4. And then this racy-hearted old bachelor was as full of delight in children, and in children’s parties, with all their sweetmeats and nuts and games and riddles,—quite as much so—as if he had been their very grandfather himself. Nay, this rosy-hearted old rogue was as inveterate a matchmaker as if he had been a mother of the world with a houseful of daughters on her hands and with the sons of the nobility dangling around. It would make you wish you could kiss the two dear old souls, Gaius the innkeeper and Old Honest his guest, if you would only read how they laid their grey heads together to help forward the love-making of Matthew and Mercy. Yes, it would be a great pity, said Old Honest,—thinking with a sigh of his own childless old age,—it would be a great pity if this excellent family of our sainted brother should fail for want of children, and die out like mine. And the two old plotters went together to the mother of the bridegroom, and told her with an aspect of authority that she must put no obstacle in her son’s way, but take Mercy as soon as convenient into a closer relation to herself. And Gaius said that he for his part would give the marriage supper. And I shall make no will, said Honest, but hand all I have over to Matthew my son. This is the way, said Old Honest; and he skipped and smiled and kissed the cheek of the aged mother and said, Then thy two children shall preserve thee and thy husband a posterity in the earth! Then he turned to the boys and he said, Matthew, be thou like Matthew the publican, not in vice, but in virtue. Samuel, he said, be thou like Samuel the prophet, a man of faith and of prayer. Joseph, said he, be thou like Joseph in Potiphar’s house, chaste, and one that flees from temptation. And James, be thou like James the Just, and like James the brother of our Lord. Mercy, he said, is thy name, and by mercy shalt thou be sustained and carried through all thy difficulties that shall assault thee in the way, till thou shalt come thither where thou shalt look the Fountain of Mercy in the face with comfort. And all this while the guide, Mr. Greatheart, was very much pleased, and smiled upon the nimble old gentleman.
5. “Then it came to pass a while after that there was a post in the town that inquired for Mr. Honest. So he came to his house where he was, and delivered to his hands these lines, Thou art commanded to be ready against this day seven night, to present thyself before thy Lord at His Father’s house. And for a token that my message is true, all thy daughters of music shall be brought low. Then Mr. Honest called for his friends and said unto them, I die, but shall make no will. As for my honesty, it shall go with me: let him that comes after me be told of this. When the day that he was to be gone was come he addressed himself to go over the river. Now, the river at that time overflowed the banks at some places. But Mr. Honest in his lifetime had spoken to one Good-conscience to meet him there, the which he also did, and lent him his hand, and so helped him over. The last words of Mr. Honest were, Grace reigns! So he left the world.” Look at that picture and now look at this: “They then addressed themselves to the water, and, entering, Christian began to sink, and crying out to his good friend Hopeful, he said, I sink in deep waves, the billows go over my head, all His waters go over me. Then said the other, Be of good cheer, my brother, I feel the bottom, and it is good. Then said Christian, Ah, my friend, the sorrows of death have compassed me about; I shall not see the land that flows with milk and honey. And with that a great horror and darkness fell upon Christian, so that he could not see before him; and all the words that he spoke still tended to discover that he had horror of mind lest he should die in that river and never obtain entrance in at the gate. Here also, as they that stood by perceived, he was much in the troublesome thoughts of the sins that he had committed, both since and before he began to be a pilgrim. ’Twas also observed that he was troubled with apparitions of hobgoblins and evil spirits. Hopeful, therefore, had much ado to keep his brother’s head above water. Yea, sometimes he would be quite gone down, and then ere a while he would rise up again half dead.” My brethren, all my brethren, be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth. Thou, O God, wast a God that forgavest them, but Thou tookest vengeance on their inventions.
MR. FEARING
“Happy is the man that feareth alway.”—Solomon
For humour, for pathos, for tenderness, for acute and sympathetic insight at once into nature and grace, for absolutely artless literary skill, and for the sweetest, most musical, and most exquisite English, show me another passage in our whole literature to compare with John Bunyan’s portrait of Mr. Fearing. You cannot do it. I defy you to do it. Spenser, who, like John Bunyan, wrote an elaborate allegory, says: It is not in me. Take all Mr. Fearing’s features together, and even Shakespeare himself has no such heart-touching and heart-comforting character. Addison may have some of the humour and Lamb some of the tenderness; but, then, they have not the religion. Scott has the insight into nature, but he has no eye at all for grace; while Thackeray, who, in some respects, comes nearest to John Bunyan of them all, would be the foremost to confess that he is not worthy to touch the shoe-latchet of the Bedford tinker. As Dr. Duncan said in his class one day when telling us to read Augustine’s Autobiography and Halyburton’s:—“But,” he said, “be prepared for this, that the tinker beats them all!” “Methinks,” says Browning, “in this God speaks, no tinker hath such powers.”
