The Riches of Bunyan | Page 6

anxiously
directing to that great Agent all the hopes and the praises of the flock
whom he led, and of the readers whom he taught, his writings remain to
diffuse and perpetuate the lesson of his life. Into whatever tribe of the
ancient East or of the remote West his Pilgrim has been introduced, the
name and story of the writer bear, as their great lesson, the testimony
that God's Scriptures are the richest of pastures to the human soul; and
that God the Holy Ghost, as working with those Scriptures and by those
Scriptures, is the one Teacher on whose sovereign aid all the churches,
all the nations, and all the ages must depend. For the absence of those
influences of the divine Spirit no earthly lore can compensate; while
the exuberance of those influences may supply, as on Pentecost, the
lack of all human helpers and patrons, and more than replace all
universities and all libraries. We love to dwell on the illustrious
Dreamer, as one of those characters for whom man had done so little
and God did so much.
And to Christians who are neither authors nor preachers, this life of
romantic privacy and illustrious obscurity has its lessons, alike to awe
and to cheer, of solemn warning and of sustaining hope. No scene or
station of all the earth that can eye paradise, or catch the gleams of the
atoning cross, is truly ignoble or utterly forlorn. He who promised that,
in the last days, the inscription which shone on the front of the
high-priest's mitre, "HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD," should be
written also on the very bells of the horses, and that "every pot" in
Jerusalem, and its outlying streets should become holy as the
consecrated furniture of his own temple and altar, can in like manner
render the lowliest scenes of human art and toil and traffic the schools
of truth and duty and peace, schools ministering alike to the truest
happiness and to the most perfect holiness of our race. He who gave, as
in Bunyan's case he did, to the maker or mender of culinary vessels the
sacred skill to grave the all-holy Name, as one dignifying and
consecrating them, on all the objects and scenes and accompaniments
of his humble labors, can, in our times and in our various stations,

make each allowable task of our earthly life to become also
"HOLINESS TO THE LORD;" and as the Christian's body is made a
TEMPLE of the Holy Grhost, so can he render the Christian himself, in
all his social relations and enterprises, "A PRIEST AND A KING
UNTO GOD." And the great principle of conciliation amid earth's
jarring tribes and clashing interests, and of true and helpful communion
among mankind, is not external but internal, not material but spiritual,
not, terrene but celestial; and is found in the blending by this one divine
Spirit, of all earth's inhabitants, in a common contrition before a
common redemption, tending as these inhabitants are, under a common
sin and doom, to the same inevitable graves; but all of them invited, in
the one name of one Christ, to aspire to the same heaven of endless and
perfect blessedness.
WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS. NEW YORK, January, 1851.

THE RICHES OF BUNYAN.
I. GOD.
GLORY OF GOD.

God is the chief good--good so as nothing is but himself. He is in
himself most happy; yea, all good and all true happiness are only to be
found in God, as that which is essential to his nature; nor is there any
good or any happiness in or with any creature or thing but what is
communicated to it by God. God is the only desirable good; nothing
without him is worthy of our hearts. Right thoughts of God are able to
ravish the heart; how much more happy is the man that has interest in
God. God alone is able by himself to put the soul into a more blessed,
comfortable, and happy condition than can the whole world; yea, and
more than if all the created happiness of all the angels of heaven did
dwell in one man's bosom. I cannot tell what to say. I am drowned. The
life, the glory, the blessedness, the soul-satisfying goodness that is in
God, are beyond all expression.
It was this glory of God, the sight and visions of this God of glory, that
provoked Abraham to leave his country and kindred to come after God.
The reason why men are so careless of and so indifferent about their
coming to God, is because they have their eyes blinded--because they

do not perceive his glory.
God is so blessed a one, that did he not hide himself and his glory, the
whole world would be ravished with him; but