upon it, put it out of your heart.  Stop fishing for it, and when you see it coming, turn away and stop your ears against it.  And should it still insinuate itself, at any rate do not repeat to others what has already so flattered and humbled and weakened you.  Telling it to others will only humble and weaken you more.  By repeating the praise that you have heard or read about yourself you only expose yourself and purchase well-deserved contempt for yourself.  And, more than that, by fishing for praise you lay yourself open to all sorts of flatterers.  Honest men, men who truly respect and admire you, will show you their dignified regard and appreciation of you and your work by their silence; while your leaky slaves will crowd around you with floods of praise that they know well will please and purchase you.  And when you cannot with all your arts squeeze a drop out of those who love and honour you, gallons will be poured upon you by those who have respect neither for themselves nor for you.  Faugh!  Flee from flatterers, and take up only with sternly true and faithful men.  “I am much less regardful,” says Richard Baxter, “of the approbation of men, and set much lighter store by their praise and their blame, than I once did.  All worldly things appear most vain and unsatisfying to those who have tried them most.  But while I feel that this has had some hand in my distaste for man’s praise, yet it is the increasing impression on my heart of man’s nothingness and God’s transcendent greatness; it is the brevity and vanity of all earthly things, taken along with the nearness of eternity;—it is all this that has at last lifted me above the blame and the praise of men.”

To conclude; let us make up our mind and determine to pass on to God on the spot every syllable of praise that ever comes to our eyes or our ears—if, in this cold, selfish, envious, and grudging world, any syllable of praise ever should come to us.  Even if pure and generous and well-deserved praise should at any time come to us, all that does not make it ours.  The best earned usury is not the steward’s own money to do with it what he likes.  The principal and the interest, and the trader too, are all his master’s.  And, more than that, after the wisest and the best trader has done his best, he will remain, to himself at least, a most unprofitable servant.  Pass on then immediately, dutifully, and to its very last syllable, to God all the praise that comes to you.  Wash your hands of it and say, Not unto us, O God, not unto us, but unto Thy name.  And then, to take the most selfish and hungry-hearted view of this whole matter, what you thus pass on to God as not your own but His, He will soon, and in a better and safer world, return again to the full with usury to you, and you again to God, and He again to you, and so on, all down the pure and true and sweet and blessed life of heaven.

ATHEIST

“ . . . without God [literally, atheists] in the world.”—Paul.

“Yonder is a man with his back toward Zion, and he is coming to meet us.  So he drew nearer and nearer, and at last came up to them.  His name was Atheist, and he asked them whither they were going?  We are going to the Mount Zion, they answered.  Then Atheist fell into a very great laughter.  What is the meaning of your laughter? they asked.  I laugh to see what ignorant persons you are to take upon you so tedious a journey, and yet are like to have nothing but your travel for your pains.  Why, man?  Do you think we shall not be received? they said.  Received!  There is no such place as you dream of in all this world.  But there is in the world to come, replied Christian.  When I was at home, Atheist went on, in mine own country I heard as you now affirm, and, from that hearing, I went out to see, and have been seeking this city you speak of this twenty years, but find no more of it than I did the first day I set out.  And, still laughing, he went his way.”

Having begun to tell us about Atheist, why did Bunyan not tell us more?  We would have thanked him warmly to-night for a little more about this unhappy man.  Why did the dreamer not take another eight or ten pages in order to tell us, as only he could have told us, how this man that is now Atheist had spent his past twenty years seeking Mount Zion?  Those precious unwritten pages are now buried in John Strudwick’s vault in Bunhill Fields, and no other man has arisen able to handle Bunyan’s biographic pen.  Had Bunyan but put off the entrance of Christian and Hopeful into the city till he had told us something more about the twenty years it had taken this once earnest pilgrim to become an atheist, how valuable an interpolation that would have been!  What was it that made this man to set out so long ago for the Celestial City?  What was it that so stoutly determined him to leave off all his old companions and turn his back on the sweet refreshments of his youth?  How did he do at the Slough of Despond?  Did he come that way?  What about the Wicket Gate, and the House Beautiful, and the Interpreter’s House, and the Delectable Mountains?  What men, and especially what women, did he meet and converse with on his way?  What were his fortunes, and what his misfortunes?  How much did he lay out at Vanity Fair, and on what?  At what point of his twenty years’ way did his youthful faith begin to shake, and his youthful love begin to become lukewarm?  And what was it that at last made him quite turn round his back on Zion and his face to his own country?  I cannot forgive Bunyan to-night for not telling us the story of Atheist’s conversion, his pilgrimage, and his apostasy in full.

At the same time, though it cannot be denied that Bunyan has lost at this point a great opportunity for his genius and for our advantage,—at the same time, he undoubtedly did a very courageous thing in introducing Atheist at all; and, especially, in introducing him to us and making him laugh so loudly at us when we are on the very borders of the land of Beulah.  A less courageous writer, and a writer less sure of his ground, would have left out Atheist altogether; or, if he had felt constrained to introduce him, would have introduced him at any other period of our history rather than at this period.  Under other hands than Bunyan’s we would have met with this mocking reprobate just outside the City of Destruction; or, perhaps, among the booths of Vanity Fair; or, indeed, anywhere but where we now meet him.  And, that our greater-minded author does not let loose the laughter of Atheist upon us till we are almost out of the body is a stroke of skill and truth and boldness that makes us glad indeed that we possess such a sketch at Bunyan’s hand at all, all too abrupt and all too short as that sketch is.  In the absence, then, of a full-length and finished portrait of Atheist, we must be content to fall back on some of the reflections and lessons that the mere mention of his name, the spot he passes us on, and the ridicule of his laughter, all taken together, awaken in our minds.  One rapid stroke of such a brush as that of John Bunyan conveys more to us than a full-length likeness, with all the strongest colours, of any other artist would be able to do.

1.  One thing the life-long admiration of John Bunyan’s books has helped to kindle and burn into my mind and my imagination is this: What a universe of things is the heart of man!  Were there nothing else in the heart of man but all the places and all the persons and all the adventures that John Bunyan saw in his sleep, what a world that would open up in all our bosoms!  All the pilgrims, good and bad—they, or the seed and possibility of them all, are all in your heart and in mine.  All the cities, all the roads that lead from one city to another, with all the paths and all the by-paths,—all the adventures, experiences, endurances, conflicts, overthrows, victories,—all are within us and never are to be seen anywhere else.  Heaven and