slippery and unsavoury streets of this forsaken earth.  He who has fast working out for him an exceeding and eternal weight of glory will easily count all his cups and all his crosses, and all the crooks in his lot but as so many light afflictions and but for a moment.  My Lord Understanding had his palace built with high perspective towers on it, and the site of it was near to Eye-gate, from the top of which his lordship every day looked not at the things which are temporal, but at the things which are eternal, and down from his palace towers he every day descended to administer his heavenly office in the city.

Your eye, then, is the shortest way into your heart.  Watch it well, therefore; suspect and challenge all outsiders who come near it.  Keep the passes that lead to your heart with all diligence.  Let nothing contraband, let nothing that even looks suspicious, ever enter your hearts; for, if it once enters, and turns out to be evil, you will never get it all out again as long as you live.  ‘Death is come up into our windows,’ says our prophet in another place, ‘and is entered into our palaces, to cut off our children in our houses and our young men in our streets.’  Make a covenant, then, with your eyes.  Take an oath of your eyes as to which way they are henceforth to look.  For, let them look this way, and your heart is immediately full of lust, and hate, and envy, and ill-will.  On the other hand, lead them to look that way and your heart is as immediately full of truth and beauty, brotherly kindness and charity.  The light of the body is the eye; if, therefore, thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light; but if thine eye be evil, thy whole body is full of darkness.  If, therefore, the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!

CHAPTER V—THE KING’S PALACE

‘The palace is not for man, but for the Lord God.’—David.

‘Now, there is in this gallant country a fair and delicate town, a corporation, called Mansoul: a town for its building so curious, for its situation so commodious, for its privileges so advantageous, that I may say of it, there is not its equal under the whole heaven.  Also, there was reared up in the midst of this town a most famous and stately palace: for strength, it might be called a castle; for pleasantness, a paradise; and for largeness, a place so copious as to contain all the world.  This place the King intended for Himself alone, and not for another with Him, so great was His delight in it.’  Thus far, our excellent allegorical author.  But there are other authors that treat of this great matter now in hand besides the allegorical authors.  You will hear tell sometimes about a class of authors called the Mystics.  Well, listen at this stage to one of them, and one of the best of them, on this present matter—the human heart, that is.  ‘Our heart,’ he says, ‘is our manner of existence, or the state in which we feel ourselves to be; it is an inward life, a vital sensibility, which contains our manner of feeling what and how we are; it is the state of our desires and tendencies, of inwardly seeing, tasting, relishing, and feeling that which passes within us; our heart is that to us inwardly with regard to ourselves which our senses of seeing, hearing, feeling, and such like are with regard to things that are without or external to us.  Your heart is the best and greatest gift of God to you.  It is the highest, greatest, strongest, and noblest power of your nature.  It forms your whole life, be it what it will.  All evil and all good come from your heart.  Your heart alone has the key of life and death for you.’  I was just about to ask you at this point which of our two authors, our allegorical or our mystical author upon the heart, you like best.  But that would be a stupid and a wayward question since you have them both before you, and both at their best, to possess and to enjoy.  To go back then to John Bunyan, and to his allegory of the human heart.

1.  To begin with, then, there was reared up in the midst of this town of Mansoul a most famous and stately palace.  And that palace and the town immediately around it were the mirror and the glory of all that its founder and maker had ever made.  His palace was his very top-piece.  It was the metropolitan of the whole world round about it; and it had positive commission and power to demand service and support of all around.  Yes.  And all that is literally, evidently, and actually true of the human heart.  For all other earthly things are created and upheld, are ordered and administered, with an eye to the human heart.  The human heart is the final cause, as our scholars would say, of absolutely all other earthly things.  Earth, air, water; light and heat; all the successively existing worlds, mineral, vegetable, animal, spiritual; grass, herbs, corn, fruit-trees, cattle and sheep, and all other living creatures; all are upheld for the use and the support of man.  And, then, all that is in man himself is in him for the end and the use of his heart.  All his bodily senses; all his bodily members; every fearfully and wonderfully made part of his body and of his mind; all administer to his heart.  She is the sovereign and sits supreme.  And she is worthy and is fully entitled so to sit.  For there is nothing on the earth greater or better than the heart, unless it is the Creator Himself, who planned and executed the heart for Himself and not for another with Him.  ‘The body exists,’ says a philosophical biologist of our day, ‘to furnish the cerebral centres with prepared food, just as the vegetable world, viewed biologically, exists to furnish the animal world with similar food.  The higher is the last formed, the most difficult, and the most complex; but it is just this that is most precious and significant—all of which shows His unrolling purpose.  It is the last that alone explains all that went before, and it is the coming that will alone explain the present.  God before all, through all, foreseeing all, and still preparing all; God in all is profoundly evident.’  Yes, profoundly evident to profound minds, and experimentally and sweetly evident to religious minds, and to renewed and loving and holy hearts.

2.  For fame and for state a palace, while for strength it might be called a castle.  In sufficiently ancient times the king’s palace was always a castle also.  David’s palace on Mount Zion was as much a military fortress as a royal residence; and King Priam’s palace was the protection both of itself and of the whole of the country around.  In those wild times great men built their houses on high places, and then the weak and endangered people gathered around the strongholds of the powerful, as we see in our own city.  Our own steep and towering rock invited to its top the castle-builder of a remote age, and then the exposed country around began to gather itself together under the shelter of the bourg.  And thus it is that the military engineering of the Holy War makes that old allegorical book most excellent to read, not only for common men like you and me, who are bent on the fortification and the defence of our own hearts, but for the military historians of those old times also, for the experts of to-day also, and for all good students of fortification.  And the New Testament of the Divine peace itself, as well as the Old Testament so full of the wars of the Lord—they both support and serve as an encouragement and an example to our spiritual author in the elaboration of his military allegory.  Every good soldier of Jesus Christ has by heart the noble paradox of Paul to the Philippians—that the peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep their hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.  Let God’s peace, he says, be your man of war.  Let His surpassing peace do both the work of war and the work of peace also in your hearts and in your minds.  Let that peace both fortify with walls, and garrison