hate and rage that are consuming his proud heart to red-hot ashes. If the light that is in us be darkness, how great is that darkness; and if the life that is in us be death, how deadly is that death!

4. Old, angry, and ill-conditioned. Ill-conditioned is an old-fashioned word almost gone out of date. But, all the same, it is a very expressive, and to us to-night a quite indispensable word. An ill-conditioned man is a man of an in-bred, cherished, and confirmed ill-nature. His heart, which was a sufficiently bad heart to begin with, is now so exercised in evil and so accustomed to evil, that,—how can he be born again when he is so old and so ill-natured? All the qualities, all the passions, all the emotions of his heart are out of joint; their bent is bad; they run out naturally to mischief. Now, what could possibly be more ill-conditioned than to judge and sentence, denounce and execute a man before you have heard his case? What could be more ill-conditioned than positively to be afraid lest you should be led to forgive, and redress, and love, and act with another man? To be determined not to hear one word that you can help in his defence, in his favour, and in his praise? Could a human heart be in a worse state on this side hell itself than that? Nay, that is hell itself in your evil heart already. Let prejudice and partiality have their full scope among the wicked passions of your ill-conditioned heart, and lo! the kingdom of darkness is already within you. Not, lo, here! or, lo, there! but within you. Look to yourselves, says John to us all, full as we all are of our own ill-conditions. Look to yourselves. But we have no eyes left with which to see ourselves; we look so much at the faults and the blames of our neighbour. ‘Publius goes to church sometimes, and reads the Scriptures; but he knows not what he reads or prays, his head is so full of politics. He is so angry at kings and ministers of state that he has no time nor disposition to call himself to account. He has the history of all parliaments, elections, prosecutions, and impeachments by heart, and he dies with little or no religion, through a constant fear of Popery.’ Poor, old, ill-conditioned Publius!

5. And, then, his sixty deaf men under old, angry, ill-conditioned Prejudice. We read of engines of sixty-horse power. And here is a man with the power of resisting and shutting out the truth equal to that of sixty men like himself. We all know such men; we would as soon think of speaking to those iron pillars about a change of mind as we would to them. If you preach to their prejudices and their prepossessions and their partialities, they are all ears to hear you, and all tongues to trumpet your praise. But do not expect them to sit still with ordinary decency under what they are so prejudiced against; do not expect them to read a book or buy a passing paper on the other side. Sixty deaf men hold their ears; sixty ill-conditioned men hold their hearts. Habit with them is all the test of truth; it must be right, they’ve done it from their youth. And thus they go on to the end of their term of life, full of their own fixed ideas, with their eyes full of beams and jaundices and darkness and death. Some people think that we take up too much of our time with newspapers in our day, and that, if things go on as they are going, we shall soon have neither time nor taste for anything else but half a dozen papers a day. But all that depends on the conditions with which we read. If we would read as Jonathan Edwards read the weekly news-letters of his day; if we read all our papers to see if the kingdom of God was coming in reply to our prayer; if we read, observing all things, like Timothy, without prejudice or partiality, then I know no better reading for an ill-conditioned heart begun to look to itself than just a good, out-and-out party newspaper. And if it is a church paper all the better for your purpose. If you read with your fingers in your ears; if you read with a beam in your eye, you had better confine yourself in your reading; if you feel that your prejudices are inflamed and your partiality is intensified, then take care what paper you take in. But if you read all you read for the love of the truth, for justice, for fair-play, and for brotherly love, and all that in yourself; if you read all the time with your eyes on your own ill-conditioned heart, then, as James says, count it all joy when you fall into divers temptations. Take up your political and ecclesiastical paper every morning, saying to yourself, Go to, O my heart, and get thy daily lesson. Go to, and enter thy cleansing and refining furnace. Go to, and come well out of thy daily temptation.—A nobler school you will not find anywhere for a prejudiced, partial, angry, and ill-conditioned heart than just the party journals of the day. For the abating of prejudice; for seeing the odiousness of partiality, and for putting on every day a fair, open, catholic, Christian mind, commend me to the public life and the public journals of our living day. And it is not that this man may be up and that man down; this cause victorious and that cause defeated; this truth vindicated and that untruth defeated, that public life rolls on and that its revolutions are reported to us. Our own minds and our own hearts are the final cause, the ultimate drift, and the far-off end and aim of it all. We are not made for party and for the partialities and prosperities of party; party and all its passions and all its successes and all its defeats are made, and are permitted to be made for us; for our opportunity of purging ourselves free of all our ill-conditions, of all our prejudices, of all our partialities, and of all the sin and misery that come to us of all these things.

