103. Counterfeit Holy.

CIII ‘Counterfeit Holy.’

‘COUNTERFEIT holy’ is another of John Bunyan’s so arresting and so illuminating expressions. But in order to get at his exact meaning, what exactly is a counterfeit? Well, a counterfeit is a spurious imitation. It is a fabrication and a fraud. It is a sham and a make-believe. It is base metal. In the words of His Majesty’s mint, it is Brummagem coin. And it is in all these base senses that John Bunyan employs this contemptuous and contumelious word when he tells us that in those early days of his spiritual life the Tempter was ‘so counterfeit holy’ with him that he would not let him so much as eat his meals in peace. The old Counterfeit would come to the young tinker when he had just sat down to his well-earned dinner, and would insist with him that he must leave his half-eaten meal that moment, and must go hence to pray. ‘Now that I am sat down to my meat,’ Bunyan would remonstrate, ‘let me make an end.’ ‘No,’ insisted the old impostor,‘you must go pray now, else you will displease God, and will despise Christ.’ ‘So counterfeit holy would the devil be,’ says Bunyan, as he looks back to those neophyte days of his. Now that so characteristic passage arrests us: it makes us stop and think. And when we stop reading, and begin to think about counterfeit holiness, a thousand things arise in our minds.

‘It is a very difficult thing to counterfeit genuine gold and silver,’ says Professor Jevons in his Political Economy Primer. Perhaps so. But it has been done nevertheless. For do we not read to our amazement that counterfeit Christs arose and had their disciples even in the days of the true Christ Himself? Lo, here is Christ! and lo, there! it was preached, till the very elect were all but deceived and led astray. We need not wonder then that certain counterfeit Christs — evolutionary Christs, and historical Christs, and socialist Christs, and exemplary Christs, and such like, are preached far and wide in our so easily satisfied and so easily deceived day. And not in our day only. As to an exemplary Christ, it was only last night that I read an old book which used to have a great vogue in Scotland till it must have all but deceived the sons and daughters of the Covenanters themselves. The example of Christ is set forth with such power and with such beauty in that old classic that the reader is almost carried away to think that the exemplary Christ is the true and the only and the all-sufficient Christ. Our Lord’s unresting diligence in doing His Father’s will is so dwelt on: His unceasing devotion to prayer is so dwelt on: His charity, His meekness, and His humility are all so dwelt on, that, for the moment, the fair picture fills the mind. But as I finished the beautiful old book, this question began to arise in my mind and would not be silenced in my mind, this question: Did that ‘sometime Professor in Aberdeen’ ever really try to make Christ his own example for a single day? I do not know. He does not say. But as for myself I had been doing that all yesterday, with the result of many a sad breakdown during the day, and with a crushing load of remorse on my conscience at the end of the day. So much so that I could not attempt or expect to sleep last night till I had turned again to the one true Christ for me, as I always find Him, for one place, in the contents and in the text of Paul’s first chapter to the Colossians. Calvin was the first commentator, so far as I know, who called Paul’s Christ in that passage ‘the true Christ.’ ‘He describeth the true Christ,’ says the fine analysis also at the head of that fine chapter. And remembering that I read that great passage again, and then the great commentator’s exposition of that great passage, till my greatly defeated and greatly dejected soul found rest and peace again in the one true Christ for me. Let Paul and Calvin describe their true Christ to you also in every defeat and dejection of yours. For this is He:

