Bunyan Characters-2 [52]
from your place; for your town is worse than is the City of Destruction itself. Yes, answered Honest, we lie more off from the sun, and so are more cold and senseless. And his biographer here annotates on the margin this reflection: "Stupefied ones are worse than merely carnal." So they are; though it takes some insight to see that, and some courage to carry that through. Now, to be downright stupid in a man's natural intellects is sad enough, but to be stupid in the intellects of the soul and of the spirit is far more sad. You will often see this if you have any eyes in your head, and are not one of the stupid people yourself. You will see very clever people in the intellects of the head who are yet as stupid as the beasts in the stall in the far nobler intellects of the heart. You will meet every day with men and women who have received the best college education this city can give them, who are yet stark stupid in everything that belongs to true religion. They are quick to find out the inefficiency of a university chair, or a schoolmaster's desk, but they know no more of what a New Testament pulpit has been set up for than the stupidest sot in the city. The Divine Nature, human nature, sin, grace, redemption, salvation, holiness, heart-corruption, spiritual life, prayer, communion with God, a conversation and a treasure in heaven,--to all these noblest of studies and divinest of exercises they are as a beast before God. When you come upon a man who is a sot in his senses and in his understanding, you expect him to be the same in his spiritual life. But to meet with an expert in science, a classical scholar, an author or a critic in letters, a leader in political or ecclesiastical or municipal life, and yet to discover that he is as stupid as any sot in the things of his own soul, is one of the saddest and most disheartening sights you can see. Much sadder and much more disheartening than to see stairs and streets of people who can neither read nor write. And yet our city is full of such stupid people. You will find as utter spiritual stupidity among the rich and the lettered and the refined of this city as you will find among the ignorant and the vicious and the criminal classes. Is stupidity a sin? asks Thomas in his Forty-Sixth Question. And the great schoolman answers himself, "Stupidity may come of natural incapacity, in which case it is not a sin. But it may come, on the other hand, of a man immersing his soul in the things of this world so as to shut out all the things of God and of the world to come, in which case stupidity is a deadly sin." Now, from all that, you must already see what you are to do in order to escape from your inborn and superinduced stupidity. You are, like Old Honest, to open your gross, cold, senseless heart to the Sun of Righteousness, and you are to take care every day to walk abroad under His beams. You are to emigrate south for your life, as our well-to-do invalids do, to where the sun shines in his strength all the day. You are to choose such a minister, buy and read such a literature, cultivate such an acquaintanceship, and follow out such a new life of habits and practices as shall bring you into the full sunshine, till your heart of ice is melted, and your stupefied soul is filled with spiritual sensibility. For, were a man a mountain of ice," said Old Honest, "yet if the Sun of Righteousness will arise upon him his frozen heart shall feel a thaw; and thus hath it been with me." Your poets and your philosophers have no resource against the stupidity that opposes them. "Even the gods," they complain, "fight unvictorious against stupidity." But your divines and your preachers have hope beside the dullest and the stupidest and even the most imbruted. They point themselves and their slowest and dullest-witted hearers to Old Honest, this rare old saint; and they set up their pulpit with hope and boldness on the very causeway of the town of Stupidity itself.
2. In the second place,--on this fine old pilgrim's birth and boyhood and youth. The apostle says that
2. In the second place,--on this fine old pilgrim's birth and boyhood and youth. The apostle says that