Bunyan Characters (3rd Series) | Page 9

or unclean. I feel at this moment as if I shall yet
come to ask Him at every meal, and at every other opportunity and
temptation of every kind, what He would have and what He would do
before I go on to take or to do anything myself. What a check, what a
restraint, what an awful scrupulosity that will henceforth work in me!
But, through that, what a pure, blameless, noble, holy and heavenly life
I shall then lead! What bodily pains, diseases, premature decays; what
mental remorses, what shames and scandals, what self-loathings and
what self- disgusts, what cups bitterer to drink than blood, I shall then
escape! Yes, O Paul, I shall henceforth hold with thee that my body is
the temple of Christ, and that I am not my own, but that I am bought
with a transporting price, and can, therefore, do nothing less than
glorify God in my body and in my spirit which are God's. 'This place,'
says the Pauline author of the Holy War--'This place the King intended
but for Himself alone, and not for another with Him.'
But, my brethren, lay this well, and as never before, to heart-- this,
namely, that when you thus begin to keep any gate for Christ, your
King and Captain and Better-self,--Ear-gate, or Eye-gate, or
Mouth-gate, or any other gate--you will have taken up a task that shall
have no end with you in this life. Till you begin in dead earnest to
watch your heart, and all the doors of your heart, as if you were
watching Christ's heart for Him and all the doors of His heart, you will
have no idea of the arduousness and the endurance, the sleeplessness
and the self-denial, of the undertaking.
'Mansoul! Her wars seemed endless in her eyes; She's lost by one,
becomes another's prize. Mansoul! Her mighty wars, they did portend
Her weal or woe and that world without end. Wherefore she must be
more concern'd than they Whose fears begin and end the self-same
day.'
'We all thought one battle would decide it,' says Richard Baxter,
writing about the Civil War. 'But we were all very much mistaken,'
sardonically adds Carlyle. Yes; and you will be very much mistaken
too if you enter on the war with sin in your soul, in your senses and in
your members, with powder and shot for one engagement only. When
you enlist here, lay well to heart that it is for life. There is no discharge
in this war. There are no ornamental old pensioners here. It is a warfare

for eternal life, and nothing will end it but the end of your evil days on
earth.

CHAPTER III
--EAR-GATE

'Take heed what ye hear.'--Our Lord in Mark. 'Take heed how you
hear.'--Our Lord in Luke.
This famous town of Mansoul had five gates, in at which to come, out
at which to go, and these were made likewise answerable to the
walls--to wit, impregnable, and such as could never be opened nor
forced but by the will and leave of those within. 'The names of the
gates were these, Ear-gate, Eye-gate,' and so on. Dr. George Wilson,
who was once Professor of Technology in our University, took this
suggestive passage out of the Holy War and made it the text of his
famous lecture in the Philosophical Institution, and then he printed the
passage on the fly-leaf of his delightful book The Five Gateways of
Knowledge. That is a book to read sometime, but this evening is to be
spent with the master.
For, after all, no one can write at once so beautifully, so quaintly, so
suggestively, and so evangelically as John Bunyan. 'The Lord
Willbewill,' says John Bunyan, 'took special care that the gates should
be secured with double guards, double bolts, and double locks and bars;
and that Ear-gate especially might the better be looked to, for that was
the gate in at which the King's forces sought most to enter. The Lord
Willbewill therefore made old Mr. Prejudice, an angry and
ill-conditioned fellow, captain of the ward at that gate, and put under
his power sixty men, called Deafmen; men advantageous for that
service, forasmuch as they mattered no words of the captain nor of the
soldiers. And first the King's officers made their force more formidable
against Ear- gate: for they knew that unless they could penetrate that no
good could be done upon the town. This done, they put the rest of their
men in their places; after which they gave out the word, which was, Ye
must be born again! And so the battle began. Now, they in the town had
planted upon the tower over Ear-gate two great guns, the one called
High-mind and the other Heady.