Now, as they walked along together, the guide asked the old gentleman if he knew one Mr. Fearing that came on pilgrimage out of his parts. “Yes,” said Mr. Honest, “very well. He was a man that had the root of the matter in him; but he was one of the most troublesome pilgrims that ever I met with in all my days.” “I perceive you knew him,” said the guide, “for you have given a very right character of him.” “Knew him!” exclaimed Honest, “I was a great companion of his; I was with him most an end. When he first began to think of what would come upon us hereafter, I was with him.” “And I was his guide,” said Greatheart, “from my Master’s house to the gates of the Celestial City.” “Then,” said Mr. Honest, “it seems he was well at last.” “Yes, yes,” answered the guide, “I never had any doubt about him; he was a man of a choice spirit, only he was always kept very low, and that made his life so burdensome to himself and so troublesome to others. He was, above many, tender of sin; he was so afraid of doing injuries to others that he would often deny himself of that which was lawful because he would not offend.” “But what,” asked Honest, “should be the reason that such a good man should be all his days so much in the dark?” “There are two sorts of reasons for it,” said the guide; “one is, the wise God will have it so: some must pipe and some must weep. Now, Mr. Fearing was one that played upon this base. He and his fellows sound the sackbut, whose notes are more doleful than the notes of other music are. Though, indeed, some say that the base is the ground of music. And, for my part, I care not at all for that profession that begins not with heaviness of mind. The first string that the musician usually touches is the base when he intends to put all in tune. God also plays upon this string first when He sets the soul in tune for Himself. Only, here was the imperfection of Mr. Fearing, that he could play upon no other music but this till toward his latter end.”
1. Take Mr. Fearing, then, to begin with, at the Slough of Despond. Christian and Pliable, they being heedless, did both fall into that bog. But Mr. Fearing, whatever faults you may think he had—and faults, too, that you think you could mend in him—at any rate, he was never heedless. Everybody has his fault to find with poor Mr. Fearing. Everybody blames poor Mr. Fearing. Everybody can improve upon poor Mr. Fearing. But I will say again for Mr. Fearing that he was never heedless. Had Peter been on the road at that period he would have stood up for Mr. Fearing, and would have taken his judges and would have said to them, with some scorn—Go to, and pass the time of your sojourning here with something of the same silence and the same fear! Christian’s excuse for falling into the Slough was that fear so followed him that he fled the next way, and so fell in. But Mr. Fearing had no such fear behind him in his city as Christian had in his. All Mr. Fearing’s fears were within himself. If you can take up the distinction between actual and indwelling sin, between guilt and corruption, you have already in that the whole key to Mr. Fearing. He was blamed and counselled and corrected and pitied and patronised by every morning-cloud and early-dew neophyte, while all the time he lived far down from the strife of tongues where the root of the matter strikes its deep roots still deeper every day. “It took him a whole month,” tells Greatheart, “to face the Slough. But he would not go back neither. Till, one sunshiny morning, nobody ever knew how, he ventured, and so got over. But the fact of the matter is,” said the shrewd-headed guide, “Mr. Fearing had, I think, a slough of despond in his own mind; and a slough that he carried everywhere with him.” Yes, that was it. Greatheart in that has hit the nail on the head. With one happy stroke he has given us the whole secret of poor Mr. Fearing’s life-long trouble. Just so; it was the slough in himself that so kept poor Mr. Fearing back. This poor pilgrim, who had so little to fear in his past life, had yet so much scum and filth, spume and mire in his present heart, that how to get on the other side of that cost him not a month’s roaring only, but all the months and all the years till he went over the River not much above wet-shod. And, till then, not twenty million cart-loads of wholesome instructions, nor any number of good and substantial steps, would lift poor Mr. Fearing over the ditch that ran so deep and so foul continually within himself. “Yes, he had, I think, a slough of despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him, or else he never could have been the man he was.” I, for one, thank the great-hearted guide for that fine sentence.
