106. I MUSED, I MUSED, I MUSED.

CVI ‘I MUSED, I MUSED, I MUSED.’ THE religiously minded Greeks acknowledged and worshipped the best they knew. And among many other objects of their worship they paid a special honour and showed a special love to the Nine Muses. Those nine deities dwelt on Parnassus, and from that sacred mountain they presided over, purified, sweetened, and greatly ennobled the best life of ancient Greece. The wisest of the Greeks believed that God Himself was the Father of the sacred Nine, and that the human mind when it was at its best was their mother. And thus both heaven and earth combined in the begetting and in the birth of the Nine Muses of the Greek religion and the Greek civilisation. Nor does the greatest of our Christian poets disdain to invoke the assistance of the classic Nine when he is entering on his high enterprise:

O Muses! O high genius! now vouchsafe Your aid! O mind! that all I saw hast kept Safe in a written record, here thy worth, And eminent endowments, come to proof!

John Bunyan had never gone to school to Clio nor to Melpomene; and yet such was his native genius and such was his Christian experience that he has left behind him a history and a tragedy — Dante would have called it a comedy because it all ends so well — a history and a tragedy that far excel all Greek and Roman fame. No Greek philosopher, no Greek poet, has ever spoken to our hearts as John Bunyan has spoken in his Grace Abounding, and in his Pilgrim’s Progress. And in telling us in his own inimitable way all that God had done for his soul, Bunyan at the same time shows us how much his lifelong habit of musing had to do with his religious experience and with his intellectual and spiritual equipment for his splendid work. The first time we find John Bunyan engaged in his lifelong habit of musing is on the village green on that memorable Sabbath afternoon.

‘A voice did suddenly dart, as from heaven, into my soul, which said to me — Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or wilt thou have thy sins and go to hell? And, all that afternoon, I fell to musing on all my sanctuary sins, and on all my other Sabbath-day disobediences. Thus I stood in the midst of my play, before all that were present, but yet I told them nothing.’

You will follow out for yourselves what line John Bunyan’s musings took that Sabbath afternoon; and when and how those Sabbath musings of his ended. For myself, I also have often had a good deal of musing about the right sanctification of the Sabbath day. And so, I feel sure, have some of you. I will tell you some of my own musings on this sacred matter, and some of them are yours also, no doubt. Musing on this matter I sometimes say to myself that even if the Fourth Commandment had never come into my hands at all, I would still have observed the Sabbath day. As long as the Four Gospels and the Epistle to the Romans have come into my hands, and as often as I believe in my heart that the Son of God was delivered on the Friday morning for my offences, and was raised again on the Sabbath morning for my justification; as long as I truly believe that I would be a stock and a stone if I did not devoutly observe every returning Sabbath morning. As long as I continually stake my soul on my Lord’s death and resurrection — nature herself, common-sense herself, not to say the Spirit of Christ speaking in my heart — all that would combine to make me a devoted observer of the Lord’s Day. Sufficient, I sometimes say to myself, sufficient surely are six days out of the seven for this fast-passing life. For if there is indeed another life immediately before me, and if it is to be at all such a life as Holy Scripture forecasts it to be, then surely one day out of every seven is not too much to give up to the preparation of my mind and my heart and my habits and my character for that future life. I spend a large part of my life among books, and I often muse over my books on a Saturday night and on a Sabbath morning and say to myself — Six days and six nights are surely quite enough, in all conscience, to give to the books that bear upon this fast-dissolving earth, and one day and one night is surely not too much to give to the books that bear upon the new heavens and the new earth and upon my preparation to enter them. Six days and six nights to the history, and to the biography, and to the philosophy, and to the poetry, and to the fiction of time, and one day with one night to the whole literature of eternity. So I sometimes muse to myself. And as I so muse, the fire burns; till I again determine that as for me and my house, so far as I can secure it, we shall more and more observe, and more and more sanctify, and more and more enjoy, the Lord’s own Day. There is a twohundred- year-old and a very musical voice which exactly expresses not a few of my own musings on this whole matter, and it is this:

Bright shadows of true rest; some shoots of bliss;

Heaven once a week; The next world’s gladness prepossessed in this; A Day to seek Eternity in time; time’s bower; The narrow way;

Transplanted paradise;

God’s walking hour; The cool o’ the day; The creation’s jubilee;

God’s parle with dust;

Heaven here; man on those hills of myrrh, of flowers;

Angels descending; the return of trust; A gleam of glory after six days’ showers.