6. ‘It is the work of a philosopher,’ says Addison in one of his bestSpectators, ‘to be every day subduing his passions and laying aside his prejudices.’ We are not philosophers, but we shall be enrolled in the foremost ranks of philosophy if we imitate such philosophers in their daily work, as we must do and shall do. Well, are we begun to do it? Are we engaged in that work of theirs and ours every day? Is God our witness and our judge that we are? Are we so engaged upon that inward work, and so succeeding in it, that we can read our most prejudiced newspaper with the same mind and spirit, with the same profit and progress, with which we read our Bible? A good man, a humble man, a man acutely sensible of his ill-conditions, will look on every day as lost or won according as he has lost or won in this inward war. If his partialities are dropping off his mind; if his prejudices are melting; if he can read books and papers with pleasure and instruction that once filled him with dark passions and angry outbursts; if his Calvinism lets him read Thomas À Kempis and Jeremy Taylor and William Law; if his High-Churchism lets him delight to worship God in an Independent or a Presbyterian church; if his Free-Churchism permits him to see the Establishment reviving, and his State-Churchism admits that the Free Churches have more to say to him than he had at one time thought; if his Toryism lets him take in a Radical paper, and his Radicalism a Unionist paper—then let him thank God, for God is in all that though he knew it not. And when he counts up his incalculable benefits at each return of the Lord’s table, let him count up as not the least of them an open mind and a well-conditioned heart, an unprejudiced mind, and an impartial heart.

7. And now, to conclude: Take old, angry, ill-conditioned Prejudice, his daily prayer: ‘My Adorable God and Creator! Thy Holy Church is by the wickedness of men divided into various communions, all hating, condemning, and endeavouring to destroy one another. I made none of these divisions, nor am I any longer a defender of them. I wish everything removed out of every communion that hinders the Common Unity. The wranglings and disputings of whole churches and nations have so confounded all things that I have no ability to make a true and just judgment of the matters between them. If I knew that any one of these communions was alone acceptable to Thee, I would do or suffer anything to make myself a member of it. For, my Good God, I desire nothing so much as to know and to love Thee, and to worship Thee in the most acceptable manner. And as I humbly presume that Thou wouldst not suffer Thy Church to be thus universally divided, if no divided portion could offer any worship acceptable unto Thee; and as I have no knowledge of what is absolutely best in these divided parts, nor any ability to put an end to them; so I fully trust in Thy goodness, that Thou wilt not suffer these divisions to separate me from Thy mercy in Christ Jesus; and that, if there be any better ways of serving Thee than those I already enjoy, Thou wilt, according to Thine infinite mercy, lead me into them, O God of my peace and my love.’ After this manner old, angry, ill-conditioned Prejudice prayed every day till he died, a little child, in charity with all men, and in acceptance with Almighty God.

‘I am made all things to all men . . . I please all men in all things.’—Paul

Captain Anything came originally from the ancient town of Fair-speech.