2. It was a sight to see poor Mr. Fearing at the wicket gate. “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” He read the inscription over the gate a thousand times, but every time he read it his slough-filled heart said to him, Yes, but that is not for such as you. Pilgrim after pilgrim came up the way, read the writing, knocked, and was taken in; but still Mr. Fearing stood back, shaking and shrinking. At last he ventured to take hold of the hammer that hung on the gate and gave with it a small rap such as a mouse might make. But small as the sound was, the Gatekeeper had had his eye on his man all the time out of his watch-window; and before Mr. Fearing had time to turn and run, Goodwill had him by the collar. But that sudden assault only made Mr. Fearing sink to the earth, faint and half-dead. “Peace be to thee, O trembling man!” said Goodwill. “Come in, and welcome!” When he did venture in, Mr. Fearing’s face was as white as a sheet. You would have said that an officer had caught a thief if you had seen poor Mr. Fearing hiding his face, and the Gatekeeper hauling him in. And not all the entertainment for which the Gate was famous, nor all the encouragement that Goodwill was able to speak, could make terrified Mr. Fearing for once to smile. A more hard-to-entertain pilgrim, all the Gate declared when he had gone, they had never had in their hospitable house.
3. “So he came,” said the guide, “till he came to our House; but as he behaved himself at the Gate, so he did at my Master the Interpreter’s door. He lay about in the cold a good while before he would adventure to call. Yet he would not go back neither. And the nights were cold and long then. At last I think I looked out of the window, and perceiving a man to be up and down about the door, I went out to him, and asked what he was; but, poor man, the water stood in his eyes. So I perceived what he wanted. I went in, therefore, and told it in the house, and we showed the thing to our Lord. So He sent me out again to entreat him to come in, but I dare say I had hard work to do it. At last he came in, and I will say that for my Lord, He carried it wonderful lovingly to Mr. Fearing. There were but a few good bits at the table, but some of it was laid upon his trencher.” In this way the guide tells us his first introduction to Mr. Fearing, and how Mr. Fearing behaved himself in the Interpreter’s House. For instance, in the parlour full of dust, when the Interpreter said that the dust is original sin and inward corruption, you would have thought that the Interpreter had stabbed poor Mr. Fearing to the heart, so did he break out and weep. Before the damsel could come with the pitcher, Mr. Fearing’s eyes alone would have laid the dust, they were such a fountain of tears. When he saw Passion and Patience, each one in his chair—“I am that child in rags,” said Mr. Fearing; “I have already received all my good things!” Also, at the wall where the fire burned because oil was poured into it from the other side, he perversely turned that fire also against himself. And when they came to the man in the iron cage, you could not have told whether the miserable man inside the cage or the miserable man outside of it sighed the loudest. And so on, through all the significant rooms. The spider-room overwhelmed him altogether, till his sobs and the beating of his breast were heard all over the house. The robin also when gobbling up spiders he made an emblem of himself, and the tree that was rotten at the heart,—till the Interpreter’s patience with this so perverse pilgrim was fairly worn out. So the Interpreter shut up his significant rooms, and had this so troublesome pilgrim into his own chamber, and there carried it so tenderly to Mr. Fearing that at last he did seem to have taken some little heart of grace. “And then we,” said Greatheart, “set forward, and I went before him; but the man was of few words, only he would often sigh aloud.”
4. “Dumpish at the House Beautiful” is his biographer’s not very respectful comment on the margin of the history. There were too many merry-hearted damsels running up and down that house for Mr. Fearing. He could not lift his eyes but one of those too-tripping maidens was looking at him. He could not stir a foot but he suddenly ran against a talking and laughing bevy of them. There was one thing he loved above everything, and that was to overhear the talk that went on at that season in that house about the City above, and about the King of that City, and about His wonderful ways with pilgrims, and the entertainment they all got who entered that City. But to get a word out of Mr. Fearing upon any of these subjects,—all the king’s horses could not have dragged it out of him. Only, the screen was always seen to move during such conversations, till it soon came to be known to all the house who was behind the screen. And the talkers only talked a little louder as the screen moved, and took up, with a smile to one another, another and a yet more comforting topic.