most tremendous passage in regard to Esau selling his birthright, and after finding no place of repentance. "Oh," says Bunyan, "the combats and conflicts that I did meet with! As I strove to hold by this word of promise, that of Esau would fly in my face like lightning. So my soul did hang as in a pair of scales, sometimes up, and sometimes down; now in peace, and now again in terror. And I remember one day, as I was in divers frames of spirit, and considering that the frames were according to the nature of several scriptures that came in upon my mind, if this of grace, then I was quiet; but if that of Esau, then tormented. Lord, thought I, if both these scriptures should meet in my heart at once, I wonder which of them would get the better of me. So methought I had a longing mind that they might come both together upon me; yea, I desired of God they might. Well, about two or three days after, so they did indeed; they bolted both upon me at a time, and did work and struggle strongly in me for a while; at last that about Esau's birthright began to wax weak, and withdraw, and vanish, and this about the sufficiency of grace prevailed with power and joy. And as I was in a muse about this thing, that scripture came in upon me, Mercy rejoiceth over judgment. This was a wonderment to me, yet truly I am apt to think it was of God, for the word of the law and wrath must give place to the word of life and grace; because, though the word of condemnation be glorious, yet the word of life and salvation doth far exceed in glory. Also, that Moses and Elias must both vanish, and leave Christ and his saints alone."

Now we may call this a conceit, if we please, but to some minds this use of scripture is inimitably sweet and beautiful. Nor can there be any thing more beautiful than to see this soldier of Jesus Christ escaped from the perils of the conflict, sitting down to trace, with so calm and skilful a hand, and a heart so believing, joyous, and grateful, the evolutions and currents of the battle, the movements of his great Commander on the one side, and of his fierce Adversary on the other.

The consideration of Bunyan's temptations reveals to us three great secrets; the secret of his deep experimental knowledge of the power of God's word; the secret of his great skill and power in preaching; and the secret of his pure, idiomatic, energetic, English style. Every step he took in the word of God was experimental. The Bible was his book of all learning; for years he studied it as for his life. No bewildered mariner, in a crazy bark on an unknown sea, amidst sunken reefs and dangerous shallows, ever pondered his chart with half the earnestness. It was as if life or death depended on every time he opened it, and every line he read. The scriptures were wonderful things unto him; he saw that the truth and verity of them were the keys of the kingdom of heaven; those that the scriptures favour, they must inherit bliss; but those that they oppose and condemn must perish for evermore. "One sentence of the scripture did more afflict and terrify my mind, I mean those sentences that stood against me, as sometimes I thought they every one of them did, than an army of forty thousand men that might come against me. Wo be to him, against whom the scriptures bend themselves. This made me, with careful heart and watchful eye, with great fearfulness to turn over every leaf, and with much diligence mixed with trembling, to consider every sentence, together with its natural force and latitude. Now would he leap into the bosom of that promise, that yet he feared did shut its heart against him. Now also I would labour to take the word as God hath laid it down, without restraining the natural force of one syllable thereof. Oh! what did I now see in that blessed sixth of John! 'And him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.' Oh many a pull hath my heart had with Satan for that blessed sixth of John! A word, a word, to lean a weary soul upon, that it might not sink for ever! It was that I hunted for! Yea, often when I have been making for the promise, I have seen as if the Lord would refuse my soul for ever. I was often as if I had run upon the pikes, and as if the Lord had thrust at me, to keep me from him as with a flaming sword!

Here we have the secret of Bunyan's experimental knowledge of the word of God; and this, coupled with the remembrance of the tenor of holy Mr. Gifford's instructions to take nothing upon trust, but to labour to be set down by the Spirit of God in the word of God, and how faithfully Bunyan made this his practice, shows us how he came to be so rooted and grounded in divine truth, so consummate a master in it, in its living beauty and harmony. He was led from truth to truth by the Divine Spirit; every part of the gospel was thus revealed unto him; he could not express what he saw and felt of its glory, of the steadiness of Jesus Christ, the Rock of man's salvation, and of the power, sweetness, light, and fitness of his word. It was as a fire and a hammer in his

own soul, burning and beating. It was food and nourishment to his spiritual life, and a clothing of majesty and glory to his intellect. There never was a being more perfectly and entirely created out of the scriptures.