Fair-speech had many royal bounties and many special privileges bestowed upon it, and Captain Anything and his family had come to many titles and to great riches in that ancient, loyal, and honourable borough. My Lord Turn-about, my Lord Time-server, my Lord Fair-speech (from whose ancestors that town first took its name), as also such well-known commoners as Mr. Smooth-man, Mr. Facing-both-ways, and Mr. Two-tongues were all sprung with Captain Anything from the same ancient and long-established ancestry. As to his religion, from a child young Anything had sat under the parson of the parish, the same Reverend Two-tongues as has been mentioned above. And our budding soldier followed the example of his minister in that he never strove too long against wind or tide, or was ever to be seen on the same side of the street with Religion when she was banished from court or had lost her silver slippers. The crest of the Anythings was a delicately poised weather-cock; and the motto engraved around the gyrating bird ran thus: ‘Our judgment always jumps according to the occasion.’ As a military man, Captain Anything is described in military books as a proper man, and a man of courage and skill—to appearance. He and his company under him were a sort of Swiss guard in Mansoul. They held themselves open and ready for any master. They lived not so much by religion or by loyalty as by the fates of worldly fortune. In his secret despatches Diabolus was wont to address Captain Anything as My Darling; and be sure you recruit your Switzers well, Diabolus would say; but when the real stress of the war came, even Diabolus cast Captain Anything off. And thus it came about that when both sides were against this despised creature he had to throw down his arms and flee into a safe skulking place for his life.

1. In that half-papist, half-atheistic country called France there is a class of politicians known by the name of Opportunists. They are a kind of public men that, we are thankful to say, are not known in Protestant and Evangelical England, but they may be pictured out and described to you in this homely way: An Opportunist stands well out of the sparks of the fire, and well in behind the stone wall, till the fanatics for liberty, equality, and fraternity have snatched the chestnuts out of the fire, and then the Opportunist steps out from his safe place and blandly divides the well-roasted tid-bits among his family and his friends. As long as there is any jeopardy, the Jacobins are denounced and held up to opprobrium; but when the jeopardy and the risk are well past, the sober-minded, cautious, conservative, and responsible statesmen walk off with the portfolios of place and privilege and pay under their honest arms. But these are the unprincipled papists and infidels of a mushroom republic; and, thank God, such spurious patriotism, and such sham and selfish statesmanship, have not yet shown their miserable heads among faithful, fearless, straightforward, and uncalculating Englishmen. At the same time, if ever that continental vice should attack our national character, we have two well-known essays in our ethical and casuistical literature that may with perfect safety be pitted against anything that either France or Italy has produced. Even if they are but a master’s irony, let all ambitious men keepOf CunningandOf Wisdom for a Man’s Selfunder their pillow. Let all young men who would toady a great man; let all young ministers who would tune their pulpit to king, or court, or society; let all tradesmen and merchants who prefer their profits to their principles—if they have literature enough, let them soak their honest minds in our great Chancellor’s sage counsels; and he who promoted Anything and dubbed him his Darling, he will, no doubt, publish both a post and a title on his birthday for you also.

2. ‘What religion is he of?’ asks Dean Swift. ‘He is an Anythingarian,’ is the answer, ‘for he makes his self-interest the sole standard of his life and doctrine.’ And Archbishop Leighton, a very different churchman from the bitter author of thePolite Conversations, is equally contemptuous toward the self-seeker in divine things. ‘Your boasted peaceableness often proceeds from a superficial temper; and, not seldom, from a supercilious disdain of whatever has no marketable use or value, and from your utter indifference to true religion. Toleration is an herb of spontaneous growth in the soil of indifference. Much of our union of minds proceeds from want of knowledge and from want of affection to religion. Many who boast of their church conformity, and that no one hears of their noise, may thank the ignorance of their minds for that kind of quietness.’ But by far the most powerful assault that ever was made upon lukewarmness in religion and upon self-seeking in the Church was delivered by Dante in the tremendous third canto of hisInferno:—

Various tongues,Horrible languages, outcries of woe,Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse,With hands together smote that swelled the sounds,Made up a tumult that for ever whirlsRound through that air with solid darkness stain’d,Like to the sand that in the whirlwind flies.I then, with error yet encompass’d, cried,‘O master! What is this I hear? What raceAre these, who seem so overcome with woe?’He then to me: ‘This miserable fateSuffer the wretched souls of those who livedWithout or praise or blame, with that ill bandOf angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved,Nor yet were true to God, but for themselvesWere only. Mercy and Justice scorn them both.Speak not of them, but look and pass them by.’Forthwith, I understood for certain this the tribeOf those ill spirits both to God displeasingAnd to His foes. Those wretches who ne’er lived,Went on in nakedness, and sorely stungBy wasps and hornets, which bedewed their cheeksWith blood, that mix’d with tears dropp’d to their feet,And by disgustful worms was gathered there.

