Bunyan, John, 1628-1688 -- Criticism and interpretation
Now, I have taken up Captain Self-denial to-night because the young men
and I are to begin a study to-night to which I was first attracted
because it taught me lessons about myself, and about self-denial, and
thus about both a young man's and an old man's deepest and most
persistent corruptions--lessons such as I have never been taught in any
other school. In all my philosophical, theological, moral, and
experimental reading, so to describe it, I have never met with any school
of authors for one moment to be compared with the great evangelical
mystics, especially when they treat of self, self-love, self-denial, the
daily cross, and all suchlike lessons. Take the great doctrinal and
experimental Puritans, such as John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Richard Baxter,
John Howe, and Jonathan Edwards, and add on to them the greatest and best
mystics, such as Jacob Behmen, Thomas A Kempis, Francis Fenelon, Jeremy
Taylor, Samuel Rutherford, Robert Leighton, and William Law, and you will
have the profoundest, the most complete, the most perfect, and, I will
add, the most fascinating and enthralling of spiritual teaching in all
the world. And I will be bold enough to promise you that if you will but
join our Young Men's Class to-night, and will buy and read our mystical
books, and will resolve to put in practice what you hear and read in the
class, I will promise you, I say, that by the end of our short session
you will not only be ten times more open and hospitably-minded men, but
also ten times more spiritually-minded men, ten times more Christ-like
men, and with your joy in Christ and His joy in you all but full.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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