And here too, in his intense study of the Bible, you have the secret of the purity of his English style. How is it possible, it might have been asked, that this illiterate man, familiar with none of the acknowledged models of his native tongue, can have acquired a style which its most skilful and eloquent masters might envy, for its artless simplicity, purity, and strength! It was because his soul was baptized by the Spirit of God in its native idioms; because he was familiar as no other man of his age was, with the model, the very best model of the English tongue in existence, our common English Bible! Yes! that very Bible, which some modern infidel reformers would exclude from our schools, and from its blessed place of influence over the hearts and minds of our children! The fervour of the poet's soul, acting through the medium of such a language as he learned from our common translation of the scriptures, has produced some of the most admirable specimens in existence of the manly power and familiar beauty of the English tongue. There are passages even in the Grace Abounding, which for fervidness and power of expression might be placed side by side with any thing in the most admired authors, and not suffer in the comparison. Bunyan is not less to be praised than Shakspeare himself for the purity of his language, and the natural simplicity of his style. It comes even nearer indeed, to the common diction of good conversation. Its idioms are genuine English, in their most original state, unmingled with any external ornament, and of a beauty unborrowed from any foreign shades of expression.

Then too, Bunyan's imagination, his judgment, his taste, every faculty of his mind was developed, disciplined, and enriched at the same great fountain of the Scriptures. The poetry of the Bible was the source of his poetical power. His heart was not only made new by the Spirit of the Bible, but his whole intellectual being was penetrated and transfigured by its influence. He brought the spirit and power gathered from so long and exclusive a communion with the prophets and apostles to the composition of every page of the Pilgrim's Progress. To the habit of mind thus induced, and the workings of an imagination thus disciplined, may be traced the simplicity of all his imagery, and the great power of his personifications. The spirit of his work is Hebrew; we may trace the mingled influence both of David and Isaiah in the character of his genius; and as to the images in the sacred poets, he is lavish in the use of them, in the most natural and unconscious manner possible: his mind was imbued with them. He is indeed the only poet, whose genius was nourished entirely by the Bible. He felt and thought in scripture imagery.

Now here are great lessons for all our minds. We say to every young man, whose intellectual as well as moral habits are now formed, Do you wish to gain a mastery over your native language in its earliest, purest, freshest idioms, and to command a style, in which you may speak with power to the very hearts of the people? Study your Bible, your English Bible; study it with your feelings, your heart, and let its beautiful forms of expression entwine themselves around your sensibilities, your very habits of thinking, no more to be separated from them, than sensibility and thought itself can be separated from your existence. We stand in amazement at the blessed power of transfiguration which the Bible possesses for the human intellect. And yet we are not amazed, for the Bible is the voice of God, and the words of the Bible are the words of God, and he who will give himself up to them, who will feed upon them, and love them, and dwell amidst them, shall have his intellect and his soul transfigured with glory and blessedness by them. Do you ask for experience? Do you desire life? Hear our Saviour: "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life!" But beware you let no mediator come between your soul and its immediate, electric contact with those lively oracles. Beware you let no church with its 'self-assumed authority of interpretation, hang up its darkening veil between your soul and the open face of God in the scriptures. Come to them for yourself. Say to yourself, This is my possession, and no church, and no priest, and no power in the universe shall wrest it from me. This is my God and my Saviour speaking to me; and he shall speak to me, though the whole church were against me, or though I were the only Christian in the world. Yea," saith our Saviour, "if ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.' We say, Put your soul beneath the fire of God's word, and not beneath the winking tapers of the fathers, or the councils or the traditions in the churches! And

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just so, if we could get the Roman Catholics within the sound of our voice in God's sanctuary, we would say to every Roman Catholic, How can you be willing, as a man and a Christian, to let any priest, or pope, or church, or daring council, or saint on earth, or saint in heaven, take from your soul your immediate personal communion with your God? Come to him yourself, and live upon his words yourself, and all the anathemas of all the popes, councils, priests, and churches in the world, shall only strengthen and deepen in your soul the elements of eternal blessedness.

And to every Christian we would say, Mind the example of Bunyan and his wise Evangelist, "holy Mr. Gifford," and when you study the scriptures, study them as for your life, take fast hold upon them, bind them upon your neck, engrave them in your affections, seek to be set down in them by the Spirit of God, seek their experimental knowledge, the living, burning experience of their power. Let the Spirit of God lead you from truth to truth. So, and in no other way, you can be powerful as a Christian. Yea, this was the experience of Paul and Luther and Bunyan, and of all men mighty in the scriptures. This is the experience that we need, in this very age into which we are thrown, in order to save the church and the world from destruction. This is the experience that must constitute a new era of power in the church if we would meet the crisis that has come upon us, in the resurrection of old exploded errors under new forms. We must not let Christ be displaced by the church. We must enter, as Zuingle said, into God's thoughts in his own word; and we must dwell there, as in a tower of invincible strength and glory! Hear an old, noble, martyred saint, now in glory. "I had rather follow the shadow of Christ," said the blessed reformer and martyr, Bishop Hooper, the body of all the general councils or doctors since the death of Christ. It is mine opinion unto all the world, that the scriptures solely, and the apostles' church is to be followed, and no man's authority, be he Augustine, Tertullian, or even cherubim or seraphim!"