3. Now, we must all lay it continually and with uttermost humiliation to heart that we all have Captain Anything’s opportunism, his self-interest, his insincerity, his instability, and his secret deceitfulness in ourselves. That man knows little of himself who does not despise and hate himself for his secret self-seeking even in the service of God. For, how the love of praise will seduce and corrupt this man, and the love of gain that man! How easy it is to flatter and adulate this man out of all his former opinions and his deepest principles, and how an expected advantage will make that other man forget now an old alliance and now a deep antipathy! How often the side we take even in the most momentous matters is decided by the most unworthy motives and the most contemptible considerations! Unstable as water, Reuben shall not excel. Double-minded men, we, like Jacob’s first-born, are unstable in all our ways. We have no anchor, or, what anchor we sometimes have soon slips. We have no fixed pole-star by which to steer our life. Any will-o’-the-wisp of pleasure, or advantage, or praise will run us on the rocks. The searchers of Mansoul, after long search, at last lighted on Anything, and soon made an end of him. Seek him out in your own soul also. Be you sure he is somewhere there. He is skulking somewhere there. And, having found him, if you cannot on the spot make an end of him, keep your eye on him, and never say that you are safe from him and his company as long as you are in this soul-deceiving life. And, that Anything will not be let enter the gates of the city you are set on seeking, that will go largely to make that sweet and clean and truthful city your very heaven to you.

4. ‘I am made all things to all men, and I please all men in all things.’ One would almost think that was Captain Anything himself, in a frank, cynical, and self-censorious moment. But if you will look it up you will see that it was a very different man. The words are the words of Anything, but the heart behind the words is the heart of Paul. And this, again, teaches us that we should be like the Messiah in this also, not to judge after the sight of our eyes, nor to reprove after the hearing of our ears. Miserable Anything! outcast alike of heaven and hell! But, O noble and blessed Apostle! the man, says Thomas Goodwin, who shall be found seated next to Jesus Christ Himself in the kingdom of God. Happy Paul: happy even on this earth, since he could say, and in the measure he could say with truth and with sincerity, such self-revelations as these: ‘Unto the Jews I am become as a Jew that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law. To them that are without law, as without law, that I might gain them that are without law. To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak; I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. Giving none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the Church of God. Even as I please all men in all things, not seeking mine own profit, but the profit of many, that they may be saved.’ Noble words, and inspiring to read. Yes: but look within, and think what Paul must have passed through; think what he must have been put through before he,—a man of like selfish passions as we are, a man of like selfish passions as Anything was,—could say all that. Let his crosses and his thorns; his raptures up to the third heaven, and his body of death that he bore about with him all his days; let his magnificent spiritual gifts, and his still more magnificent spiritual graces tell how they all worked together to make the chief of sinners out of the blameless Pharisee, and, at the same time, Christ’s own chosen vessel and the apostle of all the churches. Boasting about his patron apostle, St. Augustine says: ‘Far be it from so great an apostle, a vessel elect of God, an organ of the Holy Ghost, to be one man when he preached and another when he wrote; one man in private and another in public. He was made all things to all men, not by the craft of a deceiver, but from the affection of a sympathiser, succouring the diverse diseases of souls with the diverse emotions of compassion; to the little ones dispensing the lesser doctrines, not false ones, but the higher mysteries to the perfect—all of them, however, true, harmonious, and divine.’ The exquisite irony of Socrates comes into my mind in this connection, and will not be kept out of my mind. By instinct as well as by art Socrates mixed up the profoundest seriousness with the humorous affectation of qualities of mind and even of character the exact opposite of what all who loved him knew to be the real Socrates. ‘Intellectually,’ says Dr. Thomson, ‘the acutest man of his age, Socrates represents himself in all companies as the dullest person present. Morally the purest, he affects to be the slave of passion and borrows the language even of the lewd to describe a love and a good-will far too exalted for the comprehension of his contemporaries. This irony of his disarmed ridicule by anticipating it; it allayed jealousy and propitiated envy; and it possibly procured him admission into gay circles from which a more solemn teacher would have been excluded. But all the time it had for its basis a real greatness of soul, a hearty and an unaffected disregard of public opinion, a perfect disinterestedness, and an entire abnegation of self. He made himself a fool in order that fools by his folly might be made wise; he humbled himself to the level of those among whom his work lay that he might raise some few among them to his own level; he was all things to all men, if by any means he might save some. Till Alcibiades ends the splendid eloge that Plato puts into his mouth with these words, “All my master’s vice and stupidity and worship of wealthy and great men is counterfeit. It is all but the Silenus-mask which conceals the features of the god within; for if you remove the covering, how shall I describe to you, my friends and boon companions, the excellence of the beauty you will find within! Whether any of you have seen Socrates in his serious mood, when he has thrown aside the mask and disclosed the divine features beneath it, is more than I know. But I have seen them, and I can tell you that they seemed to me glorious and marvellous, and, truly, godlike in their beauty.”’

