081. I Never Went To School To Plato Or Aristotle.

LXXXI ‘I NEVER WENT TO SCHOOL TO PLATO OR ARISTOTLE.’

JOHN BUNYAN begins his Grace Abounding in this way:

‘Notwithstanding the meanness and inconsiderableness of my parents, it pleased God to put it into their hearts to put me to school, to learn both to read and write; the which I also attained according to the rate of other poor men’s children; though to my shame, I confess I did soon lose that little I learnt, even almost utterly, and that long before the Lord did work His gracious work of conversion upon my soul.’ And in another place: ‘I am no poet, nor poet’s son, but a mechanic.’ And again: ‘I never went to school to Plato or Aristotle.’ And then when he comes to speak of his married life he says:

‘This woman and I, though we came together as poor as poor might be (not having so much household stuff as a dish or spoon betwixt us both), yet this she had for her part, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety, which her father had left her when he died. In these two books I should sometimes read with her, but all this time I met with no conviction.’

Now, with such an unlettered and ignorant and unconvicted beginning as that how are we to account for all that John Bunyan afterwards became and accomplished? How did a man with no book-learning at all come to write by far the best-written religious book in the English language?

Well, to begin with, John Bunyan’s first step toward the unique place he now holds was taken in his heart-searching and thoroughgoing conversion. No two cases of conversion have ever been altogether alike. Take the greatest of all recorded conversions; take Paul’s conversion, and Augustine’s, and Luther’s, and in our own land take the conversions of Thomas Halyburton, and James Fraser of Brea, and Thomas Boston, and Thomas Chalmers, and it is very remarkable how they all differ in every possible way from one another. And Bunyan’s conversion, as he describes it in such pungent detail in his Autobiography, is all his own and is like that of no one else in all the world. There is no subject of study in all the world of study that is so interesting and so important and so urgent to us all as the study of conversion. And when we once address ourselves in right earnest to that supreme study, John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding will always be found lying on our table beside those masterly writers already named. The second thing that went to the making and the fitting out of our great author was his absolutely agonising experience of the lifelong pains of sanctification. The life of sanctification follows on conversion, and both of those experiences have a kindred character in every man who truly undergoes them. An easy conversion is usually followed by an easy sanctification, and a fierce and a soul-crushing conversion is usually followed by a fierce and a soul-crushing sanctification. In all my reading I have only come upon three cases of sanctification of a fierceness and a crushingness worthy to be set beside that of John Bunyan. And they are all three fellow-countrymen and fellow-churchmen of our own — Thomas Halyburton, Alexander Brodie of Brodie, and James Fraser of Brea. The sword of truth and love and holiness was driven through and through the sinful hearts of those four elect men, and that divine sword turned every way in their sinful hearts till it laid them down dead men every day all their days on earth. In the divine preparation of the author of the Pilgrim’s Progress, both in his great conversion, and alongside of his great life of sanctification, his wonderful imagination was always working. John Bunyan’s imagination was of the very highest order, and it was all taken up into the hand of the Holy Ghost and was turned continually in upon the terrible battle between sin and grace that went on incessantly in Bunyan’s mind and heart and life. Bunyan’s whole soul lay naked and opened to the eyes of his sanctified imagination till his spiritual life within him was far more real to him than was the social and the political and the military life of Bedford and of England all round about him. And till, as Halyburton says about himself, his own sin and then the grace of God were such real things to him, that compared with them nothing else in the world had any reality at all. Dean Church says somewhere that the original and unique and characteristic power of Dr. Newman’s preaching lay largely in his extraordinary realisation of that spiritual world of which he spoke. That is to say, that great preacher’s imagination, like the imagination of

Halyburton, and like the imagination of Bunyan, made those things to be absolutely and supremely real and actual to him which are only words and names and the fleeting shadows of things to ordinary men. And then there was Bunyan’s exquisite style. I have named three men above whose conversion first, and then their after sanctification, stand out beside those of Bunyan in their intense interest to me, and in their deep and continually increasing power over me. But their books are not known outside a very small and a fast-decreasing circle of readers. And that, partly, because of the poor and stumbling and repelling style in which they are written. Whereas John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding will be read as long as the English language lasts, if only for its incomparably pure, and clear, and strong, and sweet, and winning English style.

Now, if I mistake not, there are some lessons of the very first importance and of the very first value to us all to be taken out of all that. All that was written by John Bunyan, not for his own sake alone, but for us also if we will attend and will take his offered lessons to heart.

1. Dr. Denney has a very remarkable paper in the London Quarterly for April 1904, on ‘The Education of a Minister.’ It is a very remarkable paper in itself, and it is doubly remarkable to be written by a man who has gone to school to Plato and Aristotle as few men in our day have done. Dr. Denney is all for a learned and a scholarly class among our ministers, but his strong and unanswerable contention is that the door of the evangelical pulpit ought to be set wide open to men who have had no opportunity for laying in themselves the foundations of either classical or philosophical scholarship. And indeed who may have no natural aptitude for such studies, but who may have a great compensation in their conversion, and in their character, and in their experience, and in their practical knowledge of the men and the things among whom they are to live and work, even if they have but little direct knowledge of the men and the things of ancient Greece and Rome. And I am wholly with my able and learned friend in his generous argument. Where it can be got, like him, I would like to see a deep and a broad and a firm foundation of classical and philosophical learning laid in every minister’s mind. At the same time, I would like to see our foremost pulpits open and inviting to all men who have had a conversion, and are having a sanctification, and a knowledge of their English Bible, and a passion for fruitful preaching, like all that of John Bunyan.

