Nor can I leave this point without asserting it to you that no church and
no school of theology has ever developed the mind as well as sanctified
the heart of the common people like the preaching of the Puritan pulpit.
Matthew Arnold was not likely to over-estimate the good that Puritanism
had done to England. Indeed, in his earlier writings he sometimes went
out of his way to lament the hurt that the Puritan spirit had done to
liberality of life and mind in his native land. But in his riper years
we find him saying: "Certainly," he says, "I am not blind to the faults
of the Puritan discipline, but it has been an invaluable discipline for
that poor, inattentive, and immoral creature, man. And the more I read
history and the more I see of mankind, the more I recognise the value of
the Puritan discipline." And in that same Address he "founded his best
hopes for that so enviable and unbounded country in which he was
speaking, America, on the fact that so many of its millions had passed
through the Puritan discipline." John Milton was a product of that
discipline on the one hand, as John Bunyan was on the other. Christiana
was another of its products in the sphere of the family, just as Matthew
Arnold himself had some of his best qualities out of the same fruitful
school.
2. Her heart, her deep, strong, tender heart, is present on every page
of Christiana's noble history. Her heart keeps her often silent when the
water in her eyes becomes all the more eloquent. When she does let her
heart utter itself in words, her words are fine and memorable. As, for
one instance, after Greatheart's discourse on redemption. "O Mercy, that
thy father and mother were here; yea, and Mrs. Timorous also. Nay, I
wish with all my heart now that here was Madam Wanton, too. Surely,
surely, their hearts would be affected, nor could the fear of the one,
nor the powerful lusts of the other, prevail with them to go home again,
and to refuse to become good pilgrims." But it was not so much what she
said herself that brought out the depth and tenderness of Christiana's
heart, it was rather the way her heart loosened other people's tongues.
You must all have felt how some people's presence straitens your heart
and sews up your mouth. While there are other people, again, whose
simple presence unseals your heart and makes you eloquent. We ministers
keenly feel that both in our public and in our private ministrations.
There are people in whose hard and chilling presence we cannot even say
grace as we should say it. Whereas, we all know other people, people of
a heart, that is, whose presence somehow so touches our lips that we
always when near them rise far above ourselves. Christiana did not speak
much to her guides and instructors and companions, but they always spoke
their best to her, and it was her heart that did it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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