own protracted mental sufferings, or pictures those scenes of gentleness which especially abound in the narrative of Christiana and her children, he takes our hearts captive. We are clay in his hands. He moulds us as he will.

Bunyan's ready sympathy.

Bunyan's enthusiasm.

This broad humanity in Bunyan is manifested still further in his ready sympathy in all the forms of human feeling. It is especially conspicuous in his charity of spirit, which even his twelve years of imprisonment could not disturb so as to call out one sharp or bitter word toward his enemies. It is manifested in that infectious enthusiasm which is a prime element of power in every successful career, and which communicates to ordinary men an inspiration of hope and courage and strength such as puts its author almost in the place of a deity among his followers. It is the combination of these and kindred qualities in Bunyan, constituting a broad, generous, well-developed humanity, which seems to have been the source of that peculiar magnetism which is so perceptible in his writings, and which must have been still more fully felt in his personal presence.

This broad humanity essential to

success.

If our analysis is correct, and if this magnetic humanity is one great source of the power which attained such development in Bunyan, and which is seen in absolute perfection in Him who, five days before his crucifixion, could fill Jerusalem and even the very courts of the Temple with the hosannas of the populace, then every preacher of the gospel, whether by tongue or pen, should give to its culture the most assiduous study.

Cause of the pop

ularity of sensa

It is not to be denied that a class of men who have none of the higher qualities we have named, who, unlike Bunyan, have little or no real instruction to give, who sneer at "theology" because they know tional preachers. nothing about it, and who are held in deserved contempt by scholarly men, are notwithstanding getting and retaining the ear of the busy, mercurial, quickwitted American people, not by any means on account of their emptiness, but wholly in spite of it, and yet are wielding an amount of influence over public opinion and character which is undoubtedly preparing the way, first, for loose doctrine, then for false doctrine, and at last for a complete apostasy from Christ, both in opinion and life.

What the people want.

The secret of the power of these preachers is to be found in their intense sympathy with men, and in the numerous points of contact with their audiences at which that sympathy is evolved. It is simple slander upon the people to say, as is often done, that they do not love thought. All men love thought, but they love something else better. They love a man better than they love his thoughts. He who shows himself to be a man, highly developed in all the characteristics of a man as God made him, will be more to them than the greatest philosopher or the profoundest theologian. "And I," says our Saviour--not my doctrine, not my law, but I-"if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me."

BUNYAN'S WORKS A TRANSCRIPT OF HIS OWN EXPERIENCE.

It still remains that another and a far more important secret of Bunyan's success should he mentioned. He wrote what he had himself experienced. His "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners" is the "Pilgrim's Progress" and the "Holy War" in a subjective form. It is easy to trace, in this account of his personal experience, the original of all the chief scenes of his allegories. Here is the Slough of Despond, and a miry place it was to poor Bunyan. The Interpreter's House stood hard by his home. The fight with Apollyon was a real one. Vanity Fair and its courts were a transcript of the society

and government of the times in England. Some of the characters can even now be traced to the living men around him, and in Bunyan's day a large number must have been capable of identification.

Without the terrible spiritual experience of Bunyan and his protracted sufferings, these immortal productions would have been impossible. The seed of the plentiful harvest which they have brought into the kingdom of God was sown in anguish and tears. The force of this personal experience threw, often into a single sentence, the results of a lifetime of intense thought. It focalized under the eye of the reader the concentrated vitality of Bunyan's whole physical, intellectual and spiritual energies for long years. Here is the power of these works in one of its chief elements. While all the auxiliaries which we have named, of defined doctrine, of clear speech, of beauty in expression, of correctness in conception, of personal application, of a large humanity in its humour, in its frankness, in its fancy, in its pathos, in its sympathy, in its charity, and in its inspiring enthusiasm, were present, yet none of them were present in such an eminent degree as to place the author where he is—in the very front rank of literature. In fact, the critic often feels that there is a deficiency in these particulars which suggests somewhat painfully the idea of poverty in literary resources. Still, he is conscious of power. He feels that the author has reached the end of writing, while he seems deficient in the qualities by which that end is ordinarily gained. Like the famous sentence of Massillon at the commencement of his sermon on the death of the Duchess of Orleans, "God only is great !"-which simple words caused a vast assembly to bow their heads in worship and awe-the words of Bunyan seem possessed of a power of which no critical account can be given. The explanation is, in part at least, that these words were forged upon the anvil of experience, and were ejected with the concentrated momentum of years of emotion and thought.

