Bunyan, John, 1628-1688 -- Criticism and interpretation
I shall then lead! What bodily pains, diseases, premature decays; what
mental remorses, what shames and scandals, what self-loathings and what
self-disgusts, what cups bitterer to drink than blood, I shall then
escape! Yes, O Paul, I shall henceforth hold with thee that my body is
the temple of Christ, and that I am not my own, but that I am bought with
a transporting price, and can, therefore, do nothing less than glorify
God in my body and in my spirit which are God's. 'This place,' says the
Pauline author of the _Holy War_--'This place the King intended but for
Himself alone, and not for another with Him.'
But, my brethren, lay this well, and as never before, to heart--this,
namely, that when you thus begin to keep any gate for Christ, your King
and Captain and Better-self,--Ear-gate, or Eye-gate, or Mouth-gate, or
any other gate--you will have taken up a task that shall have no end with
you in this life. Till you begin in dead earnest to watch your heart,
and all the doors of your heart, as if you were watching Christ's heart
for Him and all the doors of His heart, you will have no idea of the
arduousness and the endurance, the sleeplessness and the self-denial, of
the undertaking.
'Mansoul! Her wars seemed endless in her eyes;
She's lost by one, becomes another's prize.
Mansoul! Her mighty wars, they did portend
Her weal or woe and that world without end.
Wherefore she must be more concern'd than they
Whose fears begin and end the self-same day.'
'We all thought one battle would decide it,' says Richard Baxter, writing
about the Civil War. 'But we were all very much mistaken,' sardonically
adds Carlyle. Yes; and you will be very much mistaken too if you enter
on the war with sin in your soul, in your senses and in your members,
with powder and shot for one engagement only. When you enlist here, lay
well to heart that it is for life. There is no discharge in this war.
There are no ornamental old pensioners here. It is a warfare for eternal
life, and nothing will end it but the end of your evil days on earth.
CHAPTER III--EAR-GATE
'Take heed what ye hear.'--_Our Lord in Mark_.
'Take heed how you hear.'--_Our Lord in Luke_.
This famous town of Mansoul had five gates, in at which to come, out at
which to go, and these were made likewise answerable to the walls--to
wit, impregnable, and such as could never be opened nor forced but by the
will and leave of those within. 'The names of the gates were these, Ear-
gate, Eye-gate,' and so on. Dr. George Wilson, who was once Professor of
Technology in our University, took this suggestive passage out of the
_Holy War_ and made it the text of his famous lecture in the
Philosophical Institution, and then he printed the passage on the fly-
leaf of his delightful book _The Five Gateways of Knowledge_. That is a
book to read sometime, but this evening is to be spent with the master.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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