To that Spirit Bunyan gave
zealous, earnest, and continual worship. Receiving his light and
power from that good Spirit, and anxiously directing to that great
Agent all the hopes and the praises of the flock whom he led, and of
the readers whom he taught, his writings remain to diffuse and
perpetuate the lesson of his life. Into whatever tribe of the
ancient East or of the remote West his Pilgrim has been introduced,
the name and story of the writer bear, as their great lesson, the
testimony that God's Scriptures are the richest of pastures to the
human soul; and that God the Holy Ghost, as working with those
Scriptures and by those Scriptures, is the one Teacher on whose
sovereign aid all the churches, all the nations, and all the ages
must depend. For the absence of those influences of the divine
Spirit no earthly lore can compensate; while the exuberance of those
influences may supply, as on Pentecost, the lack of all human
helpers and patrons, and more than replace all universities and all
libraries. We love to dwell on the illustrious Dreamer, as one of
those characters for whom man had done so little and God did so
much.
And to Christians who are neither authors nor preachers, this life
of romantic privacy and illustrious obscurity has its lessons, alike
to awe and to cheer, of solemn warning and of sustaining hope.
Pages:
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31