‘In whom we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins. For it pleased the Father that in Him should all fullness dwell. And having made peace by the blood of His cross, by Him to reconcile all things to Himself. And you that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath He reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and unblameable, and unreproveable in His sight. If ye continue in the faith, grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the Gospel which ye have heard, and whereof I, Paul, am made a minister.’ As always, the true apostle puts the true Christ first and foremost; and then, when the saints and faithful brethren have received the sin-atoning and peace-speaking Christ into their minds and hearts, Paul then passes on, with all his apostolic power and impressiveness, to set the Christ of God before them in His proper order, that is to say, in the second place, as their one and true and supreme example. For myself, as often as I glance at the sometimes beautiful but always superficial sermons of our day on Christ as our example, I turn again to Paul’s divine order of preaching and presenting the true Christ. That is to say, the divine order and the rational order of preaching Christ as first and last and always our Redeemer and our Righteousness. And then, after that, as our example and our pattern. That was Paul’s apostolic order in every sermon and in every epistle of his. That was Luther’s order, who most took of Paul of all our great preachers. That was Calvin’s order, and that was Bunyan’s order. And in this matter I often remember how the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah for that he sought not God after God’s due and appointed order. For myself, as I hear this man and that calling on me, and saying, lo here! and lo there! lest I be fatally deceived in this all-momentous matter, and have God’s anger kindled against me, I anxiously ask, Hath He marks to lead me to Him if He be my Guide? And I am always and immediately and infallibly answered, In His feet and hands are wound-prints, and His side.

‘Take Christ in His personal excellencies,’ says Goodwin, ‘and He is the Object of love rather than of faith. But the faith that justifies the ungodly looks upon Christ not so much in His personal excellencies, but rather as He is made sin for us, in order that we may be made the righteousness of God in Him.’ The narrow way comes to its very narrowest in that valley where it lies crushed in between a counterfeit Christ on the one hand, and a counterfeit doctrine of the true Christ on the other hand. Never can any better counsel be given to any escaping sinner than to tell him to look to Christ for his salvation: and to look to Christ always and in everything. But that Scriptural and soul-saving counsel is turned into its soul-destroying counterfeit when the corrupt-hearted sinner is told to avoid all ‘morbid introspection,’ and all overanxious self-examination, as his counterfeit counsellors are wont to have it. In offering his great Temple prayer Solomon said that as soon and as often as any man in Israel should come to know the plague of his own heart, that divinely enlightened man would immediately, and would always thereafter make his way up to the temple, and to the atonement that was made in the temple. But the devil and his counterfeit clergy are wiser than Solomon. There is really no such plague as all that in your heart, they say to the too easily deceived sinner. Or if there is ever anything in the state of your heart that is not altogether right, look away from it. Do not brood and break and mourn over it. As your Bible has it, look only to Christ. While, if those counterfeit teachers and their deluded disciples only had grace enough to know it, nothing is more certain than this, that no man has ever really and truly looked to Christ with a saving faith, who has not really and truly and always looked with shame and pain and horror and hatred at himself and at his own sinplagued and sin-possessed heart. Look unto Me and be ye saved, is the very truth of God, and the whole truth of God, as God says it. But the devil has often put his own diabolical sense upon God’s truth, and has often got his counterfeit preachers to preach it. It was this same counterfeit Gospel that put Luther beside himself in those antinomian days when he cried out in every sermon of his, Beware of the devil when he comes with the words of the Gospel in his false mouth! Beware of that master of mountebanks! Beware of that prince of impostors! Beware of that arch evangelical counterfeit! But better than even Luther, John Bunyan puts the whole spiritual situation in his own inimitable and never-to-be-forgotten way.

‘I saw also in my dream that so far as this valley reached there was on the right hand a very deep ditch; that ditch is it into which the blind have led the blind in all ages, and have both miserably perished. Again, behold, on the left hand, there was a very dangerous quag, into which if a good man falls, he can find no bottom for his feet to stand on. The pathway here also was exceeding narrow, and therefore good Christian was all the more put to it. For, when he sought in the dark to shun the ditch on his right hand he was ready to tip over into the mire on his left hand. Also, when he sought to escape the mire, without great carefulness he would be ready to fall into the ditch. Thus he went on, and I heard him sigh bitterly.’

I sometimes wonder that Bunyan did not bring in the old Counterfeit himself at this point to rebuke Christian for his so bitter sighs. I sometimes wonder he did not introduce Satan himself to command the downcast pilgrim to march on with a ‘light heart,’ as you will remember he got the French army to march out of Paris on their way to Berlin: a march that ended not at Berlin but at Sedan.

