woman’s smile and the touch of her hand had in a moment done for this once so obstinate man.  He would read anything now, and especially the best books.  He would hear and enjoy any preacher now, and especially the best and most earnest in preaching.  His old likes and dislikes, prejudices and prepossessions, self-opinionativeness and self-assertiveness all miraculously melted off him, and he became in a day an open-minded, intelligent, good-mannered, devout-minded gentleman.  He who was once such a mule to everybody was now led about by a child in a silken bridle.  All old things had passed away, and all things had become new.  For a time; for a time.  But time passes, and there passes away with it all the humility, meekness, pliability, softness, and sweetness of the obstinate man.  Till when long enough time has elapsed you find him all the obstinate and mulish man he ever was.  It is not that he has ceased to love his wife and his children.  It is not that.  But there is this in all genuine and inbred obstinacy, that after a time it often comes out worst beside those we love best.  A man will be affable, accessible, entertaining, the best of company, and the soul of it abroad, and, then, instantly he turns the latch-key in his own door he will relapse into silence, and sink back into utter boorishness and bearishness, mulishness and doggedness.  He swallows his evening meal at the foot of the table in silence, and then he sits all night at the fireside with a cloud out of nothing on his brow.  His sunshine, his smile, and his universal urbanity is all gone now; he is discourteous to nobody but to his own wife.  Nothing pleases him; he finds nothing at home to his mind.  The furniture, the hours, the habits of the house are all disposed so as to please him; but he was never yet heard to say to wife, or child, or servant that he was pleased.  He never says that a meal is to his taste or a seat set so as to shelter and repose him.  The obstinate man makes his house a very prison and treadmill to himself and to all those who are condemned to suffer with him.  And all the time it is not that he does not love and honour his household; but by an evil law of the obstinate heart its worst obstinacy and mulishness comes out among those it loves best.

But, my brethren, worse than all that, we have all what good Bishop Hall calls ‘a stone of obstination’ in our hearts against God.  With all his own depth and clearness and plain-spokenness, Paul tells us that our hearts are by nature enmity against God.  Were we proud and obstinate and malicious against men only it would be bad enough, and it would be difficult enough to cure, but our case is dreadful beyond all description or belief when our obstinacy strikes out against God.  We know as well as we know anything, that in doing this and in not doing that we are going every day right in the teeth both of God’s law and God’s grace; and yet in the sheer obstinacy and perversity of our heart we still go on in what we know quite well to be the suicide of our souls.  We are told by our minister to do this and not to do that; to begin to do this at this new year and to break off from doing that; but, partly through obstinacy towards him, reinforced by a deeper and subtler and deadlier obstinacy against God, and against all the deepest and most godly of the things of God, we neither do the one nor cease from doing the other.  There is a sullenness in some men’s minds, a gloom and a bitter air that rises up from the unploughed, undrained, unweeded, uncultivated fens of their hearts that chills and blasts all the feeble beginnings of a better life.  The natural and constitutional obstinacy of the obstinate heart is exasperated when it comes to deal with the things of God.  For it is then reinforced with all the guilt and all the fear, all the suspicion and all the aversion of the corrupt and self-condemned heart.  There is an obdurateness of obstinacy against all the men, and the books, and the doctrines, and the precepts, and the practices that are in any way connected with spiritual religion that does not come out even in the obstinate man’s family life.

John Bunyan’s Obstinate, both by his conduct as well as by the etymology of his name, not only stands in the way of his own salvation, but he does all he can to stand in the way of other men setting out to salvation also.  Obstinate set out after Christian to fetch him back by force, and if it had not been that he met his match in Christian, The Pilgrim’s Progress would never have been written.  ‘That can by no means be,’ said Christian to his pursuer, and he is first called Christian when he shows that one man can be as obstinate in good as another man can be in evil.  ‘I never now can go back to my former life.’  And then the two obstinate men parted company for ever, Christian in holy obstinacy being determined to have eternal life at any cost, and Obstinate as determined against it.  The opening pages of The Pilgrim’s Progress set the two men very graphically and very impressively before us.

As to the cure of obstinacy, the rod in a firm, watchful, wise, and loving hand will cure it.  And in later life a long enough and close enough succession of humble, yielding, docile, submissive, self-chastening and thanksgiving acts will cure it.  Reading and obeying the best books on the subjugation and the regulation of the heart will cure it.  Descending with Dante to where the obstinate, and the embittered, and the gloomy, and the sullen have made their beds in hell will cure it.  And much and most agonising prayer will above all cure it.

‘O Lord, if thus so obstinate I,
Choose Thou, before my spirit die,
A piercing pain, a killing sin,
And to my proud heart run them in.

PLIABLE

‘He hath not root in himself.’—Our Lord.

With one stroke of His pencil our Lord gives us this Flaxman-like outline of one of his well-known hearers.  And then John Bunyan takes up that so expressive profile, and puts flesh and blood into it, till it becomes the well-known Pliable of The Pilgrim’s Progress.  We call the text a parable, but our Lord’s parables are all portraits—portraits and groups of portraits, rather than ordinary parables.  Our Lord knew this man quite well who had no root in himself.  Our Lord had crowds of such men always running after Him, and He threw off this rapid portrait from hundreds of men and women who caused discredit to fall on His name and His work, and burdened His heart continually.  And John Bunyan, with all his genius, could never have given us such speaking likenesses as that of Pliable and Temporary and Talkative, unless he had had scores of them in his own congregation.

Our Lord’s short preliminary description of Pliable goes, like all His descriptions, to the very bottom of the whole matter.  Our Lord in this passage is like one of those masterly artists who begin their portrait-painting with the study of anatomy.  All the great artists in this walk build up their best portraits from the inside of their subjects.  He hath not root in himself, says our Lord, and we need no more than that to be told us to foresee how all his outside religion will end.  ‘Without self-knowledge,’ says one of the greatest students of the human heart that ever lived, ‘you have no real root in yourselves.  Real self-knowledge is the root of all real religious knowledge.  It is a deceit and a mischief to think that the Christian doctrines can either be understood or aright accepted by any outward means.  It is just in proportion as we search our own hearts and understand our own nature that we shall ever feel what a blessing the removal of sin will be; redemption, pardon, sanctification, are all otherwise mere words without meaning or power to us.  God speaks to us first in our own hearts.’  Happily for us our Lord has annotated His own text and has told us that an honest heart is