Bunyan Characters-3 [6]
to come in the very act of sin. It will make me start back before I make Christ cruel or false, a wine-bibber, a glutton, or unclean. I feel at this moment as if I shall yet come to ask Him at every meal, and at every other opportunity and temptation of every kind, what He would have and what He would do before I go on to take or to do anything myself. What a check, what a restraint, what an awful scrupulosity that will henceforth work in me! But, through that, what a pure, blameless, noble, holy and heavenly life I shall then lead! What bodily pains, diseases, premature decays; what mental remorses, what shames and scandals, what self-loathings and what self- disgusts, what cups bitterer to drink than blood, I shall then escape! Yes, O Paul, I shall henceforth hold with thee that my body is the temple of Christ, and that I am not my own, but that I am bought with a transporting price, and can, therefore, do nothing less than glorify God in my body and in my spirit which are God's. 'This place,' says the Pauline author of the Holy War--'This place the King intended but for Himself alone, and not for another with Him.'
But, my brethren, lay this well, and as never before, to heart-- this, namely, that when you thus begin to keep any gate for Christ, your King and Captain and Better-self,--Ear-gate, or Eye-gate, or Mouth-gate, or any other gate--you will have taken up a task that shall have no end with you in this life. Till you begin in dead earnest to watch your heart, and all the doors of your heart, as if you were watching Christ's heart for Him and all the doors of His heart, you will have no idea of the arduousness and the endurance, the sleeplessness and the self-denial, of the undertaking.
'Mansoul! Her wars seemed endless in her eyes; She's lost by one, becomes another's prize. Mansoul! Her mighty wars, they did portend Her weal or woe and that world without end. Wherefore she must be more concern'd than they Whose fears begin and end the self-same day.'
'We all thought one battle would decide it,' says Richard Baxter, writing about the Civil War. 'But we were all very much mistaken,' sardonically adds Carlyle. Yes; and you will be very much mistaken too if you enter on the war with sin in your soul, in your senses and in your members, with powder and shot for one engagement only. When you enlist here, lay well to heart that it is for life. There is no discharge in this war. There are no ornamental old pensioners here. It is a warfare for eternal life, and nothing will end it but the end of your evil days on earth.
CHAPTER III--EAR-GATE
'Take heed what ye hear.'--Our Lord in Mark. 'Take heed how you hear.'--Our Lord in Luke.
This famous town of Mansoul had five gates, in at which to come, out at which to go, and these were made likewise answerable to the walls--to wit, impregnable, and such as could never be opened nor forced but by the will and leave of those within. 'The names of the gates were these, Ear-gate, Eye-gate,' and so on. Dr. George Wilson, who was once Professor of Technology in our University, took this suggestive passage out of the Holy War and made it the text of his famous lecture in the Philosophical Institution, and then he printed the passage on the fly-leaf of his delightful book The Five Gateways of Knowledge. That is a book to read sometime, but this evening is to be spent with the master.
For, after all, no one can write at once so beautifully, so quaintly, so suggestively, and so evangelically as John Bunyan. 'The Lord Willbewill,' says John Bunyan, 'took special care that the gates should be secured with double guards, double bolts, and double locks and bars; and that Ear-gate especially might the better be looked to, for that was the gate in at which the King's forces sought most to enter. The Lord Willbewill therefore made old Mr. Prejudice, an angry and ill-conditioned fellow, captain of the ward at that gate, and put under his power sixty men, called Deafmen; men advantageous for that service, forasmuch as they mattered no words of the
But, my brethren, lay this well, and as never before, to heart-- this, namely, that when you thus begin to keep any gate for Christ, your King and Captain and Better-self,--Ear-gate, or Eye-gate, or Mouth-gate, or any other gate--you will have taken up a task that shall have no end with you in this life. Till you begin in dead earnest to watch your heart, and all the doors of your heart, as if you were watching Christ's heart for Him and all the doors of His heart, you will have no idea of the arduousness and the endurance, the sleeplessness and the self-denial, of the undertaking.
'Mansoul! Her wars seemed endless in her eyes; She's lost by one, becomes another's prize. Mansoul! Her mighty wars, they did portend Her weal or woe and that world without end. Wherefore she must be more concern'd than they Whose fears begin and end the self-same day.'
'We all thought one battle would decide it,' says Richard Baxter, writing about the Civil War. 'But we were all very much mistaken,' sardonically adds Carlyle. Yes; and you will be very much mistaken too if you enter on the war with sin in your soul, in your senses and in your members, with powder and shot for one engagement only. When you enlist here, lay well to heart that it is for life. There is no discharge in this war. There are no ornamental old pensioners here. It is a warfare for eternal life, and nothing will end it but the end of your evil days on earth.
CHAPTER III--EAR-GATE
'Take heed what ye hear.'--Our Lord in Mark. 'Take heed how you hear.'--Our Lord in Luke.
This famous town of Mansoul had five gates, in at which to come, out at which to go, and these were made likewise answerable to the walls--to wit, impregnable, and such as could never be opened nor forced but by the will and leave of those within. 'The names of the gates were these, Ear-gate, Eye-gate,' and so on. Dr. George Wilson, who was once Professor of Technology in our University, took this suggestive passage out of the Holy War and made it the text of his famous lecture in the Philosophical Institution, and then he printed the passage on the fly-leaf of his delightful book The Five Gateways of Knowledge. That is a book to read sometime, but this evening is to be spent with the master.
For, after all, no one can write at once so beautifully, so quaintly, so suggestively, and so evangelically as John Bunyan. 'The Lord Willbewill,' says John Bunyan, 'took special care that the gates should be secured with double guards, double bolts, and double locks and bars; and that Ear-gate especially might the better be looked to, for that was the gate in at which the King's forces sought most to enter. The Lord Willbewill therefore made old Mr. Prejudice, an angry and ill-conditioned fellow, captain of the ward at that gate, and put under his power sixty men, called Deafmen; men advantageous for that service, forasmuch as they mattered no words of the