Bunyan Characters (3rd Series) | Page 6

they are thereby fast
preparing their city for that threatened day when she is to be hung up
on her own walls and bled to the white? Who would not hate and revile
the book or the preacher who prophesied such rough things as that?
Who could love the author or the preacher who told him to his face that
his eyes and his ears and all the passes to his heart were already in the
hands of a cruel, ruthless, and masterful enemy? No wonder that you
never read the Holy War. No wonder that the bulk of men have never
once opened it. The Downfall is not a favourite book in the night-

gardens of Paris.
3. And then, few, very few, it is to be feared, will be any better of the
Holy War. For, to be any better of such a terrible book as this is, we
must at all costs lay it, and lay it all, and lay it all at once, to heart. We
must submit ourselves to see ourselves continually in its blazing glass.
We must stoop to be told that it is all, in all its terrors and in all its
horrors, literally true of ourselves. We must deliberately and resolutely
set open every gate that opens in on our heart--Ear-gate and Eye-gate
and all the gates of sense and intellect, day and night, to Jesus Christ to
enter in; and we must shut and bolt and bar every such gate in the
devil's very face, and in the face of all his scouts and orators, day and
night also. But who that thinks, and that knows by experience what all
that means, will feel himself sufficient for all that? No man: no sinful
man. But, among many other noble and blessed things, the Holy War
will show us that our sufficiency in this impossibility also is all of God.
Who, then, will enlist? Who will risk all and enlist? Who will
matriculate in the military school of Mansoul? Who will submit himself
to all the severity of its divine discipline? Who will be made willing to
throw open and to keep open his whole soul, with all the gates and
doors thereof, to all the sieges, assaults, capitulations, submissions,
occupations, and such like of the war of gospel holiness? And who will
enlist under that banner now?
'Set down my name, sir,' said a man of a very stout countenance to him
who had the inkhorn at the outer gate. At which those who walked
upon the top of the palace broke out in a very pleasant voice,
'Come in, come in; Eternal glory thou shalt win.'
We have no longer, after what we have come through, any such
stoutness in our countenance, yet will we say to-night with him who
had it, Set down my name also, sir!

CHAPTER II
--THE CITY OF MANSOUL AND ITS CINQUE PORTS

'--a besieged city.'--Isaiah.
Our greatest historians have been wont to leave their books behind
them and to make long journeys in order to see with their own eyes the

ruined sites of ancient cities and the famous fields where the great
battles of the world were lost and won. We all remember how
Macaulay made a long winter journey to see the Pass of Killiecrankie
before he sat down to write upon it; and Carlyle's magnificent
battle-pieces are not all imagination; even that wonderful writer had to
see Frederick's battlefields with his own eyes before he could trust
himself to describe them. And he tells us himself how Cromwell's
splendid generalship all came up before him as he looked down on the
town of Dunbar and out upon the ever- memorable country round about
it. John Bunyan was not a great historian; he was only a common
soldier in the great Civil War of the seventeenth century; but what
would we not give for a description from his vivid pen of the famous
fields and the great sieges in which he took part? What a find John
Bunyan's 'Journals' and 'Letters Home from the Seat of War' would be
to our historians and to their readers! But, alas! such journals and
letters do not exist. Bunyan's complete silence in all his books about the
battles and the sieges he took his part in is very remarkable, and his
silence is full of significance. The Puritan soldier keeps all his military
experiences to work them all up into his Holy War, the one and only
war that ever kindled all his passions and filled his every waking
thought. But since John Bunyan was a man of genius, equal in his own
way to Cromwell and Milton themselves, if I were a soldier I would
keep ever before me the great book in which