Bunyan, John, 1628-1688 -- Criticism and interpretation
4. And for largeness a place so copious as to contain all the world.
Over against the word 'copious' Bunyan hangs for a key, Ecclesiastes
third and eleventh; and under it Miss Peacock adds this as a
note--'_Copious_, spacious. Old French, _copieux_; Latin, _copiosus_,
plentiful.' The human heart, as we have already read to-night, is the
highest, greatest, strongest, and noblest part of human nature. And so
it is. Fearfully and wonderfully made as is the whole of human nature,
that fear and that wonder surpass themselves in the spaciousness and the
copiousness of the human heart. For what is it that the human heart has
not space for, and to spare? After the whole world is received home into
a human heart, there is room, and, indeed, hunger, for another world, and
after that for still another. The sun is--I forget how many times bigger
than our whole world, and yet we can open our heart and take down the sun
into it, and shut him out again and restore him to his immeasurable
distances in the heavens, and all in the twinkling of an eye. As for
instance. As I wrote these lines I read a report of a lecture by Sir
Robert Ball in which that distinguished astronomer discoursed on recent
solar discoveries. A globe of coal, Sir Robert said, as big as our
earth, and all set ablaze at the same moment, would not give out so much
heat to the worlds around as the sun gives out in a thousandth part of a
second. Well, as I read that, and ere ever I was aware what was going
on, my heart had opened over my newspaper, and the sun had swept down
from the sky, and had rushed into my heart, and before I knew where I was
the cry had escaped my lips, 'Great and marvellous are Thy works, Lord
God Almighty! Who shall not fear Thee and glorify thy name?' And then
this reflection as suddenly came to me: How good it is to be at peace
with God, and to be able and willing to say, My Father! That the whole
of the surging and flaming sun was actually down in my straitened and
hampered heart at that idle moment over my paper is scientifically
demonstrable; for only that which is in the heart of a man can kindle the
passions that are in the heart of that man; and nothing is more sure to
me than that the great passions of fear and love, wonder and rapture were
at that moment at a burning point within me. There is a passage well on
in the _Holy War_, which for terror and for horror, and at the same time
for truth and for power, equals anything either in Dante or in Milton.
Lucifer has stood up at the council board to second the scheme of
Beelzebub. 'Yes,' he said, amid the plaudits of his fellow-princes--'Yes,
I swear it. Let us fill Mansoul full with our abundance. Let us make of
this castle, as they vainly call it, a warehouse, as the name is in some
of their cities above. For if we can only get Mansoul to fill herself
full with much goods she is henceforth ours. My peers,' he said, 'you
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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