Well, now, I gather out of all that this great lesson: that it is, to begin with, a mere matter of temperament, or what William Law would call a mere matter of complexion and sensibility, whether, to begin with, a man is hard, and dry, and narrow, and stiff, and proud, and scornful, and cruel; or again, whether he is soft and tender, broad and open, and full of sympathy and of the milk of human kindness. At first, and to begin with, there is neither praise nor blame as yet in the matter. A man is hard just as a stone is hard; it is his nature. Or he is soft as clay is soft; it is again his nature. But, inheriting such a nature, and his inherited nature beginning to appear, then is the time when the true man really begins to be made. The bad man dwells in contentment, and, indeed, by preference, at home in his own hard, proud, scornful, resentful heart; or, again, in his facile, fawning, tide-waiting, time-serving heart; and thus he chooses, accepts, and prefers his evil fate, and never seeks the help either of God or man to enable him to rise above it. Paul was not, when we meet him first, the sweet, humble, affable, placable, makeable man that he made himself and came to be after a lifetime of gospel-preaching and of adorning the gospel he preached. And all the assistances and all the opportunities that came to Paul are still coming to you and to me; till, whether naturally pliable and affectionate or the opposite, we at last shall come to the temperament, the complexion, and the exquisite sensibility of Paul himself. Are you, then, a hard, stiff, severe, censorious, proud, angry, scornful man? Or are you a too-easy, too-facile man-pleaser and self-seeker, being all things to all men that you may make use of all men? Are you? Then say so. Confess it to be so. Admit that you have found yourself out. And reflect every day what you have got to do in life. Consider what a new birth you need and must have. Number your days that are left you in which to make you a new heart, and a new nature, and a new character. Consider well how you are to set about that divine work. You have a minister, and your minister is called a divine because by courtesy he is supposed to understand that divine work, and to be engaged on it night and day in himself, and in season and out of season among his people. He will tell you how you are to make you a new heart. Or, if he does not and cannot do that; if he preaches about everything but that to a people who will listen to anything but that, then your soul is not in his hands but in your own. You may not be able to choose your minister, but you can choose what books you are to buy, or borrow, and read. And if there is not a minister within a hundred miles of you who knows his right hand from his left, then there are surely some booksellers who will advise you about the classical books of the soul till you can order them for yourselves. And thus, if it is your curse and your shame to be as spongy, and soapy, and oily, and slippery as Anything himself; if you choose your church and your reading with any originality, sense, and insight, you need not fear but that you will be let live till you die an honest, upright, honourable, fearless gentleman: no timid friend to unfashionable truth, as you are to-night, but a man like Thomas Boston’s Ettrick elder, who lies waiting the last trump under a gravestone engraven with this legend: Here lies a man who had a brow for every good cause. Only, if you would have that written and read on your headstone, you have no time to lose. If I were you I would not sit another Sabbath under a minister whose preaching was not changing my nature, making my heart new, and transforming my character; no, not though the Queen herself sat in the same loft. And I would leave the church even of my fathers, and become anything as far as churches go, if I could get a minister who held my face close and ever closer up to my own heart. Nor would I spend a shilling or an hour that I could help on any impertinent book,—any book that did not powerfully help me in the one remaining interest of my one remaining life: a new nature and a new heart. No, not I. No, not I any more.

