104. Those Who Had Writ In Our Days, I Thought - But I Desire Them Now To Pardon Me - Had Writ W...

CIV ‘Those Who Had Writ In Our Days, I Thought (But I Desire Them Now To Pardon Me) Had Writ Without Themselves Going Down Into The Deep.’

IF John Bunyan had lived in our day he would. I fear, have been in the same difficulty that he describes so feelingly and so powerfully in his hundred and twenty-ninth paragraph. The difficulty, that is, to get a book writ in our day that would prove itself most fit for a conscience wounded as his conscience was wounded. I will tell you some of the ways in which John Bunyan’s conscience was wounded, and then I will put it to yourselves to say if you know any book writ in our day that you could recommend Bunyan to buy and to read and to find his condition so largely and so profoundly handled, as if the book had been written out of his own broken heart. Take, then, some specimens of poor Bunyan’s wounded conscience and broken heart. And I will not water down my great author one iota. I will boldly and honestly read to you what he so powerfully writes about himself in his own unmitigated words.

‘Now, thought I, now I grow worse and worse. For I felt such discouragement in my heart as laid me as low as hell. I was driven as with a tempest. My heart would be unclean. The Canaanites would dwell in the land. My original and inward pollution, that, that was my plague and my affliction; that I had the guilt of to amazement. By reason of that I was more loathsome in my own eyes than was a toad. Sin and corruption would as naturally bubble out of my heart as water would bubble out of a fountain. I thought now that every one had a better heart than I had; and I could have changed hearts with anybody. I thought none but the devil himself could equalise me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. Man, indeed, is the most noble, by creation, of all creatures in the visible world; but by his sin he has made himself the most ignoble. The birds, the beasts, the fishes, I blessed their condition, for they had not a sinful nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God as I was. I could therefore have rejoiced had my condition been as theirs is. And now was I a burden and a terror to myself. Oh how gladly would I have been anybody but myself! Now was the Gospel the greatest torment to me. Every time I thought of the Lord Jesus, of His grace, love, goodness, kindness, gentleness, meekness, death, blood, promises, blessed exhortations, comforts and consolations, it went to my soul like a sword. Aye, I said to myself, this is the Jesus, the loving Saviour, the Son of God, whom I have parted with, whom I have slighted, despised, and abused. Oh! thought I, what I have lost! Oh! what I have for ever parted with! Then there would come flocking into my mind an innumerable company of my sins and transgressions, namely, my deadness, dullness, and coldness in holy duties; my wanderings of heart, ray wearisomeness in all good things, my want of love to God, to His ways, and to His people, with this at the end of all — are these the fruits of Christianity? Are these the tokens of a blessed man? But one day, as I was walking up and down in the house, as a man in a most woful state, that word of God took hold of my heart — thou art justified freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Then, O what a turn that made upon me! But with all that I find to this day these seven abominations in my heart. First, inclinings to unbelief; second, to forget the love and the mercy of Christ; third, a leaning to the works of the law; fourth, wanderings and coldness in prayer; fifth, to forget to watch for that for which I have prayed; sixth, apt to murmur because I have no more, and at the same time making a bad use of what I have; seventh, my corruptions of heart will thrust themselves into everything I do. When I would do good, evil is present with me.’

Now if you have been attending to all that, and if you have been understanding all that, and feeling all that in yourselves, then, tell me, do you know any book, writ in our day, that goes down into depths like these? Tell me, I say. For I confess to you I do not know any such book myself, though I have searched for it as for hid treasure. Yes; I have most anxiously searched for such a book, and in this way. I already possess Luther on the Galatians, and concerning Christian Liberty, and Goodwin on the Ephesians, and Davenant on the Colossians, and Shepard on the Ten Virgins, and Marshall on Sanctification and many such like. But I am man enough of my own day to wish to read something writ in my own day, and writ in the style and in the physiognomy and in the atmosphere of my own day. And, with that view, I have most anxiously searched all the publishers’ lists for this autumn and this winter and this coming Christmas. With something of John Bunyan’s own hunger I have repeatedly gone over all the advertisements in the Quarterly, and in theEdinburgh, and in the Dublin, and in Blackwood, and in the Athenaeum, and in the Academy, and in the Spectator, and in the Nation, and in theBritish Weekly, and in the Scottish Review, and so on. But, would you believe it, among those hundreds upon hundreds of books written in our day, I have only found two or three that I could order and open with any hope. And even the two or three that I did order I found that my money was as good as thrown away upon them; so far that is as my present pursuit is concerned. I enjoyed to read the great promises of great books soon coming out in theology, and in philosophy, and in morality, and in sociology; in history, in biography, in poetry, in fiction, and in pure letters. But I found nothing at all that John Bunyan would have preferred, next to the Bible, for a wounded conscience and a broken heart. Till in my deep distress of soul I turned again to some of my old books that are ready to fall piece from piece if I do but turn them over. Books, that is, about sin, and about the sinfulness of sin, and about indwelling sin; books also about the sending and the substitution and the sacrifice of the Son of God; about faith in His blood; about justification, adoption, and sanctification, and eternal life, and such like. Yes, I said to myself, the old are indeed better; out of all sight better!