2. At the same time, like Dr. Denney, I would have every precaution and every guarantee taken that the lack of scholarship in any given student or minister is not due to his own laziness. I would have laziness held to be the one unpardonable sin in all our students and in all our ministers. I would have all lazy students drummed out of the college, and all lazy ministers out of the Assembly. And all the churches will have to take steps to do that soon, if they are to live and thrive in this hard-working world of ours. Genius and grace, like John Bunyan’s genius and grace, are the sovereign gift of Almighty God; but incessant industry, and the most conscientious preparation for the pulpit and the prayer-meeting and the Bible-class, and daily and hourly pastoral and sickbed visitation, are all things of which every minister will have to give an account, and that by day and date, to Him who did not redeem us in His sleep.

3. We have a fine lesson as to John Bunyan’s ideal of what a Christian minister ought to be in his seven ministerial portraits of Evangelist, and the Interpreter, and Greatheart, and the four Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains, whose fine names are Knowledge, and Experience, and Watchful, and Sincere. They are all portraits so beautiful and so heart-winning that they must have been the salvation of a multitude of ministers. Let all ministers look till they see themselves as in a glass in Evangelist and in Greatheart. And let every manse, and every minister’s study, and every pulpit, and every Bible-class be an Interpreter’s House, with its inexhaustibly significant rooms. And let every minister seek to have the four portraits of the Delectable Shepherds realised and fulfilled in himself. All our congregations cannot have four ministers like the Delectable Mountains. They cannot all have one minister with the knowledge, and another with the experience, and another with the watchfulness, and another with the sincerity. But at the same time, happy that delectable mountain where its very poverty and its other limitations all compel its one pastor to have all the knowledge needful, and all the experience, and all the watchfulness, and all the sincerity in his single self. As they all so conspicuously met in unlettered John Bunyan.

4. It may look like it at first sight, but it is not at all to come down from a high level to a low to say a word or two at this point about a minister’s written and spoken style. Let all our students be sure to read and lay to heart all that Dr. Denney says on that subject also. And if they have not already learned to distinguish in their own work, and in other men’s work, a good from a bad style, their divinity professors should take them and teach them some elementary lessons in that fine subject. Dear old David White of Airlie was wont to take me in my teens and teach me just what a good style is, taking now Hugh Miller’s leading articles in the Witness newspaper, and now young Mr. Spurgeon’s early sermons in the Park Street Pulpit. Till, though I cannot to this day write a style to my own satisfaction, at the same time a good style, and especially in sacred composition, is one of the purest delectations of my daily life. And it is surely an immense encouragement to us all to see a man able to write a style which is one of the high water-marks of the English language, though he never went to school to Plato, or to Aristotle, or to Tully, or to Quintilian. ‘In the name of wonder, Macaulay, where did you pick up that astonishing style of yours?’ demanded Lord Jeffrey of his young contributor. Macaulay we know had picked up his astonishing style out of all Greek and Latin and English literature, and out of many other such sources. But John Bunyan, who beats Macaulay at English out of all sight, picked up all his astonishing style out of his English Bible and out of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs alone. ‘Give your days and nights to Addison for style,’ advised Dr. Samuel Johnson. But I will rather say to all our students — Give your days and nights to your English Bible and to John Bunyan if you would write and speak a perfect English style for your purpose.

5. Then, again, let no student nor minister be downcast about doing good pulpit work and good class work because he has so few books. Jacob Behmen, Luther’s greatest disciple, and the greatest mind in all greatminded Germany, had no books; but then, in his own words, he had himself. And John Bunyan was quite as badly off as Jacob Behmen, for he had only his English Bible and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. He had none of our long shelves of prosy commentaries and Bible dictionaries and encyclopaedias and rows upon rows of ephemeral sermons gathering dust in his significant rooms. ‘Look in thy heart and write,’ it was said to Behmen and Bunyan. And Bunyan looked into nothing else but into his English Bible and his own heart till he wrote the Grace Abounding and the Pilgrim’s Progress and the Holy War, and in all these set a standard for English composition.

6. Now, with all these lessons out of John Bunyan for your future ministers, there is still this great lesson left for yourselves: this great lesson: English is the key to everything, even to Plato and Aristotle. For Plato himself is now to be read in the finest Oxford English, and with all that has been learned in Christendom since his day added to him. But better far for you than all Plato and all Aristotle taken together, like Mr. Spurgeon, read the Pilgrim’s Progress a hundred times. And I promise you that you will lay the book down many a sweetened and sanctified midnight saying with Ned Bratts in Robert Browning — His language was not ours:

‘Tis my belief, God spake: No tinker has such powers.