Then, again, there is a counterfeit conscience, more or less, in every one of us, though we may not all know it and admit it. That is to say, there is a counterfeit strictness, in some things, in all of us; and then that counterfeit strictness is always accompanied with a corresponding slackness in some other things. There is a spurious conscience in all of us that winks at the most serious evils in our own hearts and in our own lives, and then it compensates itself by raging loudly against some things in other people that are not real sins in them at all. Our counterfeit conscience will sometimes deal with the utmost scrupulosity and stringency with the most microscopic matters of Church doctrine and practice; it will resist to the death the least departure from a traditional ritual, while, at the same time, it will allow and well abet the most flagrant insults and injuries to our neighbours. James Fraser of Brea, who was one of the profoundest masters of the things of the soul that ever lived, has set down this as the devil’s thirteenth device directed against his soul:

‘When I could not be wholly deluded from laying to heart matters of religion, Satan, for the most part of my time, busied me with the externals and the formalities of religion, and made me all but forget the fundamental matters. Nice points were much studied, and were much talked about by me, whereas the great matters of my own soul, and of other men’s souls, I forgot to think or speak much about.’ To my mind it is not a good sign of our Church and our day that such a masterpiece of spiritual analysis as Fraser’s autobiography commands so little sale. To my mind it is one of the greatest books of that great century in Scotland. In its own special field I have never met its equal. But I find I must sum up before I am well begun: so endless is this subject of counterfeit holiness, so absolutely endless. For every spiritual and saving grace in our hearts and in our lives has its own special and inseparable counterfeit standing and working beside it. There are a multitude of counterfeit graces against which we must watch and pray, with a far from counterfeit watchfulness and prayer. Take a counterfeit humility as a good example of that; and take that counterfeit humility in its most subtle and its most spiritual shape. Santa Teresa warned her spiritual daughters that Satan never so nearly had her soul in his clutches for ever as when he tried to sophisticate her into a counterfeit contrition of conscience and into a counterfeit humility of heart.

‘Fie, woman!’ he would say to her, ‘if it is only for decency’s sake, wait a little! Would you rush into God’s pure and holy presence with your over-hasty repentance, and with your soul still reeking with your sin? Wait, woman, till your fall is sometime past. Wait till you have had opportunity to do some adequate penance to show to God and to yourself that you are not wholly insincere in your repentance and in your prayer.’ And the same subtle spirit tried the same sophistical indignation and the same spurious solicitude with that great Scottish saint of whom I have already spoken. ‘After my slips and my stumbles,’ says Brea in his masterly book,

‘Satan tried hard to shock me into despair. He tried to amaze me and to confound me with what I had again done. He tried hard to hold me down. He did his best to keep me from ever getting on my feet again. Whereas, my best way was immediately to seek a fresh pardon, and then to go back to my work.’ And yet another outstanding spiritual genius gives us — and word for word — the deceptive debate that the devil dictated to him when he was in the same sad plight in England as Teresa was in Spain and as Brea was in Scotland. ‘Oh,’ reasoned Walter Marshall with himself, in the great bitterness of his soul,

‘Oh, let me first have some true hatred of my sin before I prepare to return from it to God! Let the raging of my lusts be somewhat abated! Let the stinking kennel of my corrupt heart be somewhat cleansed and sweetened! Let me first be more humbled for my sin, and more ashamed of it; let me have a far more godly sorrow on account of it. At any rate, I would first be able to pour out my soul to God, and not be the lifeless lump of sin that I now am.’ But Bunyan beats them all at that also.

‘Oh, ‘twas hard for me to have to pray to this Christ, against whom I had sinned with such vileness! ‘Twas hard work again to look Him in the face, against whom I had sinned so frequently and so abominably! Oh, the shame that did now attend me! I was ashamed, yea even confounded, because of my villany committed against Jesus Christ! But I soon came to see that there was only one way left to me. I must go humble myself before Him, and must beg of Him that, in His amazing grace, He would again have mercy on this wretchedly sinful soul of mine.’ My brethren, before we part for the night, I do beseech you to lay all these things well to heart, and that before you sleep. For when any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not in its application to himself, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart.

‘Nevertheless, the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal — the Lord knoweth them that are His. But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honour, and some to dishonour. If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified, and fit for the Master’s use, and prepared unto every good work.’