Bunyan, John, 1628-1688 -- Criticism and interpretation
3. Mr. Prejudice was an old man; and this also has been handed down
about him, that he was almost always angry. And if you keep your eyes
open you will soon see how true to the life that feature of old Mr.
Prejudice still is. In every conversation, discussion, debate,
correspondence, the angry man is invariably the prejudiced man; and,
according to the age and the depth, the rootedness and the intensity of
his prejudices, so is the ferocity and the savagery of his anger. He has
already settled this case that you are irritating and wronging him so
much by your still insisting on bringing up. It is a reproach to his
understanding for you to think that there is anything to be said in that
matter that he has not long ago heard said and fully answered. Has he
not denounced that bad man and that bad cause for years? You insult me,
sir, by again opening up that matter in my presence. He will have none
of you or of your arguments either. You are as bad yourself as that bad
man is whose advocate you are. We all know men whose hearts are full of
coals of juniper, burning coals of hate and rage, just by reason of their
ferocious prejudices. Hate is too feeble a word for their gnashing rage
against this man and that cause, this movement and that institution.
There is an absolutely murderous light in their eye as they work
themselves up against the men and the things they hate. Charity rejoices
not in iniquity; but you will see otherwise Christian and charitable men
so jockeyed by the devil that they actually rejoice in iniquity and do
not know what they are doing, or who it is that is egging them on to do
it. You will see otherwise and at other times good men so full of the
rage and madness of prejudice and partiality that they will storm at
every report of goodness and truth and prosperity in the man, or in the
cause, or in the church, or in the party, they are so demented against.
Jockey is not the word. There is the last triumph of pure devilry in the
way that the prince of the devils turns old Prejudice's very best
things--his love of his fathers, his love of the past, his love of order,
his love of loyalty, his love of the old paths, and his very truest and
best religion itself--into so much fat fuel for the fires of hate and
rage that are consuming his proud heart to red-hot ashes. If the light
that is in us be darkness, how great is that darkness; and if the life
that is in us be death, how deadly is that death!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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