All real eloquence springs from personal experience.

Webster.

Whitefield.

So it has been with all great orators. The finest similes of Daniel Webster were not wrought out at the moment when they leaped, as if unbidden, from his lips. They were the fruit of hours of elevated communion with nature and with truth, and when they were uttered they were a lightning-stroke, because the massed electricity of vast hidden regions of lofty emotion found vent in them.

Very simple were the words of Whitefield. The rudest collier among his audiences could have uttered them as easily as he. Yet when he raised his hands and exclaimed, "Oh the wonderful love of Christ!" vast assemblies were bathed in tears, because these words, when uttered by Whitefield, meant vastly more than when uttered by an ordinary man.

Napoleon.

Napoleon's charge at Lodi carried his troops victorious over batteries which had mowed down the columns of every other French general, because at the moment his whole military history was brought to the minds both of friend and foe, and the united force of a hundred battle-fields swept over the bridge of fire. The great chief himself recognized this principle of cumulation when he said to his army in Egypt, "From the summit of those pyramids forty centuries look down upon you." The deeds witnessed by those mute sentinels of history, during two-thirds of the world's life, commingled with the deeds of to-day, and every blow of the modern army gathered into itself the combined energies of ages of heroism.

The words, as well as the deeds, of power which have moved the world have ever been the voice of the accumulated experience of generations. So the words by which one individual moves another must be the voice of accumulated personal experience. Our Saviour penetrated in an instant the hearts of all about him, not only because he knew man, but because he had been tried as man

Our Saviour.

is. He paints heaven and the glory of his Father, he describes hell in language of fearful power, because he speaks that which he knows and testifies that which he has seen. John could not be commissioned to write the Apocalypse of the future until he had been shown, amid the dark mountains of the isle of Patmos, the actual vision of the supernatural world. Even Paul could not be entrusted with his great message until he had been caught up in the third heaven and heard that "which it is not lawful for man to utter." In ordinary speech, the words of an eye-witness, though they are the same words, are always uttered with a zest which the manufactured utterances of a mere investigator can never acquire.

Bunyan.

Bunyan's rude and unfinished word-pictures stand before us in the warm colours and sharp outlines which belong to acts rather than representations. We do not read a biography. We see a life. Hence we are moved by Bunyan's words as by a cry of agony or a shout of joy uttered at our side. We are in no mood to criticise the artistic execution, as if a dramatist were exhibiting before us. Here is living suffering and actual happiness. A human heart is uttering itself, not a musical tone or an elocutionary inflection. This is the power of reality. All the rules of mere representation here fail of application.

The preacher who speaks out his own experience has a power which transcends all the canons of art. Art will unquestionably add to this power and bring it to a polished perfection, but it will not create it. The preacher who moves men must learn to say, not only "Thou art the man," but also, "I am the man." The former without the latter will be scolding, not preaching. It may be very faithful and very just, but men will grow worse under it rather than better. The latter without the former is simply the egoistic form of the sensational style. It is the insufferable personality of a coarse, vain man thrust between his hearers and the truth. But the two, united as they were in Bunyan, cry to men to escape the city of Destruction, where I lived; to roll off their burdens at the cross, where I found pardon; to avoid Doubting Castle, where I was ensnared; to resist the Devil, with whom I contended in the Valley of Humiliation; to eschew the allurements of Vanity Fair, which I have seen to "bite like a serpent and sting like an adder;" to seek the instruction and delights of the Delectable Mountains, where I have drunk of the river of God's pleasures.