‘ . . . the promise made of none effect.’—Paul

Toward the end of the thirteenth century Edward the First, the English Justinian, brought a select colony of artists from Italy to England and gave them a commission to execute their best coinage for the English Mint. Deft and skilful as those artists were, the work they turned out was but rude and clumsy compared with some of the gold and silver and copper coins of our day. The Florentine artists took a sheet of gold or of silver and divided the sheet up with great scissors, and then they hammered the cut-out pieces as only a Florentine hammerman could hammer them. But, working with such tools, and working on such methods, those goldsmiths and silversmiths, with all their art, found it impossible to give an absolutely equal weight and worth to every piece of money that they turned out. For one thing, their cut and hammered coins had no carved rims round their edges as all our gold and silver and even copper coinage now has. And, accordingly, the clever rogues of that day soon discovered that it was far easier for them to take up a pair of shears and to clip a sliver of silver off the rough rim of a shilling, or a shaving of gold off a sovereign, than it was to take of their coats and work a hard day’s work. Till to clip the coin of the realm soon became one of the easiest and most profitable kinds of crime. In the time of Elizabeth a great improvement was made in the way of coining the public money; but it was soon found that this had only made matters worse. For now, side by side with a pure and unimpaired and full-valued currency, and mingled up everywhere with it, there was the old, clipped, debased, and far too light gold and silver money; till troubles arose in connection with the coinage and circulation of the country that can only be told by Macaulay’s extraordinarily graphic pen. ‘It may well be doubted,’ Macaulay says, in the twenty-first chapter of hisHistory of England, ‘whether all the misery which has been inflicted on the English nation in a quarter of a century by bad Kings, bad Ministers, bad Parliaments, and bad Judges was equal to the misery caused in a single year by bad crowns and bad shillings. Whether Whigs or Tories, Protestants or Papists were uppermost, the grazier drove his beasts to market, the grocer weighed out his currants, the draper measured out his broadcloth, the hum of buyers and sellers was as loud as ever in the towns; the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire; the apple juice foamed in the presses of Herefordshire; the piles of crockery glowed in the furnaces of the Trent, and the barrows of coal rolled fast along the timber railways of the Tyne. But when the great instrument of exchange became thoroughly deranged all trade and all industry were smitten as with a palsy. Nothing could be purchased without a dispute. Over every counter there was wrangling from morning to night. The employer and his workmen had a quarrel as regularly as Saturday night came round. On a fair day or a market day the clamours, the disputes, the reproaches, the taunts, the curses, were incessant. No merchant would contract to deliver goods without making some stipulation about the quality of the coin in which he was to be paid. The price of the necessaries of life, of shoes, of ale, of oatmeal, rose fast. The bit of metal called a shilling the labourer found would not go so far as sixpence. One day Tonson sends forty brass shillings to Dryden, to say nothing of clipped money. The great poet sends them all back and demands in their place good guineas. “I expect,” he says, “good silver, not such as I had formerly.” Meanwhile, at every session of the Old Bailey the most terrible example of coiners and clippers was made. Hurdles, with four, five, six wretches convicted of counterfeiting or mutilating the money of the realm, were dragged month after month up Holborn Hill.’ But I cannot copy the whole chapter, wonderful as the writing is. Suffice it to say that before the clippers could be rooted out, and confidence restored between buyer and seller, the greatest statesmen, the greatest financiers, and the greatest philosophers were all at their wits’ end. Kings’ speeches, cabinet councils, bills of Parliament, and showers of pamphlets were all full in those days of the clipper and the coiner. All John Locke’s great intellect came short of grappling successfully with the terrible crisis the clipper of the coin had brought upon England. Carry all that, then, over into the life of personal religion, after the manner of our Lord’s parables, and after the manner of thePilgrim’s Progressand theHoly War, and you will see what an able and impressive use John Bunyan will make of the shears of the coin-clippers of his day. Macaulay has but made us ready to open and understand Bunyan. ‘After this, my Lord apprehended Clip-Promise. Now, because he was a notorious villain, for by his doings much of the king’s coin was abused, therefore he was made a public example. He was arraigned and judged to be set first in the pillory, then to be whipped by all the children and servants in Mansoul, and then to be hanged till he was dead. Some may wonder at the severity of this man’s punishment, but those that are honest traders in Mansoul they are sensible of the great abuse that one clipper of promises in little time may do in the town of Mansoul; and, truly, my judgment is that all those of his name and life should be served out even as he.’

