They are quick to find out the inefficiency of a university chair, or a schoolmaster's desk, but they know no more of what a New Testament pulpit has been set up for than the stupidest sot in the city. The Divine Nature, human nature, sin, grace, redemption, salvation, holiness, heart-corruption, spiritual life, prayer, communion with God, a conversation and a treasure in heaven,--to all these noblest of studies and divinest of exercises they are as a beast before God. When you come upon a man who is a sot in his senses and in his understanding, you expect him to be the same in his spiritual life. But to meet with an expert in science, a classical scholar, an author or a critic in letters, a leader in political or ecclesiastical or municipal life, and yet to discover that he is as stupid as any sot in the things of his own soul, is one of the saddest and most disheartening sights you can see. Much sadder and much more disheartening than to see stairs and streets of people who can neither read nor write. And yet our city is full of such stupid people. You will find as utter spiritual stupidity among the rich and the lettered and the refined of this city as you will find among the ignorant and the vicious and the criminal classes. Is stupidity a sin? asks Thomas in his Forty-Sixth Question. And the great schoolman answers himself, "Stupidity may come of natural incapacity, in which case it is not a sin. But it may come, on the other hand, of a man immersing his soul in the things of this world so as to shut out all the things of God and of the world to come, in which case stupidity is a deadly sin." Now, from all that, you must already see what you are to do in order to escape from your inborn and superinduced stupidity. You are, like Old Honest, to open your gross, cold, senseless heart to the Sun of Righteousness, and you are to take care every day to walk abroad under His beams. You are to emigrate south for your life, as our well-to-do invalids do, to where the sun shines in his strength all the day. You are to choose such a minister, buy and read such a literature, cultivate such an acquaintanceship, and follow out such a new life of habits and practices as shall bring you into the full sunshine, till your heart of ice is melted, and your stupefied soul is filled with spiritual sensibility. For, were a man a mountain of ice," said Old Honest, "yet if the Sun of Righteousness will arise upon him his frozen heart shall feel a thaw; and thus hath it been with me." Your poets and your philosophers have no resource against the stupidity that opposes them. "Even the gods," they complain, "fight unvictorious against stupidity." But your divines and your preachers have hope beside the dullest and the stupidest and even the most imbruted. They point themselves and their slowest and dullest-witted hearers to Old Honest, this rare old saint; and they set up their pulpit with hope and boldness on the very causeway of the town of Stupidity itself.
2. In the second place,--on this fine old pilgrim's birth and boyhood and youth. The apostle says that there is no real difference between one of us and another; and what he says on that subject must be true. No; there is really no difference compared with the Celestial City whether a pilgrim is born in Stupidity, in Destruction, in Vanity, or in Darkland. At the same time, nature, as well as grace, is of God, and He maketh, when it pleaseth Him, one man to differ in some most important respects from another.
You see such differences every day. Some children are naturally, and from their very infancy, false and cruel, mean and greedy;
while their brothers and sisters are open and frank and generous.
One son in a house is born a vulgar snob, and one daughter a shallow-hearted and shameless little flirt; while another brother is a born gentleman, and another sister a born saint. Some children are tender-hearted, easily melted, and easily moulded;
while others in the same family are hard as stone and cold as ice.
Sometimes a noble and a truly Christian father will have all his days to weep and pray over a son who is his shame; and then, in the next generation, a grandson will be born to him who will more than recover the lost image of his father's father. And so is it sometimes with father Adam's family. Here and there, in Darkland, in Destruction, and in Stupidity, a child will be born with a surprising likeness to the first Adam in his first estate. That happy child at his best is but the relics and ruins of his first father; at the same time, in him the relics are more abundant and the ruins more easy to trace out. And little Honest was such a well-born child. For, Stupidity and all, there was a real inborn and inbred integrity, uprightness, straightforwardness, and nobleness about this little and not over-clever man-child. And, on the principle of "to him that hath shall be given," there was something like a special providence that hedged this boy about from the beginning. "I girded thee though thou hast not known Me" was never out of Old Honest's mouth as often as he remembered the days of his own youth and heard other pilgrims mourning over theirs. "I
have surnamed thee though thou hast not known Me," he would say to himself in his sleep. Slow-witted as he was, no one had been able to cheat young Honest out of his youthful integrity. He had not been led, and he had led no one else, into the paths of the destroyer. He could say about himself all that John Bunyan so boldly and so bluntly said about himself when his enemies charged him with youthful immorality. He left the town in nobody's debt.