"--when thou shalt enlarge my heart."--David.
On Sabbath, the 12th December 1886, I heard the late Canon Liddon preach a sermon in St. Paul's Cathedral, in which he classed Oliver Cromwell with Alexander the Sixth and with Richard the Third. I
had taken my estimate of the great Protector's character largely from Carlyle's famous book, and you can judge with what feelings I
heard the canon's comparison. And, besides, I had been wont to think of the Protector as having entered largely into John Bunyan's portrait of Greatheart, the pilgrim guide. And the researches and the judgments of Dr. Gardiner have only gone to convince me, the eloquent canon notwithstanding, that Bunyan could not have chosen a better contemporary groundwork for his Greatheart than just the great Puritan soldier. Cromwell's "mental struggles before his conversion," his life-long "searchings of heart," his "utter absence of vindictiveness," his unequalled capacity for "seeing into the heart of a situation," and his own "all-embracing hospitality of heart"--all have gone to reassure me that my first guess as to Bunyan's employment of the Protector's matchless personality and services had not been so far astray. And the oftener I read the noble history of Greatheart, the better I seem to hear, beating behind his fine figure, by far the greatest heart that ever ruled over the realm of England.
1. The first time that we catch a glimpse of Greatheart's weather-
beaten and sword-seamed face is when he is taking a stolen look out of the window at Mr. Fearing, who is conducting himself more like a chicken than a man around the Interpreter's door. And from that moment till Mr. Fearing shouted "Grace reigns!" as he cleared the last river, never sportsman surely stalked a startled deer so patiently and so skilfully and so successfully as Greatheart circumvented that chicken-hearted pilgrim. "At last I looked out of the window, and perceiving a man to be up and down about the door, I went out to him and asked him what he was; but, poor man, the water stood ill his eyes. So I perceived what he wanted. I
went in, therefore, and told it in the house, and we showed the thing to our Lord. So He sent me out again to entreat him to come in; but I dare say I had hard work to do it." Greatheart's whole account of Mr. Fearing always brings the water to my eyes also. It is indeed a delicious piece of English prose. If I were a professor of belles lettres instead of what I am, I would compel all my students, under pain of rustication, to get those three or four classical pages by heart till they could neither perpetrate nor tolerate bad English any more. This camp-fire tale, told by an old soldier, about a troublesome young recruit and all his adventures, touches, surely, the high-water mark of sweet and undefiled English. Greatheart was not the first soldier who could handle both the sword and the pen, and he has not been the last.
But not Caesar and not Napier themselves ever handled those two instruments better.
2. Greatheart had just returned to his Master's house from having seen Mr. Fearing safely through all his troubles and well over the river, when, behold, another caravan of pilgrims is ready for his convoy. For Greatheart, you must know, was the Interpreter's armed servant. When at any time Greatheart was off duty, which in those days was but seldom, he took up his quarters again in the Interpreter's house. As he says himself, he came back from the river-side only to look out of the Interpreter's window to see if there was any more work on the way for him to do. And, as good luck would have it, as has been said, the guide was just come back from his adventures with Mr. Fearing when a pilgrim party, than which he had never seen one more to his mind, was introduced to him by his Master, the Interpreter. "The Interpreter," so we read at this point, "then called for a man-servant of his, one Greatheart, and bid him take sword, and helmet, and shield, and take these, my daughters," said he, "and conduct them to the house called Beautiful, at which place they will rest next. So he took his weapons and went before them, and the Interpreter said, God-speed."
3. Now I saw in my dream that they went on, and Greatheart went before them, so they came to the place where Christian's burden fell off his back and tumbled into a sepulchre. Here, then, they made a pause, and here also they blessed God. "Now," said Christiana, "it comes to my mind what was said to us at the gate;
to wit, that we should have pardon by word and by deed. What it is to have pardon by deed, Mr. Greatheart, I suppose you know;
wherefore, if you please, let us hear your discourse thereof." "So then, to speak to the question," said Greatheart. You have all heard about the "question-day" at Highland communions. That day is so called because questions that have arisen in the minds of "the men" in connection with doctrine and with experience are on that day set forth, debated out, and solved by much meditation and prayer; age, saintliness, doctrinal and experimental reading, and personal experience all ****** their contribution to the solution of the question in hand. Just such a question, then, and handled in such a manner, was that question which whiled the way and cheated the toil till the pilgrims came to the House Beautiful.