Bunyan Characters (3rd Series) | Page 8

will and leave
of those within. The names of the gates were these: Ear-gate, Eye-gate,
Mouth-gate; in short, 'the five senses,' as we say.
In the south of England, in the time of Edward the Confessor and after
the battle of Hastings, there were five cities which had special
immunities and peculiar privileges bestowed upon them, in recognition
of the special dangers to which they were exposed and the eminent
services they performed as facing the hostile shores of France. Owing
to their privileges and their position, the 'Cinque Ports' came to be cities
of great strength, till, as time went on, they became a positive weakness
rather than a strength to the land that lay behind them. Privilege bred
pride, and in their pride the Cinque Ports proclaimed wars and formed
alliances on their own account: piracies by sea and robberies by land
were hatched within their walls; and it took centuries to reduce those
pampered and arrogant ports to the safe and peaceful rank of ordinary
English cities. The Revolution of 1688 did something, and the Reform
Bill of 1832 did more to make Dover and her insolent sisters like the
other free and equal cities of England; but to this day there are
remnants of public shows and pageantries left in those old towns
sufficient to witness to the former privileges, power, and pride of the
famous Cinque Ports. Now, Mansoul, in like manner, has her cinque
ports. And the whole of the Holy War is one long and detailed history
of how the five senses are clothed with such power as they possess;
how they abuse and misuse their power; what disloyalty and despite
they show to their sovereign; what conspiracies and depredations they

enter into; what untold miseries they let in upon themselves and upon
the land that lies behind them; what years and years of siege, legislation,
and rule it takes to reduce our bodily senses, those proud and licentious
gates, to their true and proper allegiance, and to make their possessors a
people loyal and contented, law-abiding and happy.
The Apostle has a terrible passage to the Corinthians, in which he treats
of the soul and the senses with tremendous and overwhelming power.
'Your bodies and your bodily members,' he argues, with crushing
indignation, 'are not your own to do with them as you like. Your bodies
and your souls are both Christ's. He has bought your body and your
soul at an incalculable cost. What! know ye not that your body is
nothing less than the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, and ye
are not any more your own? know ye not that your bodies are the very
members of Christ?' And then he says a thing so terrible that I tremble
to transcribe it. For a more terrible thing was never written. 'Shall I
then,' filled with shame he demands, 'take the members of Christ and
make them the members of an harlot?' O God, have mercy on me! I
knew all the time that I was abusing and polluting myself, but I did not
know, I did not think, I was never told that I was abusing and polluting
Thy Son, Jesus Christ. Oh, too awful thought. And yet, stupid sinner
that I am, I had often read that if any man defile the temple of God and
the members of Christ, him shall God destroy. O God, destroy me not
as I see now that I deserve. Spare me that I may cleanse and sanctify
myself and the members of Christ in me, which I have so often
embruted and defiled. Assist me to summon up my imagination
henceforth to my sanctification as Thine apostle has here taught me the
way. Let me henceforth look at my whole body in all its senses and in
all its members, the most open and the most secret, as in reality no
more my own. Let me henceforth look at myself with Paul's deep and
holy eyes. Let me henceforth seat Christ, my Redeemer and my King,
in the very throne of my heart, and then keep every gate of my body
and every avenue of my mind as all not any more mine own but His.
Let me open my eye, and my ear, and my mouth, as if in all that I were
opening Christ's eye and Christ's ear and Christ's mouth; and let me
thrust in nothing on Him as He dwells within me that will make Him
ashamed or angry, or that will defile and pollute Him. That thought, O
God, I feel that it will often arrest me in time to come in the very act of

sin. It will make me start back before I make Christ cruel or false, a
wine-bibber, a glutton,