BUNYAN CHARACTERS: FIRST SERIES
LECTURES DELIVERED
IN ST. GEORGE'S FREE CHURCH
EDINBURGH
BY ALEXANDER WHYTE, D.D.
Delivered on Sunday, June 26, 1892 (just before Communion),
on the eve of a general election.
INTRODUCTORY
'The express image' [Gr. 'the character'].--Heb. 1. 3.
The word 'character' occurs only once in the New Testament, and that is in the
passage in the prologue of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the original word
is translated 'express image' in our version. Our Lord is the Express Image of
the Invisible Father. No man hath seen God at any time. The only-begotten
Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him. The Father
hath sealed His divine image upon His Son, so that he that hath seen the Son
hath seen the Father. The Son is thus the Father's character stamped upon
and set forth in human nature. The Word was made flesh. This is the highest
and best use to which our so expressive word 'character' has ever been put,
and the use to which it is put when we speak of Bunyan's Characters partakes
of the same high sense and usage. For it is of the outstanding good or evil in
a man that we think when we speak of his character. It is really either of his
likeness or unlikeness to Jesus Christ we speak, and then, through Him, his
likeness or unlikeness to God Himself. And thus it is that the adjective 'moral'
usually accompanies our word 'character'--moral or immoral. A man's
character does not have its seat or source in his body; character is not a
physical thing: not even in his mind; it is not an intellectual thing. Character
comes up out of the will and out of the heart. There are more good minds, as
we say, in the world than there are good hearts. There are more clever people
than good people; character,--high, spotless, saintly character,--is a far rarer
thing in this world than talent or even genius. Character is an infinitely better
thing than either of these, and it is of corresponding rarity. And yet so true is
it that the world loves its own, that all men worship talent, and even bodily
strength and bodily beauty, while only one here and one there either
understands or values or pursues moral character, though it is the strength
and the beauty and the sweetness of the soul.
We naturally turn to Bishop Butler when we think of moral character. Butler is
an author who has drawn no characters of his own. Butler's genius was not
creative like Shakespeare's or Bunyan's. Butler had not that splendid
imagination which those two masters in character-painting possessed, but he
had very great gifts of his own, and he has done us very great service by
means of his gifts. Bishop Butler has helped many men in the intelligent
formation of their character, and what higher praise could be given to any
author? Butler will lie on our table all winter beside Bunyan; the bishop beside
the tinker, the philosopher beside the poet, the moralist beside the evangelical
minister.
In seeking a solid bottom for our subject, then, we naturally turn to Butler.
Bunyan will people the house for us once it is built, but Butler lays bare for us
the naked rock on which men like Bunyan build and beautify and people the
dwelling-place of God and man. What exactly is this thing, character, we hear
so much about? we ask the sagacious bishop. And how shall we understand
our own character so as to form it well till it stands firm and endures?
'Character,' answers Butler, in his bald, dry, deep way, 'by character is meant
that temper, taste, disposition, whole frame of mind from whence we act in
one way rather than another . . . those principles from which a man acts, when
they become fixed and habitual in him we call his character . . . And
consequently there is a far greater variety in men's characters than there is in
the features of their faces.' Open Bunyan now, with Butler's keywords in your
mind, and see the various tempers, tastes, dispositions, frames of mind from
which his various characters act, and which, at bottom, really make them the
characters, good or bad, which they are. See the principles which Bunyan has
with such inimitable felicity embodied and exhibited in their names, the
principles within them from which they have acted till they have become a
habit and then a character, that character which they themselves are and will
remain. See the variety of John Bunyan's characters, a richer and a more
endless variety than are the features of their faces. Christian and Christiana, Obstinate and Pliable, Mr.
Fearing and Mr. Feeblemind, Temporary and Talkative, Mr. By-ends and Mr.
Facing-both-ways, Simple, Sloth, Presumption, that brisk lad Ignorance, and
the genuine Mr. Brisk himself. And then Captain Boasting, Mr. High-mind, Mr.
Wet-Eyes, and so on, through a less known (but equally well worth knowing)
company of municipal and military characters in the_Holy War_.
We shall see, as we proceed, how this and that character in Bunyan was
formed and deformed. But let us ask in this introductory lecture if we can find
out any law or principle upon which all our own characters, good or bad, are
formed. Do our characters come to be what they are by chance, or have we
anything to do in the formation of our own characters, and if so, in what way?
And here, again, Butler steps forward at our call with his key to our own and
to all Bunyan's characters in his hand, and in three familiar and fruitful words
he answers our question and gives us food for thought and solemn reflection
for a lifetime. There are but three steps, says Butler, from earth to heaven,
or, if you will, from earth to hell--acts, habits, character. All Butler's prophetic
burden is bound up in these three great words--acts, habits, character.
