Bunyan Characters (2nd Series)

by Alexander Whyte

4. Widower as old Gaius was, and never for a single hour forgot that he was, there was a certain sweet and stately gallantry awakened in his withered old heart at the sight of Christiana and Mercy, and especially at the sight of Matthew and Mercy when they were seen together. He seems to have fallen almost in love with that aged matron, as he called her, and the days of his youth came back to him as he studied the young damsel, who was to her as a daughter. And this set the loquacious old innkeeper upon that famous oration about women which every man who has a mother, or a wife, or a sister, or a daughter has by heart. And from that he went on to discourse on the great advantages of an early marriage. He was not the man, nor was he speaking to a mother who was the woman, ever to become a vulgar and coarse-minded matchmaker; at the same time, he liked to see Matthew and Mercy sent out on a message together, leaving it to nature and to grace to do the rest. The pros and cons of early marriage were often up at his hearty table, but he always debated, and Gaius was a great debater, that true hospitality largely consisted in throwing open the family circle to let young people get well acquainted with one another in its peace and sweetness. And Gaius both practised what he preached, and at the same time endorsed his watchful wife’s last testament, when he gave his daughter Phebe to James, Christiana’s second son, and thus was left alone, poor old Gaius, when the happy honeymoon party started upward from his hostel door.

5. Their next host was one Mr. Mnason, a Cyprusian by nation, and an old disciple. “How far have you come to-day?” he asked. “From the house of Gaius our friend,” they said. “I promise you,” said he, “you have gone a good stitch; you may well be weary; sit down.” So they sat down. “Our great want a while since,” said Old Honest, “was harbour and good company, and now I hope we have both.” “For harbour,” said the host, “you see what it is, but for good company that will appear in the trial.” After they were a little rested Old Honest again asked his host if there were any store of good people in that town; and, “How,” he said, “shall we do to see some of them? For the sight of good men to them that are going on pilgrimage is like to the appearing of the moon and stars to them that are sailing upon the seas.” Then Mr. Mnason stamped with his foot and his daughter Grace came up, when he sent her out for five of his friends in the town, saying that he had a guest or two in his house at present to whom he would like to introduce them.

Now, this is another of the good qualities of a good host, to know the best and the most suitable people in the town, and to be on such terms with them that on short notice they will step across to help to entertain such travellers as had come to Mr. Mnason’s table. And it is an excellent thing to be sure that when we are so invited we shall not only get a good dinner, but also, as good “kitchen” with our dinner, good company and good conversation. It is nothing short of a fine art to gather together and to seat suitably beside one another good and suitable people as Mr. and Miss Mnason did in their hospitable house that afternoon. And then, as to the talk: let the host and the hostess introduce the guests, and then let the guests introduce their own topics. And as far as possible, in a city and a day like this, let our topics be books rather than people. And let the books be the books that the guests have read rather than those that the host and the hostess have read. Books are a fine subject for a talk at table. Only, let great readers order their learned and literary talk so as not to lead the less learned into temptation. There is no finer exercise of fine feeling than to be able to carry on a conversation about matters that other people present are ignorant of, and at the same time to interest them, to set them at ease, and to make them forget both you and themselves. I had a letter the other day from an English Church clergyman, in which he tells me that his bishop is coming this month to his vicarage for a kind of visitation and retreat, and that they are to have William Law’s Characters and Characteristics read aloud to them when the bishop and the assembled clergy are at their meals. For my part, I would rather hear a good all-round talk on that book by the bishop and his clergy after they had all read the book over and over again at home. But such readings at assembled meals have all along been a feature of the best fraternal life in the Church of England and in some of the sister churches.

6. Now, after dining and supping repeatedly with garrulous old Gaius, and with the all-but-silent Mr. Mnason, I have come home ruminating again and again on this—that a good host, the best host, lets his guests talk while he attends to the table. If the truth may even be whispered to one’s-self about a table that one has just left, Gaius did his best to spoil his good supper by his own over-garrulity. It was good talk that he entertained his waiting guests with, but we may have too much of a good thing. His oration in praise of women was an excellent oration, had it been delivered in another house than his own; and, say, when he was asked to give the health of Christiana, or of Matthew the bridegroom and Mercy the bride, it would then have been perfect; but not in his own house, and not when his guests were waiting for their supper. On the other hand, you should have seen that perfect gentleman, Mr. Mnason. For that true old Christian and old English gentleman never once opened his mouth after he had set his guests a-talking. He was too busy watching when any man’s dish was again empty. He was too much delighted to see that every one of his guests was having his punctual share of the supper, and at the same time his full share of the talk. Mr. Fearing’s small voice was far more pleasant to Mr. Mnason than his own voice was in his own best story. As I opened my own door the other night after supping with Mr. and Miss Mnason, I said to myself—One thing I have again seen and learned to-night, and that is, that a host, and still more a hostess, should talk less at their own table than their most silent, most bashful, and most backward guest. “Make this an ordinance for thee,” said Rabban Shammai to his sons in the law; “receive all thy guests with a pleasant expression of countenance, and then say little and do much.”