The grace of God is like a bullion mass of purest gold, and then Jesus Christ is the great ingot of that gold, and then Moses, and David, and Isaiah, and Hosea, and Paul, and Peter, and John are the inspired artists who have commission to take both bullion and ingot, and out of them to cut, and beat, and smelt, and shape, and stamp, and superscribe the promises, and then to issue the promises to pass current in the market of salvation like so many shekels, and pounds, and pence, and farthings, and mites, as the case may be. And it was just these royal coins, imaged and superscribed so richly and so beautifully, that Clip-Promise so mutilated, abused, and debased, till for doing so he was hanged by the neck till he was dead.

1. The very house of Israel herself, the very Mint-house, Tower Hill, and Lombard Street of Israel herself, was full of false coiners and clippers of the promises; as full as ever England was at her very worst. Israel clipped her Messianic promises and lived upon the clippings instead of upon the coin. Her coming Christ, and His salvation already begun, were the true spiritual currency of Old Testament times; while round that central Image of her great promise there ran an outside rim of lesser promises that all took their true and their only value from Him whose image and superscription stood within. But those besotted and infatuated men of Israel, instead of entering into and living by the great spiritual promises given to them in their Messiah, made lands, and houses, and meat, and drink, all the Messiah they cared for. Matthew Henry says that when we go to the merchant to buy goods, he gives us the paper and the pack-thread to the bargain. Well, those children and fools in Israel actually threw away the goods and hoarded and boasted over the paper and the pack-thread. Our old Scottish lawyers have made us familiar with the distinction in the church betweenspiritualiaandtemporalia. Well, the Jews let thespiritualiago to those who cared to take such things, while they held fast to thetemporalia. And all that went on till His disciples had the effrontery to clip and coin under our Lord’s very eyes, and even to ask Him to hold the coin while they sharpened their shears. ‘O faithless and perverse generation! How long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! And beginning at Moses and all the prophets He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.’

2. But those who live in glass houses must take care not to throw stones. And thus the greatest fool in Israel is safe from you and me. For, like them, and just as if we had never read one word about them, we bend our hearts and our children’s hearts to things seen and temporal, and then, after things seen and temporal have all cast us off, we begin to ask if there is any solace or sweetness for a cast-off heart in things unseen and eternal. There are great gaps clipt out of our Bibles that not God Himself can ever print or paste in again. Look and see if half the Book of Proverbs, for instance, with all its noble promises to a godly youth, is not clipt clean out of your dismembered Bible. That fine leaf also, ‘My son, give Me thine heart,’ is clean gone out of the twenty-third chapter of the Proverbs years and years ago. As is the best part of the noble Book of Daniel, and almost the whole of Second Timothy. ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and meat and drink, and wife and child shall be added unto you.’ Your suicidal shears have cut that golden promise for ever out of your Sermon on the Mount. So much so that if any or all of these temporal mercies ever come to you, they will come of pure and undeserved mercy, for the time has long passed when you could plead any promise for them. Still, there are two most excellent uses left to which you can even yet put your mangled and dismembered Bible. You can make a splendid use of its gaps and of its gashes, and of those waste places where great promises at one time stood. You can make a grand use even of those gaps if you will descend into them and draw out of them humiliation and repentance, compunction, contrition, and resignation. And this use also: When you are moved to take some man who is still young into your confidence, ask him to let you see his Bible and then let him see yours, and point out to him the rents and wounds and wilderness places in yours. And thus, by these two uses of a clipped-up and half-empty Bible, you may make gains that shall yet set you above those whose Bibles of promises are still as fresh as when they came from God’s own hand. And Samson said, I will now put forth a riddle unto you: Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.

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