The Riches of Bunyan: Selected from His Works

by John Bunyan

And to Christians who are neither authors nor preachers, this life of romantic privacy and illustrious obscurity has its lessons, alike to awe and to cheer, of solemn warning and of sustaining hope. No scene or station of all the earth that can eye paradise, or catch the gleams of the atoning cross, is truly ignoble or utterly forlorn. He who promised that, in the last days, the inscription which shone on the front of the high-priest's mitre, "HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD," should be written also on the very bells of the horses, and that "every pot" in Jerusalem, and its outlying streets should become holy as the consecrated furniture of his own temple and altar, can in like manner render the lowliest scenes of human art and toil and traffic the schools of truth and duty and peace, schools ministering alike to the truest happiness and to the most perfect holiness of our race. He who gave, as in Bunyan's case he did, to the maker or mender of culinary vessels the sacred skill to grave the all-holy Name, as one dignifying and consecrating them, on all the objects and scenes and accompaniments of his humble labors, can, in our times and in our various stations, make each allowable task of our earthly life to become also "HOLINESS TO THE LORD;" and as the Christian's body is made a TEMPLE of the Holy Grhost, so can he render the Christian himself, in all his social relations and enterprises, "A PRIEST AND A KING UNTO GOD." And the great principle of conciliation amid earth's jarring tribes and clashing interests, and of true and helpful communion among mankind, is not external but internal, not material but spiritual, not, terrene but celestial; and is found in the blending by this one divine Spirit, of all earth's inhabitants, in a common contrition before a common redemption, tending as these inhabitants are, under a common sin and doom, to the same inevitable graves; but all of them invited, in the one name of one Christ, to aspire to the same heaven of endless and perfect blessedness.

WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS.
NEW YORK, January, 1851.

THE RICHES OF BUNYAN.

I. GOD.

GLORY OF GOD.

God is the chief good—good so as nothing is but himself. He is in himself most happy; yea, all good and all true happiness are only to be found in God, as that which is essential to his nature; nor is there any good or any happiness in or with any creature or thing but what is communicated to it by God. God is the only desirable good; nothing without him is worthy of our hearts. Right thoughts of God are able to ravish the heart; how much more happy is the man that has interest in God. God alone is able by himself to put the soul into a more blessed, comfortable, and happy condition than can the whole world; yea, and more than if all the created happiness of all the angels of heaven did dwell in one man's bosom. I cannot tell what to say. I am drowned. The life, the glory, the blessedness, the soul-satisfying goodness that is in God, are beyond all expression.

It was this glory of God, the sight and visions of this God of glory, that provoked Abraham to leave his country and kindred to come after God. The reason why men are so careless of and so indifferent about their coming to God, is because they have their eyes blinded—because they do not perceive his glory.

God is so blessed a one, that did he not hide himself and his glory, the whole world would be ravished with him; but he has, I will not say reasons of state, but reasons of glory, glorious reasons why he hideth himself from the world and appeareth but to particular ones.

What is heaven without God? But many there be who cannot abide God; no, they like not to go to heaven, because God is there. The nature of God lieth cross to the lusts of men. A holy God, a glorious holy God, an infinitely holy God; this spoils all. But to the soul that is awakened, and that is made to see things as they are, to him God is what he is in himself, the blessed, the highest, the only eternal good, and he without the enjoyment of whom all things would sound but empty in the ears of that soul.

Methinks, when I consider what glory there is at times upon the creatures, and that all their glory is the workmanship of God, "O Lord," say I, "what is God himself?" He may well be called the God of glory, as well as the glorious Lord; for as all glory is from him, so in him is an inconceivable well-spring of glory, of glory to be communicated to them that come by Christ to him. Wherefore, let the glory and love and bliss and eternal happiness that are in God, allure thee to come to him by Christ.