me not--an unclean worm, a dead dog, a putrid corpse. Despise me not,
despise me not, O Lord. But look upon me with those eyes with which Thou
didst look upon Magdalene at the feast, Peter in the hall, and the thief
on the cross. O that mine eyes were a fountain of tears that I might
weep night and day before Thee! I despise and bruise myself that my
penitence is not deeper, is not fuller. Help Thou mine impenitence, and
more and more pierce, rend, and crush my heart. My sins are more in
number than the sand. My iniquities are multiplied, and I have no
relief." Perish your Puritanism, and your prayer-books too! I hear some
high-minded and indignant man saying. Perish your Celestial City and all
my desire after it, before I say the like of that about myself! Brave
words, my brother; brave words! But there have been men as blameless as
you are, and as brave-hearted over it, who, when the scales fell off
their eyes, were heard crying out ever after: O wretched man that I am!
And: Have mercy on me, the chief of sinners! And so, if it so please
God, will it yet be with you.
3. "Having had little to do this morning," said Mrs. Timorous to Mrs.
Light-mind, "I went to give Christiana a visit." "Law," I read in his
most impressive Life, "by this time was well turned fifty, but he rose as
early and was as soon at his desk as when he was still a new,
enthusiastic, and scrupulously methodical student at Cambridge." Summer
and winter Law rose to his devotions and his studies at five o'clock, not
because he had imperative sermons to prepare, but because, in his own
words, it is more reasonable to suppose a person up early because he is a
Christian than because he is a labourer or a tradesman or a servant. I
have a great deal of business to do, he would say. I have a hardened
heart to change; I have still the whole spirit of religion to get. When
Law at any time felt a temptation to relax his rule of early devotion, he
again reminded himself how fast he was becoming an old man, and how far
back his sanctification still was, till he flung himself out of bed and
began to make himself a new heart before the servants had lighted their
fires or the farmers had yoked their horses. Shame on you, he said to
himself, to lie folded up in a bed when you might be pouring out your
heart in prayer and in praise, and thus be preparing yourself for a place
among those blessed beings who rest not day and night saying, Holy, Holy,
Holy. "I have little to do this morning," said Mrs. Timorous. "But I am
preparing for a journey," said Christiana. "I have now a price put into
my hand to get gain, and I should be a fool of the greatest size if I
should have no heart to strike in with the opportunity."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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