soon find contrary both to Scripture and reason and experience.
Old Andrew Gray speaks feelingly and no less truly concerning the
heart, when he says, 'I think,' he says, 'that if all the saints
since Adam's day, and who shall be to the end of the world, had but
one deceitful heart to guide they would misguide it.'  What a plot
of God, then, it is to seat grace, a little saving grace, in the
midst of such a sea of corruption as a human heart is, and then to
set a sinful man to watch over that spark and to keep the boiling
pollutions of his own heart from extinguishing that spark!  Well
may Paul exclaim:  Yea, what carefulness it calls forth in us; yea,
what indignation; yea, what fear; yea, what vehement desire; yea,
what zeal; yea, what revenge!  And, knowing to what He has left our
hearts, well may Emmanuel say to us from His ascending steps,
'Watch ye, therefore; and what I say unto you, I say unto all,
Watch!'

3.  It is to keep thee watchful and to teach thee war also, the
Prince went on.  Bishop Butler is about the last author that we
would think of going to for light on any deep and intricate
question in the evangelical and experimental life.  But Butler is
so deeply seen into much of the heart of man, as also into many of
the ways of God, that even here he has something to say to the
point.	'It is vain to object,' he says in his sober and sobering
way, 'that all this trouble and danger might have been saved us by
our being made at once the creatures and the characters which we
were to be.  For we experience that what we are to be is to be the
effect of what we shall do.  And that the conduct of nature is not
to save us trouble and danger, but to make us capable of going
through trouble and danger, and to put it upon us to do it.'  The
Apostle Peter has the same teaching in a passage too little
attended to, in which he tells us that we are set here to work out
our own salvation, and that our salvation will just be what, with
fear and trembling, or, as Butler says, with trouble and danger, we
work out.  No man, let all men understand, is to have his salvation
thrust upon him.  No man need expect to waken up at the end of an
idle, indifferent, inattentive life and find his salvation
superinduced upon all that.  No man shall wear the crown of
everlasting life who has not for himself won it.  As every man
soweth to the Spirit so also shall he reap.  As a soldier warreth,
so shall he hear it said to him, Well done.  And as a sinner keeps
his heart with all diligence, and holds it fast till his King
comes, so shall he hear it said to him, Thou hast been faithful
over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things.  If thy
sins, then, are left in thee to teach thee war, O poor saint of
God, then take to thee the whole armour of God; thou knowest the
pieces of it, and where the armoury is, and, having done all,
stand!

4.  And dost thou know, O Mansoul, that it is all to try thy love
also?  Now, how, just how, do the remainders of sin in the
regenerate try their love?  Why, surely, in this way.  If we really
loved sin at the deepest bottom of our hearts, and only loved
holiness on the surface, would we not in our deepest hearts close
with sin, give ourselves up to it, and make no stand at all against
it?  Would we not in our deepest and most secret hearts welcome it,
and embrace it, look out for it with desire and delight, and part
with it with regret?  But if, as a matter of fact, we at our
deepest and most hidden heart turn from sin, flee from it, fight
against it, rejoice when we are rid of it, and have horror at the
return of it,--what better proof than that could Christ and His
angels have that at bottom we are His and not the devil's?  And
that grace, at bottom, has our hearts, and not sin; heaven, and not
hell?  The apostle's protesting cry is our cry also; we also
delight in the law of God after our most inward man.  For, after
our saddest surprises into sin, after its worst outbreaks and
overthrows, such all the time were our reluctances,
recalcitrations, and resistances, that, swept away as we were, yet
all the time, and after it was again over, it was with some good
conscience that we said to Christ that He knew all things, and that
He knew that we loved Him.


'O benefit of ill! now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruined love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater,
So I return rebuked to my content,
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.'


Yes; it is a sure and certain proof how truly we love our dearest
friend, that, after all our envy and ill-will, yet it is as true as
that God is in heaven that, all the time, maugre the devil of self
that remains in our heart,--after he has done his worst--we would
still pluck out our eyes for our friend and shed our blood.  I have
no better proof to myself of the depth and the divineness of my
love to my friend than just this, that I still love him and love
him more tenderly and loyally, after having so treacherously hurt
him.  And my heavenly friends and my earthly friends, if they will
still have me, must both be content to go into the same bundle both
of my remaining enmity and my increasing love; my remainders of
sin, and my slow growth in regeneration.  So when they had dined,
Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me
more than these?  He saith unto Him, Yea, Lord; Thou knowest that I
love Thee.  He saith unto him again the second time, Simon, son of
Jonas, lovest thou Me?	He saith unto Him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest
that I love Thee.  He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of
Jonas, lovest thou Me?	Peter was grieved because He said unto him
the third time, Lovest thou Me?  And he said unto Him, Lord, Thou
knowest all things; Thou knowest that I love Thee!

5.  And, to sum up all--more than your humility, more than your
watchfulness, more than your prayerfulness, more than to teach you
war, and more than to try your love, the dregs and remainders of
sin have been left in your regenerate heart to exalt and to extol
the grace of God.  In Emmanuel's very words, it has all been to
make you a monument of God's mercy.  I put it to yourselves, then,
ye people of God:  does that not satisfy you for a reason, and for
an explanation, and for a justification of all your shame and pain,
and of all your bondage and misery and wretchedness since you knew
the Lord?  Is there not a heart in you that says, Yes! it was worth
all my corruption and pollution and misery to help to manifest
forth and to magnify the glory of the grace of God?  You seize on
Emmanuel's word that you are a monument of mercy.  Somehow that
word pleases and reposes you.  Yes, that is what out of all these
post-regeneration years you are.  You would have been a monument to
God's mercy had you, like the thief on the cross, been glorified on
the same day on which you were first justified.  But it will
neither be the day of your justification nor the day of your
glorification that will make you the greatest of all the monuments
that shall ever be raised to the praise of God's grace; it will be
the days of your sanctification that will do that.  Paul was a
blasphemer and a persecutor and injurious at his conversion, but he
had to be a lifetime in grace and an apostle above all the twelve
before he became the chiefest of sinners and the most wretched of
saints.  And though your first forgiveness was, no doubt, a great
proof of the grace of God, yet it was nothing, nothing at all, to
your forgiveness to-day.  You had no words for the wonder and the
praise of your forgiveness to-day.  You just took to your lips the
cup of salvation and let that silent action speak aloud your
monumental praise.  You were a sinner at your regeneration, else
you would not have been regenerated.  But you were not then the
chief of sinners.  But now.  Ah, now!  Those words, the chief of
sinners, were but idle words in Paul's mouth.  He did not know what
he was saying.	For, what has horrified and offended other men when
it has been spoken with bated breath to them about envy, and hate,
and malice, and revenge, and suchlike remainders of hell, all that
has been a breath of life and hope to you.  It has been to you as
when Christian, in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, heard a voice
in the darkness which proved to him that there was another sinner
at the mouth of hell besides himself.  There is no text that comes
oftener to your mind than this, that whoso hateth his brother is a
murderer; and, communicant as you are, you feel and you know and
you are sure that there are many men lying in lime waiting the day
of judgment to whom it would be more tolerable than for you were it
not that you are to be at that day the highest monument in heaven
or earth to the redeeming, pardoning, and saving grace of God.
Yes, this is the name that shall be written on you; this is the
name that shall be read on you of all who shall see you in heaven;
this name that Emmanuel pronounced over Mansoul that day from His
ascending chariot-steps, a very Spectacle of wonder, and a very
Monument of the mercy and the grace of God.





End of Project Gutenberg Etext Bunyan Characters 3rd Series by A. Whyte