Passing on into our author’s ‘life of conviction,’ as he calls it, I come on this paragraph which I shall neither curtail nor water down one single drop.

‘Thus was I always sinking, sinking, sinking, whatever I did think or do. So one day, I was walking on the street of a neighbouring town, and I sat down upon a settle in that street. And as I so sat, I fell into a very deep pause about the fearful state into which my sin had brought me. And, after long musing, I lifted up my head: but, methought, I saw as if the sun that shineth in the heavens did grudge to give me his light, and as if the very stones in the streets, and the tiles on the houses, did bind themselves against me. Methought that they all combined to banish me out of the world. I was abhorred of them, and was unfit to dwell among them, or to be a partaker of their benefits, because I had so sinned against their Maker who was also my Saviour. O how happy was every creature over I was! For they all stood fast and kept their station, but I was lost and gone.’

These were some of that poor tinker’s musings on the depth of his fall and on the unspeakable awfulness of his sin and misery. Now listen to a great bishop’s similar musings some time before that in his episcopal palace.

‘Two things, O Lord, I see in myself; nature which Thou hast made, and sin which I have added to my nature. Oh! take away from me this depravity that I have brought upon myself! Truth, Lord, I deserve damnation; but no offence of mine can surely be so great as is Thy compassion. Infirm, therefore, I come to the Almighty. Wounded, I hasten to the Physician. Unclean, I flee to the Fountain.’ From a settle on a Bedfordshire street, and from one of the most luxurious palaces in England, the same sad self-musings rise to heaven.

‘At another time, I sat by the fire in my house, and was musing on my great wretchedness, and on death as the wages of my sin, when the Lord came and made this word a most precious word to me: “Forasmuch, then, as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself took part of the same; that, through death, He might destroy him that had the power of death, and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.” I thought that the glory of these words was then so weighty on me that I was, both once and twice, ready to swoon as I sat. Yet not with guilt and trouble, but with solid joy and peace.’

We have the very same wretchedness, and the very same issue out of it, in that half chapter of Paul’s which stands away out at the head of all the literature of wretchedness, ancient and modern, sacred and profane. Melpomene had her own tragical experiences in wretchedness, and she had her own triumphs in the literary expression of her wretchedness. But all her experiences of wretchedness were shallow and superficial, and all her expression of it was feeble and ineffectual, compared with the concentrated wretchedness, and the transcending expression of it, in the Fifty-first Psalm, and in the seventh of the Romans, and in certain chapters of Grace Abounding. ‘Rightly to feel sin,’ says Luther, ‘is the torture of all tortures.’

‘Especially that word Faith put me to it. So that, sometimes, I must question as to whether I had any faith, or no. On this I mused, and could not tell what to do.’

Till at last Martin Luther came to John Bunyan and told him with all clearness what to do.

‘Do this,’ said Luther. ‘Saving faith is nothing else but this. It is nothing else but a sure and steadfast looking to Christ. It is nothing else but a fixed and an unwavering taking hold of Him, and of Him alone, as the alone Giver of righteousness, and salvation, and eternal life. This,’ said Luther to Bunyan, ‘this is the reason that Paul sets Jesus Christ forward so often in his Epistles; yea, almost in every verse. And, like Paul,’ said Luther to Bunyan, ‘you, John Bunyan, must do nothing else but look to Christ. For this alone is true faith.’ And at another time Luther spoke with great point and great power and said to Bunyan:

‘These words — who loved me, and gave Himself for me — these words are full of the right sort of faith. And he who will utter this one word me, and will apply this one word to himself, as Paul the chief of sinners did, he will be a successful disputer with the broken and the angry and the soul-accusing law. Say always, therefore, even for me, a most miserable and a most wretched sinner! Read and repeat with a great vehemency these words me, and for me, not doubting but that thou art of the number to whom these words belong.’ And Bunyan obeyed Luther and did all that till he became the Bunyan that we all know and love; that is to say, one of the most blessed of all our great believers, and one of the sweetest and most consoling of all our great authors. And all that came of his much musing on that one word Faith. The next time we find Bunyan musing it is on a subject which is twinsister to saving faith; that is to say, God’s imputation of Christ’s representative and suretyship righteousness to all true believers. This was the true open-air-cure of Bunyan’s threatened consumption as you will see if you study the passage.