Remember and ponder these three words, and you will in due time become a
moral philosopher. Ponder and practise them, and you will become what is
infinitely better--a moral man. For acts, often repeated, gradually become
habits, and habits, long enough continued, settle and harden and solidify into
character. And thus it is that the severe and laconic bishop has so often made
us shudder as he demonstrated it to us that we are all with our own hands
shaping our character not only for this world, but much more for the world to
come, by every act we perform, by every word we speak, almost by every
breath we draw. Butler is one of the most terrible authors in the world. He
stands on our nearest shelf with Dante on one side of him and Pascal on the
other. He is indeed terrible, but it is with a terror that purifies the heart and
keeps the life in the hour of temptation. Paul sometimes arms himself with
the same terror; only he composes in another style than that of Butler, and,
with all his vivid intensity, he calls it the terror of the Lord. Paul and Bunyan
are of the same school of moralists and stylists; Butler went to school to the
Stoics, to Aristotle, and to Plato.
Our Lord Himself came to be the express image He was and is by living and acting under this same universal law of human life--acts, habits, character.
He was made perfect on this same principle. He learned obedience both by the
things that He did, and the things that He suffered. Butler says in one deep
place, that benevolence and justice and veracity are the basis of all good
character in God and in man, and thus also in the God-man. And those three
foundation stones of our Lord's character settled deeper and grew stronger to
bear and to suffer as He went on practising acts and speaking words of justice,
goodness, and truth. And so of all the other elements of His moral character.
Our Lord left Gethsemane a much more submissive and a much more
surrendered man than He entered it. His forgiveness of injuries, and thus His
splendid benevolence, had not yet come to its climax and crown till He said on
the cross, 'Father, forgive them'. And, as He was, so are we in this world.
This world's evil and ill-desert made it but the better arena and theatre for the
development and the display of His moral character; and the same instruments
that fashioned Him into the perfect and express image He was and is, are still,
happily, in full operation. Take that divinest and noblest of all instruments for
the carving out and refining of moral character, the will of God. How our Lord
made His own unselfish and unsinful will to bow to silence and to praise before
the holy will of His Father, till that gave the finishing touch to His always
sanctified will and heart! And, happily, that awful and blessed instrument for
the formation of moral character is still active and available to those whose
ambition rises to moral character, and who are aiming at heaven in all they do
and all they suffer upon the earth. Gethsemane has gone out till it has covered
all the earth. Its cup, if not in all the depth and strength of its first mixture,
still in quite sufficient bitterness, is put many times in life into every man's
hand. There is not a day, there is not an hour of the day, that the disciple of
the submissive and all-surrendered Son has not the opportunity to say with his
Master, If it be possible, let this cup pass: nevertheless, not as I will, but as
Thou wilt.
It is not in the great tragedies of life only that character is tested and
strengthened and consolidated. No man who is not himself under God's moral
and spiritual instruments could believe how often in the quietest, clearest, and
least tempestuous day he has the chance and the call to say, Yea, Lord, Thy
will be done. And, then, when the confessedly tragic days and nights come,
when all men admit that this is Gethsemane indeed, the practised soul is able,
with a calmness and a peace that confound and offend the bystanders, to say,
to act so that he does not need to say, Not my will, but Thine. And so of all
the other forms and features of moral character; so of humility and meekness,
so of purity and temperance, so of magnanimity and munificence, so of all
self-suppression and self-extinction, and all corresponding exalting and
magnifying and benefiting of other men. Whatever other passing uses this
present world, so full of trial and temptation and suffering, may have, this
surely is the supreme and final use of it--to be a furnace, a graving-house, a
refining place for human character. Literally all things in this life and in this
world--I challenge you to point out a single exception--work together for this
supreme and only good, the purification, the refining, the testing, and the
approval of human character. Not only so, but we are all in the very heat of
the furnace, and under the very graving iron and in the very refining fire that
our prefigured and predestinated character needs. Your life and its trials would
not suit the necessities of my moral character, and you would lose your soul
beyond redemption if you exchanged lots with me. You do not put a pearl
under the potter's wheel; you do not cast clay into a refining fire. Abraham's
character was not like David's, nor David's like Christ's, nor Christ's like Paul's. As Butler says, there is 'a providential disposition of things' around
every one of us, and it is as exactly suited to the flaws and excrescences, the
faults and corruptions of our character as if Providence had had no other life
to make a disposition of things for but one, and that one our own. Have you
discovered that in your life, or any measure of that? Have you acknowledged
to God that you have at last discovered the true key of your life? Have you
given Him the satisfaction to know that He is not making His providential
dispositions around a stock or a stone, but that He has one under His hand
who understands His hand, and responds to it, and rises up to meet and salute
it?
And we cease to wonder so much at the care God takes of human character,
and the cost He lays out upon it, when we think that it is the only work of His
hands that shall l