IV

Neither death nor life can do it. Not death--nor even life. Both are formidable forces; and Paul knew which was the more dangerous of the two.

When Elizabeth came to the English throne, a number of men and women, who were awaiting martyrdom under Mary, were liberated. Animated by the spirit of Ridley and Latimer, they would have kissed the faggots and embraced the stake. Yet, in the years that followed, some of them lapsed into indifference, went the way of the world, and named the name of Christ no more. The ordeal of life proved more potent and more terrible than the ordeal of a fiery death.

Bunyan had learned that lesson. When he was in the depths of his despair, envying the beasts and birds about him, and tormenting himself with visions of hell-fire, he went one day to hear a sermon on the love of Christ. To use his own words, his 'comforting time was come.' 'I began,' he says, 'to give place to the word which with power did over and over again make this joyful sound within my soul: "Who shall separate me from the love of Christ?" And with that my heart was filled full of comfort and hope, and I could believe that my sins would be forgiven me. Yea, I was so taken with the love and mercy of God that I remember that I could not tell how to contain till I got home; I thought I could have spoken of His love to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me. Surely I will not forget this forty years hence?'

Forty years hence! Forty years hence Bunyan was sleeping in his quiet grave in Bunhill Fields; and nobody who visits that familiar resting-place of his supposes for a moment that death has separated him from the love of Christ.

But life! Life is a far more dangerous foe. 'The tempter,' Bunyan tells us, 'would come upon me with such discouragements as these: "You are very hot for mercy, but I will cool you. This frame shall not last. Many have been as hot as you for a spirit, but I have quenched their zeal." With this, several, who were fallen off, would be set before mine eyes. Then I would be afraid that I should fall away, too, but, thought I, I will watch and take care. "Though you do," said the tempter, "I shall be too hard for you. I will cool you insensibly, by degrees, by little and little. Continual rocking will lull a crying child to sleep. I shall have you cold before long!" These things,' Bunyan continues, 'brought me into great straits. I feared that time would wear from my mind my sense of the evil of sin, of the worth of heaven, and of my need of the blood of Christ.' But at that critical moment a text came to his help--Uncle Tom's text, Signor Gavazzi's text. 'What shall separate us from the love of Christ? For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.' 'That,' Bunyan says, 'was a good word to me.'

Death cannot do it!--that is good!

Life cannot do it!--that is better!

'And now I hoped,' says Bunyan, in concluding his narrative of this experience, 'now I hoped that long life would not destroy me nor make me miss of heaven.'