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And to every unconverted person we would say, See how Bunyan entered the strait and narrow way and rose to Heaven. He followed the word of God. Take you the word of God. Take that one sentence, Flee from the wrath to come; and let it point you to that other sentence, Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. And if the world, seeing you so set out, ridicule you, shut your ears like Christian and run forward, and stay not, till the Wicket Gate opens before you, and you enter, and become a blessed Pilgrim from the City of Destruction to the City of Immanuel.

Here now is the secret of Bunyan's power in preaching. He became a preacher through his power in God's word. That word, so kindled in his soul by the Spirit of God, could not be repressed; it would blaze out; it was as a fire in his bones, if he restrained it, and it must burn. Unconsciously to himself, others first marked its power in him, and marked him as an instrument of God, for the instruction of his people and the conversion of men. Bunyan was pressed on, but never put himself forward. The gifts and graces of God in him shone so brightly, that men would have him for their minister. He was exceedingly retiring, humble, trembling, self-distrustful, and began to speak only to a few, in few words, in little meetings. But it was soon seen and felt that the Spirit and the word of God were speaking in him. And even before he became the ordained pastor of a people, he had that seal of God's ambassadors, which is better than all the consecrating oil of the Vatican, better than the hands of all the Bishops, better than all apostolical successions traced down through idolaters and adulterers in the House of God; he had the seal of the Spirit of God upon his preaching, bringing men to Christ. He could say, if he chose, "The seal of mine apostleship are YE IN THE LORD! Though I be not an apostle unto others, yet doubtless I am unto you. These things were, as well they might be, an argument unto Bunyan, that God had called him to, and stood by him in this work. Wherefore, says he, though of myself of all the saints the most unworthy, yet I, but with great fear and trembling at the sight of my own weakness, did set upon the work, and did, according to my gift, and the proportion of my faith, preach that blessed gospel that God has showed me in the holy word of truth; which, when the country understood, they came in to hear the word by hundreds, and that from all parts, though upon divers and sundry accounts.

Bunyan was called to his ministry, and led into it, by God's word, though most unfortunately not in the regular line of the apostolical succession. He enumerates the passages which ran in his mind and encouraged and strengthened him; and they are very striking, and all-ufficient for his justification. The first of them is that of Acts viii. 4, "There

fore they that were scattered abroad, went every where preaching the word." Bunyan knew there was no apostolical succession there. Another passage was that in 1 Peter iv. 10, "As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God." Bunyan knew that being addressed to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, there was no apostolical succession there. He also knew that in the case of the household of Stephanas, who had addicted themselves to the ministry of the saints, there was no apostolical succession. And these passages all were as so many certificates to him from Jesus Christ, that he, being called by the Holy Ghost, might preach the gospel. And so he did preach it, and many and blessed were the seals of his faithful stewardship. He knew what the office of the ministry was. He had often read Paul's catalogue of its qualifications, and they suited the frame of his own intrepid spirit." In all things approving ourselves as the ministers of God, in much patience, in afflictions, in necessities, in distresses, in stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in labours, in watchings, in fastings; by pureness, by knowledge, by long-suffering, by kindness, by the Holy Ghost, by love unfeigned, by the word of truth, by the power of God, by the armour of righteousness on the right hand and on the left, by honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report: as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things," 2 Cor. vi. 4-10. There is no apostolical succession here, nor prelatical nor episcopal consecration; but a succession of adversities; a consecration to the sacred fires of self-denial and of suffering for Christ's sake. Assuredly John Bunyan was as true, and regular, and Heaven-commissioned a minister of Jesus Christ, as any bishop in lawn sleeves, under whose jurisdiction he was forbidden to preach, and was thrust into prison.

Bunyan's life and discipline, under the leadings of Divine Providence, were very much like those of some of the early Reformers of England. In his character and his preaching he resembled not a little the honesty and vigour, the straight-forwardness and humour of Bishop Latimer. He had kindred qualities also with those of Luther, and the perusal of Luther's Commentary on Galatians, we doubt not, exerted a great influence on the character of Bunyan's preaching. Nevertheless, the little that Bunyan received from others became his own, as much as if it had originated with himself; being a process as natural and unconscious in his intellectual and moral being, as that in which the dews and light from heaven, falling on the plants, are worked into the nature of the fruits and foliage.

Bunyan always preached what he saw and felt, and so the character of his preaching varied with the aspect which divine truth, in the colouring of his personal hopes and fears, wore to his own soul. He enumerates three chief enclosures in the pastures of divine truth, in which he was detained by his own experience; for he dared not break through that hedge, and take things at second hand, as he might find them. He says, that he never endeavoured nor durst make use, of other men's lives, or tracings, though, he adds, I do not condemn all that do; for I verily thought and found by experience that what was taught me by the word and Spirit of Christ could be spoken, maintained, and stood to by the soundest and best established conscience. He could, in a great measure, say with the apostle, "I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man; for I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.'