CHRISTIAN

“The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.”—Luke.

“Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.”—King Agrippa.

“Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.”—Paul.

All the other personages in the Pilgrim’s Progress come and go; they all ascend the stage for a longer or shorter time, and then pass off the stage and so pass out of our sight; but Christian in the First Part, and Christiana in the Second Part, are never for a single moment out of our sight. And, accordingly, we have had repeated occasion and opportunity to learn many excellent lessons from the chief pilgrim’s upward walk and heavenly conversation. But so full and so rich are his life and his character, that some very important things still remain to be collected before we finally close his history. “Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost,” said our Lord, after His miraculous meal of multiplied loaves and fishes with His disciples. And in like manner I shall now proceed to gather up some of the remaining fragments of Christian’s life and character and experience. And I shall collect these fragments into the three baskets of his book, his burden, and his sealed roll and certificate.

1. And first, a few things as to his book. “As I slept I dreamed, and behold I saw a man clothed in rags standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked and saw him open the book and read therein; and as he read he wept and trembled; and not being able longer to contain he broke out with a lamentable cry, saying, What shall I do?” We hear a great deal in these advertising days, and not one word too much, about the books that have influenced and gone largely to the making of our great men; but Graceless, like John Bunyan, his biographer, was a man of but one book. But, then, that book was the most influential of all books; it was the Book of books; it was God’s very own and peculiar Book. And those of us who, like this man, have passed out of a graceless into a gracious state will for ever remember how that same Book at that time influenced us till it made us what we are and shall yet be. We read many other good books at that epoch in our life, but it was the pure Bible that we read and prayed over out of sight the most. We needed no commentators or exegetes on our simple Bible in those days. The great texts stood out to our eyes in those days as if they had been written with a sunbeam; while all other books (and we read nothing but the best books in those days) looked like twilight and rushlight beside our Bible. In those immediate, direct, and intense days we would have satisfied Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold themselves in the way we read our Bible with our eye never off the object. The Four Last Things were ever before us—death and judgment, heaven and hell. “O my dear wife,” said Graceless, “and you the children of my bowels, I your dear friend am in myself undone by reason of a burden that lieth hard upon me; moreover, I am for certain informed that this our city will be burned with fire from heaven, in which fearful overthrow both myself, with thee my wife, and you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape can be found whereby we may be delivered.” He would walk also solitarily in the fields, sometimes reading and sometimes praying; and thus for some days he spent his time. Graceless at that time and at that stage would have satisfied the exigent author of the Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection where he says that “we are too apt also to think that we have sufficiently read a book when we have so read it as to know what it contains. This reading may be quite sufficient as to many books; but as to the Bible we are not to think that we have read it enough because we have often read and heard what it teaches. We must read our Bible, not to know what it contains, but to fill our hearts with the spirit of it.” And, again, and on this same point, “There is this unerring key to the right use of the Bible. The Bible has only one intent, and that is to make a man know, resist, and abhor the working of his fallen earthly nature, and to turn the faith, hope, and longing desire of his heart to God; and therefore we are only to read our Bibles with this view and to learn this one lesson from it . . . The critic looks into his books to see how Latin and Greek authors have used the words ‘stranger’ and ‘pilgrim,’ but the Christian, who knows that man lives in labour and toil, in sickness and pain, in hunger and thirst, in heat and cold among the beasts of the field, where evil spirits like roaring lions seek to devour him—he only knows in what truth and reality man is a poor stranger and a distressed pilgrim upon the earth.” John Bunyan read neither Plato nor Aristotle, but he read David and Paul till he was the chief of sinners, and till he was first the Graceless and then the Christian of his own next-to-the-Bible book.