‘At this I was greatly lightened in my mind, and bettered in my body, and was made to understand that God could justify and establish a sinner at any time. It was but His looking upon Christ and imputing of His benefits upon us, and the work was forthwith done.’ And my brethren, when we read it aright we discover that the whole of our Bible is one long muse upon this same imputation. As far back as the fifteenth of Genesis we find the God of Abraham Himself laying the foundation of Gospel imputation in His gracious treatment of the father of the faithful. And when we come to Moses and Aaron we find that they are the divinely appointed ministers of imputation, far more than of anything else. And the God of Israel gave His two servants their first lesson in imputation when He said that as often as He saw the blood of the pascal lamb on any door He would make His destroying angel to pass by that house on which the atoning blood was sprinkled. And David, who so much needed God’s imputation, sings a fine psalm celebrating his own experience of it:

O blessed is the man to whom Is freely pardoned All the transgression he hath done, Whose sin is covered.

Bless’d is the man to whom the Lord Imputeth not his sin. And Isaiah in his great Gospel sermon:

‘Surely He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed, All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.’ And the Apostle Paul, that mighty muser, he muses on little else but on Gospel imputation. His great masterpiece the Epistle to the Romans is the very Magna Charta of Gospel imputation. And it was when Luther, Paul’s great scholar, mused on this same subject in his cell, that the chains fell off his sin-enslaved conscience when he burst out of his prison-house and became the creator of an emancipated Christendom. The Westminster divines also mused on imputation till they asked and answered their three great Gospel questions, to which all our children know the answers: ‘How doth Christ execute the office of a Priest?’ And, ‘What is justification?’ And, ‘What is faith in Jesus Christ?’ All the hymns of the Reformation also, and of every true revival of religion; all the Olney Hymns, all the Wesley Hymns, all the Bonar Hymns, and indeed all the hymns that are worthy to be called hymns, they are all so many musings on Gospel imputation. Let every Sabbath day of ours begin then, and go on, and wind up, with a constant musing on Gospel imputation; for, without Gospel imputation there is nothing left for you and me but a fearful looking for of judgment. And then as the end of all and the best of all,

‘As I was musing and in my studies how to love the Lord, and how to express my love to Him, I felt my soul greatly to go out in love and pity to Him, and my bowels to yearn towards Him. For I saw that He was still my Friend and did reward me good for evil. Yea the love and affection that did then burn within me to my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, did work at this time such a strong and such a hot desire of avengement upon myself for the abuse I had done unto Him, that had I had a thousand gallons of blood within my veins, I could freely then have spilt it all at His feet.’ To such a heat did the fire burn, as Bunyan mused, and mused, and mused upon sin and salvation, upon himself and upon his Saviour.

Now, my brethren, that is John Bunyan; or rather that is a small selection and a poor specimen of that great spiritual writer on his lifelong habit of musing. But what do you say yourselves to all that? Marcus Aurelius to himself says this in one place, this:

‘If we were of a sudden seized upon and turned inside out how would we appear? If our secret musings were all openly discovered and read from the house-tops, how would we stand?’ My brethren, if you are wise, and if you would be found among the wise, besides these offered lessons out of John Bunyan to-night, you will take home with you this added lesson out of the Stoic Emperor, ‘Suddenly surprised,’ and searched to the bottom of your heart, what would your most secret self-musings be found to be? Would they ever be found to be, like John Bunyan’s, about the Lord’s Day, about its past history, about its weekly message from Christ’s empty grave to you, and about the rest that remains for you in heaven? Again, would your musings ever be like those of Bishop Andrewes and John Bunyan, as to how your sinfulness has degraded you and defiled you and enslaved you? Again, would your musings ever be suddenly found to be about that great word faith, and what faith does, and on Whom faith rests? And on imputation? With all your knowledge, do you know the great imputation chapters in your Bible? And the great passages on that supreme subject in Luther, and in Hooker, and in Bunyan, and in all the other greatest authors in the Church of Christ? If we could but overhear you musing and singing to yourself what would it be? Would it ever be, ‘O blessed is the man’? Would it be, ‘Just as I am’? Would it be, ‘Nothing in my hands I bring’? Would it be, ‘Jesus! Thy blood and righteousness’? Would it be, ‘Standing on His merit I know no safer stand’? Would it be, what we sometimes go home from the class on Sabbath nights singing:

Jesus! how precious is Thy grace! When in Thy Name we trust, Our faith receives a righteousness That makes the sinner just?