‘I grow worse and worse,’ says Bunyan about himself. ‘My heart lays me as low as hell. I am driven as with a tempest. My inward and original pollution of heart, that, that I have to amazement. I am more loathsome to myself than a toad.’ Do you know any book, writ in our day, that even so much as professes to deal with a state of things like that? Do not blame your booksellers because they do not display the deep books of the soul on their crowded Christmas counters. They are business men and they display what they know you will buy. But one or two of you will turn upon me in selfdefence and will say to me that all you can do you cannot find the books that I am continually instructing you to read for the real and the sure and the everlasting salvation of your souls. O no! that does not deceive me nor silence me for one moment! The great books of the soul are quite easy to be got by those who truly love them and who truly desire to possess them. You know quite well where to find old furniture, and old plate, and old pictures, and old lace, and old wine. And the sellers of those old things know you and send you from time to time their lists of rare and ancient things. And when you become spiritual experts, and collectors of the masterpieces of the soul, you will discover those out-of-the-way shops where such books are still to be bought. It is not the authors of the day who are to be blamed, nor is it the publishers, nor is it the booksellers — it is yourselves. When you are once bent with all your mind and heart on the one thing needful in books, you will then importune your bookseller, and he will importune his publisher, and they will both importune our religious authors, and the right sort of book will be produced, and will be sold, and will be bought, and will be read even by you. Speaking about publishers — just as I am writing this page I come on this paragraph among the literary notes in last Monday’s Westminster:

‘It argues no small amount of courage,’ says the writer of the notes, ‘for a present-day publisher to issue a new edition of Baxter’s Saint’s Rest in a handsome format. Yet the thing has been done by Grant Richards. This book, famous in its day, and commended for its style by no less a person than Archbishop Trench, is in these days not so frequently read. But, perhaps, in this artistic form it may yet attract a select band of readers.’

Then again: ‘My deadness and my coldness in holy duties. My want of love to God, and to His ways, and to His people.’ Now suppose you were to come to your minister with that complaint about yourselves. He would not know a book, writ in your day, to recommend to you. There are masterly and immortal books that deal with all such complaints, but they were not writ to-day nor yesterday. You like to hear about classics and to talk about classics. Well, then, you order The Religious Affections of Jonathan Edwards, edited by Dr. Smellie. That true classic deals with all those complaints, and deals with them in a way worthy of a writer who has been competently called ‘one of the greatest of the sons of men.’ The book will only cost you half-a-crown, and if you have mind enough and heart enough to read it once, you will go on to read it till you have read it as often as Benjamin Jowett had read James Boswell.

Then again:

‘As I was walking up and down the house, that word of God took hold of my heart — being justified freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in His blood.’ Have you ever read that old book called The Romans? Well, that central passage in the Romans was William Cowper’s conversion; and it was when one was reading in his hearing Luther on the same subject that John Wesley passed from his darkness of heart into the full light of God’s countenance. My own special father in God, Thomas Goodwin, has a whole massive volume on this same subject of justification. Since my student days I have carried about that golden volume with me in trains and in steamers, at home and abroad, till I know it as well, I think, as the Master of Balliol knew his Boswell. But if any salad student here is shy of Goodwin, he can surely hold up his head for Hooker. Everybody honours Hooker and Hooker’s readers. And Hooker was a Paul and a puritan at heart in the foundation matter of justification; though, on the surface, and to sciolists, he has a far more popular name. The very vocabulary of scriptural and evangelical religion has been scorned and set aside by the novice authors of our superficial day. As I have read those ephemeral writers I have honestly tried to fit their newfangled words and phrases into my mind and into my heart and into my conscience and into my imagination, but, I am bound to say, they do not fit into me at all. The new vocabulary of the new books has all been fashioned by men who are wholly different from me in their whole mental upmake and operation. So different are they from me that they seem to me to belong to another race of men altogether. To me the religious phraseology of the present day wholly lacks the apostolicity, and the authority, and the height, and the depth, and the substance, and the strength, and the intellectual, and the spiritual satisfactoriness and finality of the old phraseology. I entirely agree with what Dr. John Duncan says about John Foster, great man and great preacher as John Foster was. ‘You find it in a very noble man,’ says Dr. Duncan,

