'Search me, O God, and know my heart.'--David.
'Let a man examine himself.'--Paul 'Look to yourselves.'--John.
'Know thyself.'--Apollo.
The year 1668 saw the publication of one of the deepest books in the whole world, Dr. John Owen's Remainders of Indwelling Sin in Believers. The heart-searching depth; the clear, fearless, humbling truth, the intense spirituality, and the massive and masculine strength of John Owen's book have all combined to make it one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the great Puritan school.
Had John Owen's style been at all equal to his great learning, to the depth and the grasp of his mind, and to the lofty holiness of his life, John Owen would have stood in the very foremost and selectest rank of apostolical and evangelical theologians. But in all his books Owen labours under the fatal drawback of a bad style.
A fine style, a style like that of Hooker, or Taylor, or Bunyan, or Howe, or Leighton, or Law, is such a winning introduction to their works and such an abiding charm and spell. The full title of Dr.
Owen's great work runs thus: The Nature, Power, Deceit, and Prevalency of the Remainders of Indwelling Sin in Believers--a title that will tell all true students what awaits them when they have courage and enterprise enough to address themselves to this supreme and all-essential subject. Fourteen years after the publication of Dr. Owen's epoch-****** book, John Bunyan's Holy War first saw the light. Equal in scriptural and in experimental depth, as also in their spiritual loftiness and intensity, those two books are as different as any two books, written in the same language, and written on the same subject, could by any possibility be. John Owen's book is the book of a great scholar who has read the Fathers and the Schoolmen and the Reformers till he knows them by heart, and till he has been able to digest all that is true to Scripture and to experience in them into his rich and ripe book. A
powerful reasoner, a severe, bald, muscular writer, John Owen in all these respects stands at the very opposite pole to that of John Bunyan. The author of the Holy War had no learning, but he had a mind of immense natural sagacity, combined with a habit of close and deep observation of human life, and especially of religious life, and he had now a lifetime of most fruitful experience as a Christian man and as a Christian minister behind him; and, all that, taken up into Bunyan's splendid imagination, enabled him to produce this extraordinarily able and impressive book. A model of English style as the Holy War is, at the same time it does not attain at all to the rank of the Pilgrim's Progress; but then, to be second to the Pilgrim's Progress is reward and honour enough for any book. Let all genuine students, then, who would know the best that has been written on experimental religion, and who would preach to the deepest and divinest experience of their best people, let them keep continually within their reach John Owen's Temptation, his Mortification of Sin in Believers, his Nature and Power of Indwelling Sin, and John Bunyan's Holy War made for the Regaining of the Metropolis of this World.
Well, then, as He who dwells on high would have it, there was one whose name was Mr. Prywell, a great lover of Mansoul. And he, as his manner was, did go listening up and down in Mansoul to see and hear, if at any time he might, whether there was any design against it or no. For he was always a jealous man, and feared some mischief would befall it, either from within or from some power without. Mr. Prywell was always a lover of Mansoul, a sober and a judicious man, a man that was no tattler, nor a raiser of false reports, but one that loves to look into the very bottom of matters, and talks nothing of news but by very solid arguments.
And then, after our historian has told us some of the eminent services that Mr. Prywell was able to perform both for the King and for the city, he goes on to tell us how the captains determined that public thanks should be given by the town of Mansoul to Mr.
Prywell for his so diligent seeking of the welfare of the town;
and, further, that, forasmuch as he was so naturally inclined to seek their good, and also to undermine their foes, they gave him the commission of Scoutmaster-general for the good of Mansoul. And Mr. Prywell managed his charge and the trust that Mansoul had put into his hands with great conscience and good fidelity; for he gave himself wholly up to his employ, and that not only within the town, but he also went outside of the town to pry, to see, and to hear.
Now, that being so, it may interest and perhaps instruct you to-
night to look for a little at some of the features and at some of the feats of the Scoutmaster-general of the Holy War, Mr. Prywell, of the town of Mansoul.
1. 'Well, now, as He who dwells on high would have it, there was one whose name was Mr. Prywell, a great lover of the town of Mansoul.' In other words: self-observation, self-examination, strict, jealous, sleepless self-examination, is of God. Our God who searches our hearts and tries our reins would have it so. And if He does not have it so in us, our souls are not as our God would have them to be.
'Bunyan employs pry,' says Miss Peacock in her excellent notes, 'in a more favourable sense than it now bears. As, for instance, it is said in another part of this same book that the men of Mansoul were allowed to pry into the words of the Holy Ghost and to expound them to their best advantage. Honest anxiety for the welfare of his fellow-townsmen was Mr. Prywell's chief characteristic. Pry is another form of peer--to look narrowly, to look closely.' And God, says John Bunyan, would have it so.