In the first years of his preaching, Bunyan had not advanced to that richness and blissfulness of religious experience, in the possession and command of which he wrote the Pilgrim's Progress. As a preacher, he was at first as a man flying from hell, and warning others to flee also, but not having reached the gates of Heaven. He was as his own Pilgrim, trembling beneath the overhanging rocks of Sinai, stunned by the crashing peals of thunder, and well nigh blinded by the lightning. He was passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and knowing the terrors of the Lord he persuaded men, pouring out upon them, as in a stream of fire, the intensity of his own convictions. How he preached in the midst of such soul-torturing experience may be gathered from his own language: "This part of my work," says he, "I fulfilled with great sense for the terrors of the law, and guilt for my transgressions, lay heavy upon my conscience. I preached what I felt, what smartingly I did feel, even that, under which my poor soul did groan and tremble to astonishment. Indeed, I have been as one sent to them from

the dead.

I WENT MYSELF IN CHAINS TO PREACH TO THEM IN CHAINS; AND CARRIED THAT FIRE IN MY OWN CONSCIENCE, THAT I PERSUADED THEM TO BE AWARE OF. I can truly say, that when I have been to preach, I have gone full of guilt and terror to the pulpit door; and then it hath been taken off, and I have been at liberty in my mind until I have done my work; and then immediately, even before I could get down the pulpit stairs, I have been as bad as I was before. Yet God carried me on; but surely with a strong hand, for neither guilt nor hell could take me off my work." So Bunyan preached, and preaching so, it is no wonder that he made an impression both on men and devils. He describes with great nature and truth his various frames in preaching; sometimes with such enlargement of soul, that he could speak as in a very flame of fire; and then again so straitened in his utterance before the people, as if his head had been in a bag all the time of his exercise. The truth is, the heart of the preacher is more apt to be in the bag than his head is; and when his heart is there, then generally, as to effect, his head is there also. This experience of the bag, we are sorry to say, is rather more common than that of the seraphic enlargement of soul, which the love of Christ ought always to give us.

Thus Bunyan went on preaching, travelling through those special enclosures in the word of God, of which he speaks, about the space of five years or more, when, says he, "I was caught in my then present practice, and cast into prison, where I have lain above as long again to confirm the truth by way of suffering, as I was before in testifying of it according to the Scriptures, in a way of preaching." Nor is it to be supposed that during all this time Bunyan was free from the temptations of Satan in his ministry; nay, he had them abundantly, but somewhat changed from inward to external; for "when Satan perceived that his thus tempting and assaulting me would not answer his design; to wit, to overthrow the ministry, and make it ineffectual as to the ends thereof; then he tried another way, which was to stir up the minds of the ignorant and malicious to load me with slanders and reproaches: now therefore I may say, that what the devil could devise, and his instruments invent, was whirled up and down the country against me, thinking, as I said, that by that means they should make my ministry to be abandoned. It began therefore to be rumoured up and down among the people that I was a witch, a jesuit, a highwayman, a whoremonger, and the like. To all which I shall only say, God knows that I am innocent. I have a good conscience, and whereas they speak evil of me as an evil-doer, they shall be ashamed that falsely accuse my good conversation in Christ. So then, what shall I say to those who have thus bespattered me? Shall I threaten them? Shall I chide them? Shall I flatter them? Shall I entreat them to hold their tongues? No, not I. Were it not that these things make those ripe for damnation who are the authors and abettors, I would say unto them, Report it, because it will increase my glory. Therefore, I bind these lies and slanders to me as an ornament; it belongs to my Christian profession to be thus vilified, slandered, reproached, and reviled; and since all this is nothing else, as my God and conscience do bear me witness, I rejoice in reproaches for Christ's sake."

"Now as Satan endeavoured by reproaches and slanders to make me vile among my countrymen, that if possible my preaching might be made of no more effect, so there was added hereto, a long and tedious imprisonment, that thereby I might be frightened from the service of Christ, and the world terrified, and made afraid to hear me preach. Of which I shall in the next place give you a brief account."

Now in this matter of Bunyan's imprisonment, it is evident that, so far as Satan had a share in it, he did, as we say, overshoot the mark; he was a clear illustration of that saying of Shakspeare's concerning

Doubtless this enemy of souls, and this adversary of Bunyan, because of the great good he was doing in his preaching, supposed he had accomplished a great work when, through the tyranny of the Church Establishment, he had succeeded in silencing the preacher; and when he got him into prison, he thought within himself, There is an end of that man's usefulness; no more souls shall rise to glory through him. But what a signal mistake! Perhaps the greatest mistake but one or two, that Satan ever committed! If this man, John Bunyan, had been permitted still to go at large and preach, the world, doubtless, would never have been blessed with the Pilgrim's Progress. But God permitted the wrath of Bunyan's adversaries to shut him up in prison just at that point,

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