096. A Thousand Pounds For A Tear.

XCVI ‘A Thousand Pounds For A Tear.’

MR. WETEYES is one of John Bunyan’s most speaking likenesses in his splendid gallery of spiritual portraits. Luther’s artist friend, Albert Durer, in a noble act of penitence put his own head and face on his famous portrait of the prodigal son, And in like manner, John Bunyan has put his own broken heart into the breast of Mr. Weteyes of the town of Mansoul. In his masterpiece portrait of Mr. Fearing, and in his companion portrait of Mr. Weteyes, we have John Bunyan’s own personal experience and his clear testimony concerning the true place of penitential tears in the spiritual life of a penitent sinner. The scientific students of tears tell us that they have discovered and have distinguished four outstanding kinds of tears. Namely natural tears, and diabolical tears, and human tears, and divine tears. Natural tears, according to those teachers, are all those tears that proceed from constitution, and from temperament, and from age, and from sex, and from all suchlike causes. And such tears as proceed from these and from all suchlike causes they assert have no real value at all; they have no religious value at all, nor any real importance whatsoever. Human tears again are such tears as flow at the loss of temporal goods, at the breaking up of earthly friendships and attachments, and at desolating bereavements; as also, sometimes, simply at pathetic occurrences and moving narrations. We all shed, and we see other people shedding, whole rivers of such humane tears every day. And such tears are not without a real value to us and to others if we make a right use of them. But the tears that those great authorities call divine tears are very different from the very best of all such natural and human tears. For divine tears, as their fine name indicates, are the immediate gift of God. And the tears that God gives are preeminently if not exclusively shed for sin. Divine tears are all those tears that we shed on account of the existence and the prevalence of sin. On account of the dominion of sin, and the pain of sin, and the guilt of sin, and the shame of sin, and the curse of sin, and especially because of all that in our own sin. The truly penitent sinner often sheds divine tears as he meditates upon and somewhat realises what his sin has cost his Saviour. Every true penitent sheds divine tears every day also for all the pain and all the sorrow and all the sin that he has brought upon other people through his own past sin as well as through his own present sinfulness. All these are the divine tears that the Holy Ghost alone can give to us and that the true penitents among us alone can shed. And all such tears are acceptable before God in the measure that they come up before Him in and through the intercessions and the tears of the Man of Sorrows. At this point it will both instruct us and impress us if we call to mind some of those Bible saints who were specially blest with the grace of tears. Those penitent saints whose divine tears were put into God’s bottle and in His bottle have been preserved to this day. ‘All the night make I my bed to swim,’ says the Weteyes of the Old Testament; ‘I water my couch with my tears. ‘And again: ‘My tears have been my meat day and night.’ And again: ‘I have eaten ashes like bread, and I have mingled my drink with my weeping.’ And again: ‘Thou feedest Thy people with the bread of tears, and Thou givest them tears to drink in great measure.’ And the prophet Jeremias, whom the Jews took to have come back to them again in the person of our Lord, he has filled his two books with utterances like these:

‘Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears. Mine eyes shall weep sore, and my soul shall weep in secret places because the Lord’s people are carried away captive. Let mine eyes run down with tears night and day, and let them not cease, for the daughter of my people is stricken with a very sore blow.’ And so Ezra, and Daniel, and Hosea, and Micah continually. And we never can forget that New Testament woman who by the grace given to her washed her Saviour’s feet with her tears and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Nor can we ever forget Peter in the garden of the high priest, nor Paul in his pastorate and in his whole apostleship. And to pass by whole generations of weeping penitents, we come to our present so penitent author. And we see him in the person of his own Christian standing and looking at the Cross till the springs that were in his head sent the waters down his cheeks.

‘Of all tears,’ he tells us, ‘they are by far the best that spring up within us at the moment when we are being sprinkled with the blood of Christ. And of all our joys they are the sweetest that are mixed with our mourning over the sufferings of Christ for our sins.’ But Bunyan is at his best in his Mr. Weteyes.

‘For you must know that this Mr. Weteyes was a poor man, and a man of a broken spirit, and one that could speak well to a petition. And for this cause he was often sent up from the town of Mansoul to intercede with the King. When he would fall down, and would utter himself in this way. Oh, my Lord, he would say, what I truly am I know not myself, nor whether my name of Weteyes be feigned or true. Especially when I begin to think what some have said, and that is, that this name of Weteyes was given me because Mr. Repentance was my father. But good men have sometimes bad children; and sinners do sometimes beget hypocrites. My mother also called me by this name of mine from my cradle. But whether she said so because of the moistness of my brain, or because of the softness of my heart, I never could make out. Be that as it may, I see much impurity in mine own tears, and great stains in the bottom of my prayers. But, I pray thee (and all the time the gentleman wept) that thou wouldest not remember against us our transgressions, nor take offence at the unqualifiedness of thy servants.’