‘John Foster. That essay of his entitled, “The Aversion of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion,” I dislike exceedingly. You do no good by changing the vocabulary of your religion. If you change the words you change the things. The more I study language the more I am convinced of this, that particular shades of thought are wedded to particular words. If you cut the one, you wound the other; they are dermis and epidermis. I find that my best words are scriptural words, and my next best words are ecclesiastical words.’ So far that true genius and profound scholar, Dr. John Duncan. And a writer of a very different school, Dean Stanley, says:

‘Use them to the utmost, use them threadbare if you will; long experience, the course of their history, their age and dignity, have made them far more elastic, far more available, than any we can invent for ourselves.’ And Dr. Forsyth has a fine passage to the same effect in his new book on preaching. Yes, the old, both in doctrine and in the vocabulary of doctrine, is the best. Like Marcus Aurelius, even where the new is true, the old is truest; even where the new is verus, the old is verissimus.

Now, you will be sure to ask me why it is that our day is so barren of the best books of the soul? Well, I often ask myself that same question. And I confess I cannot answer that question so as to satisfy myself about it. But this may be said. There have been great Sowings and great ebbings of spiritual truth and spiritual life all along the history of the Church of Christ. There was a great and an incomprehensible ebbing of spiritual truth, if not of spiritual life, at the very beginning of the Church of Christ. To this day it is an amazement and a mystery to students why the Apostle Paul and the Epistle to the Romans should have so fallen out of sight for hundreds of years in the early Church. And, indeed, what an astonishment it is to see that the greatest of the apostles and his special gospel never once got their true place in the pulpit of Christendom all down the ages till Luther was raised up of God to give them their true place. And then again even since Luther’s great gospel day there have been whole generations, even in evangelical Christendom, in which both Paul and Luther and justification and sanctification by faith have been all but completely misunderstood and misrepresented. And this present generation, if we do not take good care, may yet be written down to our shame in Church history as one of those wholly misunderstanding and wholly misrepresenting generations. Then again, some of the ablest and best men of our day have been drawn away from the deepest and the most central doctrines of the Christian faith, and have wholly given themselves up to the study of sacred history, sacred scholarship, and sacred criticism. Noble and fruitful studies, in their own place. But even such legitimate and necessary studies may wholly take the place in our minds that belongs by right to Christian doctrine and to Christian experience. Dr. Duncan, already quoted, was wont to say that his Semitic studies were the wine and the whoredom of his heart. Then, again, account for it as we may, there have been whole generations when the spiritual sense of sin; the spiritual sense of the depth and the deceitfulness and the malignity of sin has been all but completely lost, and that even among God’s best taught and most deeply exercised people. And so far as I can read the heart of my day that is one of its most deadly and most deplorable declensions. For myself I scarcely ever hear a sermon or read a page or kneel under a prayer in which the unspeakable evil of my own sinfulness is at all felt or is at all attempted to be expressed. All these things combine with some other things to make both our preachers and our publishers somewhat ashamed and somewhat shy of the Gospel of Christ. And yet I feel sure that the apostolic doctrines of grace and truth must be far more preached in our pulpits than the silence of the press would lead us to think. There must be many able, deeply doctrinal, and genuinely evangelical preachers who feel that they do not possess enough of the gift and grace of English style to justify them in challenging a place among the literary men of our day. Paul himself must have felt something of the same shrinking. He must have felt tempted to water down certain of his pulpit doctrines in Greece and in Rome, else he would never have written, and with such emphasis, that he was not going to be ashamed of the Gospel of Christ; and, especially, that he was not going to be ashamed of the scandal of the cross, but was determined at all costs to preach everywhere that so scandalising doctrine. ‘I was with you in weakness,’ he says to the Corinthians, ‘and in fear, and in much trembling.’ But Paul was a strong man; and he conquered and cast out his fear and his weakness far better than some of his successors have done. But the true and proper point of all that for you is this: You are independent both of your new preachers and of your new publishers. That is to say, if your new preachers are at all like those preachers of William Law’s day who preached in the morning on the wind called Euroclydon, and in the evening on the times when the Gospels were writ. You are happily independent of such preachers. For you have the Psalms, and the Gospels, and the Epistles at home. And you have the Confession — one of our elders died with the chapter on Justification open on his pillow beside his Bible — and the Catechism, and the Hymn-book at home. And you have Bunyan, and Baxter, and Rutherford; and perhaps Shepard and Brea and Halyburton. And you have Boston’s Life, and Chalmers’s Life, and McCheyne’s Life, and Spurgeon’s Sermons. ‘How are you getting on?’ I said to an old saint who was so full of years and rheumatism that she never got across her doorstep, and never saw her so-called pastor. ‘O,’ she said, ‘I get on fine, for I have Spurgeon’s Sermons.’