2. In the second place, and as to his burden. We are supplied with no particulars as to the first beginnings, the gradual make-up, and at last the terrible size of Christian’s burden. What this pilgrim’s youthful life must have been in such a city as his native city was, and while he was still a young man of such a name and such a character in such a city, we are left to ourselves to think and consider. Graceless was his name by nature, and his life was as his name and his nature were. Still, as I have said, we have no detailed and particular account of his early life when his burden was still day and night in the making up. How long into your life were you graceless, my brother? And what kind of life did you lead day and night before you were persuaded or alarmed, as the case may have been with you, into being a Christian? What burdens do you carry on your broken back to this day that were made up in the daylight or in the darkness by your own hands in your early days? Were you early or were you too late in your conversion? Or are you truly converted to God and to salvation even yet? And are you at this moment still binding a burden on your back that you shall never lay down on this side your grave—it may be, not on this side your burning bed in hell? Ask yourselves all that before God and before your own conscience, and make yourselves absolutely sure that God at any rate is not mocked; and, therefore that you, too, shall in the end reap exactly as you from the beginning have sown. “How camest thou by thy burden at first?” asked Mr. Worldly-Wiseman at the trembling pilgrim. “By reading this book in my hand,” he answered. And, in the long run, it is always the Bible that best creates a sinner’s burden, binds it on his back, and makes it so terribly heavy to bear. Fear of death and judgment will sometimes make up and bind on a sinner’s burden; and sometimes the fear of man’s judgment on this side of death will do it. Fear of being found out in some cases will make a man’s secret sin far too heavy for him to bear. The throne of public opinion is not a very white throne; at the same time, it is a coarse forecast and a rough foretaste of the last judgment; and the fear of it not seldom makes a man’s burden simply intolerable to him. Sometimes a great sinner’s burden leads him to flight and outlawry; sometimes to madness and self-murder; and sometimes, by the timeous and sufficient grace of God, to the way of escape that our pilgrim took. Tenderness of conscience, also, simple softness of heart and conscience, will sometimes make a terrible burden out of what other men would call a very light matter. Bind a burden on that iron pillar standing there, and it will feel nothing and say nothing. But, bind the same burden on that man in whose seat that dead pillar takes up a sitter’s room, and he will make all that are in the house hear his sighs and his groans. And lay an act of sin—an evil word or evil work or evil thought—on one man among us, and he will walk about the streets with as erect a head and as smiling a countenance and as light a step as if he were an innocent child; while, lay half as much on his neighbour, and it will so bruise him to the earth that all men will take knowledge of him that he is a miserable man. Our Lord could no doubt have carried His cross from the hall of judgment to the hill-top without help had His back not been wet with blood. What with a whole and an unwealed body, a well-rested and well-nourished body, He could easily have carried, with His broken body and broken heart He quite sank under. And so it is with His people. One of His heart-broken, heart-bleeding people will sink down to death and hell under a burden of sin and corruption that another of them will scarcely feel or know or believe that it is there. Some sins again in themselves, and by reason of several aggravations, are far more heavy to bear than others, and by some sinners than others. I was reading Bishop Andrewes to myself last night and came upon this pertinent passage. “Sin: its measure, its harm, its scandal. Its quality: how often—how long. The person by whom: his age, condition, state, enlightenment. Its manner, motive, time, and place. The folly of it, the ingratitude of it, the hardness of it, the presumptuousness of it. By heart, by mouth, by deed. Against God, my neighbours, my own body. By knowledge, by ignorance. Willingly and unwillingly. Of old and of late. In boyhood and youth, in mature and old age. Things done once, repeated often, hidden and open. Things done in anger, and from the lust of the flesh and of the world. Before and after my call. Asleep by night and awake by day. Things remembered and things forgotten. Through the fiery darts of the enemy, through the unclean desires of the flesh—I have sinned against Thee. Have mercy on me, O God, and forgive me!” That is the way some men’s burdens are made up to such gigantic proportions and then bound on by such acute cords. That is the way that Lancelot Andrewes and John Bunyan walked solitarily in the fields, sometimes reading and sometimes praying, till the one of them put himself into his immortal Devotions, and the other into his immortal Grace Abounding and Pilgrim’s Progress.

“Then I saw in my dream that Christian asked the Gatekeeper further if he could not help him off with his burden that was upon his back, for as yet he had not got rid of it, nor could he by any means get it off without help. He told him, ‘As to thy burden, be content to bear it until thou comest to the place of deliverance, for there it will fall from off thy back itself.’ Now I saw in my dream that the highway up which Christian was to go was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall is Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back. He ran thus till he came to a place somewhat ascending, and upon that place stood a cross, and a little below in the bottom a sepulchre. So I saw in my dream that just as Christian came up with the cross his burden loosed from off his back, and began to tumble and so continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in and I saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, ‘He hath given me rest by His sorrow, and life by His death!’”