Now with all that, and with whole volumes more like that, it is no wonder that among all the angels that stand around the throne, — This is the angel of the earth And she is always weeping. And at this point Jeremy Taylor comes in with this. Our tears for sin, he says, are so unlike the tears of the great saints; our divinest tears are so slow in coming, and they are so soon staunched and dried up again, that the great masters of the devotional life have invented ‘suppletory arts and spiritual stratagems’ so as to secure to us both timeous and sufficient tears. And one of those ‘suppletory arts,’ of which Taylor himself was such a past master, is the great art of penitential preaching. Now that great art never flourished more nor ever bore better fruit than just in the days of Taylor and Bunyan in England and in those same days in Scotland. But that great divine art is almost a lost art in our day both in Scotland and in England. Real penitential preaching, close and bold preaching coming right home to the conscience, preaching like Thomas Boston’s to terrify the godly in their too easy and too presuming way with God and with themselves, preaching fitted to keep a sinner once penitent always penitent, preaching that makes the holy law of God to enter deeper and deeper every day into the deceitful and corrupt and wicked heart; lifesearching, heart-searching, conscience-searching preaching, so far as can be gathered from the sermons that are published and belauded and widely sold among us is all but a lost art. There is great intellectual power in the preaching of our day, there never was more; there is great Biblical and other scholarship, great eloquence, and great earnestness, of a kind; but preaching to the heart and to the conscience is a neglected, if not an altogether lost art. And the pity is, our best people are quite well pleased to have it so. They get what they want; and hence their hardness, and their dryness, and their self-complacency in the matter of divine tears; in the matter of that sacrifice which so pleases God when He can get it at the hands of His people. At the same time if the pulpits of your preachers are all but silent on the great penitential texts and topics, you have the penitential books of a far deeper and a far more spiritual day; as many of you as pine for such instruction and such direction. Though I have been labouring after it all my days among you, I bitterly feel that I have sinfully failed in preaching to you with the art, and with the power, and with the alternate commandingness and winningness of the great preachers of the penitential pulpit. At the same time, you cannot deny this that I have always told you about those great and true preachers and have pressed their priceless books upon you. The Way to Christ, The Imitation of Christ, The Unregenerate Man, The Indwelling Sin, The Mortification of Sin, The Saving Interest, The Saint’s Rest, The Holy Living and Dying, The Private Devotions, The Serious Call, The Christian Perfection, The Religions Affections, and so on; and the great spiritual autobiographies. If any one among you seriously wishes to have himself exercised in some of the‘suppletory arts and spiritual stratagems’ of repentance unto life and divine tears, these books, and a lifetime of suchlike books, are confidently recommended to the purchase, and to the constant perusal, of that truly wise man.

I have no books, penitential or other, said the author of The Way to Christ, but I have myself. And one who early fell in love with her own salvation, and who kept true to her first love, and whom Behmen would have loved to have had for a daughter, she reports herself from the Valley of Humiliation in these inimitable terms:

‘This place, methinks, suits well with my spirit. For I love to be in such places where there is no rattling with coaches, and no rumbling with wheels. Methinks, one may here, without much molestation, be thinking what he was, whence he came, what he has done, and to what his King has called him. Here one may think and break at heart, and may melt in one’s spirit until one’s eyes become like the fish-pools of Heshbon.’

‘Here one may think and break at heart.’ As much as to say that all our hearts would be broken, and all our eyes would be fountains of tears, if we would only think on the topics on which Mercy thought so much and so sweetly and so profitably. Thinking, then, just thinking, is another sure stratagem to be confidently recommended to all those who have neither the money to buy penitential books, nor have the help they so much need but in vain look for from their ministers’ pulpits.

‘More tears,’ said McCheyne to himself when he was inquiring what was wanting in order to secure more success in missionary work. ‘More tears,’ he said, for the lost estate of this whole world, and more tears for the‘unqualifiedness,’ as Mr. Weteyes called it, of those who go out to do missionary work. Let both home ministers and foreign missionaries also shed far more tears, said McCheyne. ‘Tears gain everything,’ says Santa Teresa, in her so tearful autobiography. And then the restoration Psalmist strikes in to comfort both Teresa and McCheyne and says to them:

‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.’

Let us all close with seeking to say each one his own Amen to this penitential prayer of the great Weteyes of the English Church:

‘Thou knowest, O Lord, that I have great heaviness, and continual sorrow in my heart, for the way I have sinned against Thee. But, with all that, I am a burden to myself in that I cannot sorrow more. I beseech Thee, then, for a contrite heart, and for tears of blood for my great sins. Woe is me, for the sinfulness of my life, and for the hardness of my heart, and the dryness of my eyes. I can sin; but, of myself, I cannot repent. I am dried up like a potsherd. Woe, woe is me. Turn, O Lord, the hard rock into a pool. Give tears: give a fountain of tears. Give the grace of tears. Tears, such as Thou didst give to David, and to Jeremiah, and to Peter, and to Mary Magdalene. Give me some of the tears of the Man of Sorrows. And blessed be His Name, who so wept and so bled for me! Blessed be His name for ever by me! Even the Name of the Man of Sorrows and acquainted with grief for me. Amen.’