There is a sense in which the true preacher can say, "We preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus, the Lord." There is another sense in which he can say, "We preach ourselves as your servants, for Jesus' sake."

BUNYAN'S THOUGHTS AN INSPIRATION FROM GOD.

We shall detain the reader only to call attention to one more element of Bunyan's power. He was a man in constant communion with God. His spiritual autobiography is not needed to assure us of this fact. All his writings bear testimony to it. Such a fact is of course beyond the scope of ordinary literary criticism. The power of the men who have received from God "a mouth and a wisdom which all their adversaries are not able to gainsay or resist" is a mystery to the critics of the Schools. They find in it only a new proof of the superstition of the ignorant masses, who can be so moved without any apparent cause. But in this case, as in others, the foolishness of God is wiser than men. One divine word, though it be ever so simple, is mighty to the pulling down of the strongest holds. The man who utters that divine word possesses, it may be, not eloquence, not learning, not logic, not any of the ordinary forces of the orator, but he has inspiration. In the highest spiritual sense, "the inspiration of the Almighty hath given him understanding," and with understanding comes power.

Thought-inspira

spiration.

In using the word inspiration we have restricted it to thought-intion and word-in- spiration. Word-inspiration is confined to the superintendence of the Spirit over those who spake "not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth." In the Holy Scrip. tures both the thoughts and the language, so far as necessary, were directed from on high. "Expressing things taught by the Spirit, in language taught by the Spirit," is probably the idea intended in the words, "Comparing spiritual things with spiritual."

But there is no evidence that in our times any aid is given to utterance, except as it is given through the thoughts, emotions and purposes which are created by the present Spirit in the soul. That form of inspiration is still the privilege of every man who has become united with God.

The original union of man with his Maker is a union of nature-a union which has been broken by sin. But the union of the "new creature" with the Creator is a union of thought, affection and purpose. The soul experiences the modicum of truth which is contained in the heathen idea of absorption into the deity. "It returns into the bosom of Divinity," not to lose its conscious existence, but to become more active amid divine activities, to become more loving with Him "who first loved us," to energize its will-power by blending it with the will of God. Just in proportion to the perfection of this union does the restored wanderer become "a partaker of the Divine nature;" just in that proportion he can say, "I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me;" and just in that proportion does it remain true, as of old, that it is given him, at the hour of need, what he ought to speak. The particular words will indeed be modified by the habits and taste of the speaker. Here comes in the need and the duty of personal culture. But the thought or emotion will issue defined and strong and glowing from the mind of God. In a real, in the most important, sense, the words of the man of prayer are the words of God.

Relation of culture to inspiration.

The inspiration of thoughts is a higher inspiration than that of words. The one implies union with God in character and by constant communion. The other may be granted to a Balaam who "loved the wages of unrighteousness."

The inspiration of Bunyan is the inspiration of a man who had become "the temple of the living God." When this fact is fully comprehended, it ceases to be a mystery that none of his adversaries were able to resist the wisdom and power with which he spake. All the other sources of strength which we have enumerated sink into insignificance when compared with this.

Let this unquestionable fact be a rebuke to the men of ambition who trust mainly in the arts of popularity or in the forces of learning and culture, and convert their pulpits, the one into an actor's stage, the other into a professor's chair. Let it be for the encouragement and joy of every man of faith who puts forth all his powers, however humble they may be, in close and constant sympathy with God.

Bunyan, like the woman who anointed the Saviour's feet, has done deeds by the simple power of faith which shall be told for a memorial of him wherever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world. By the same faith may every man become a chosen vessel to bear the name of Christ to the perishing millions of earth!

"When one who holds communion with the skies

Has filled his urn where these pure waters rise,
And once more mingles with us meaner things,
'Tis e'en as if an angel shook his wings!
Ambrosial fragrance fills the circuit wide,
That tells us whence his treasures are supplied !"

CONTENTS.