086. Another Thing Was My Dancing.

LXXXVI ‘Another Thing Was My Dancing.’ BUT it must always be remembered that there is dancing and dancing. There is a great deal of dancing even in the Bible. And the dancing in the Bible is nearly always good dancing. On the shore of the Red Sea Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Moses and Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. And David was so full of holy joy at the homebringing of the Ark that he leaped and danced on the very street to the terrible scandal of his coldhearted queen. And then in the New Testament the return of the prodigal son was celebrated with such an outburst of jubilation that the whole house was filled with feasting and with music and with dancing. As much as to say that there will be feasting and music and dancing in heaven, or something far better, when we return home to our Father’s house to go no more out. And then Bunyan boldly declares that in vision one Sabbath morning he saw our Lord actually leaping and dancing around His empty grave, because He had gotten the victory for us over sin, and death, and hell. There is no doubt some very bad dancing recorded in the Bible, but by far the most part of it is good, as good as the worship of God is good, as good as the overpowering joyfulness of the saints of God is good. And then there is both good and bad dancing in the Pilgrim’s Progressalso.

‘Come,’ said Mrs. Lightmind, ‘put this kind of talk away. I was yesterday at Madam Wanton’s where we were all as merry as the maids. For who do you think should be there but I and Mrs. Love-the-flesh and three or four more, with Mr. Lechery, Mrs. Filth, and some others. So we had music and dancing, and what else was meet to fill up the pleasure. And I dare say, my Lady herself is an admirably-bred gentlewoman, and Mr. Lechery is as pretty a fellow.’ And then we have this other dancing-party further on in the same book.

‘Now Christiana, if need was, could play upon the viol, and her daughter Mercy upon the lute. So since they were so merry disposed, she played them a lesson, and Mr. Ready-to-halt would dance. So he took Mr. Despondency’s daughter, named Miss Much-afraid, by the hand, and to dancing they went on the road. True, he could not dance without one crutch in his hand; but, I promise you, he footed it well; also the girl was to be commended, for she answered the music handsomely. As for Mr. Despondency, the music was too much for him; he was for feeding rather than dancing, for that he was almost starved. So Christiana gave him some of her bottle of spirits for his present relief, and then prepared him something to eat, and in a little the old gentleman came to himself, and began to be finely revived.’ So that, you see, there are more kinds of dancing than one. It all depends on whose house it is in which you dance, and in whose company, and to what music, and especially who is your partner.

Another thing of Bunyan’s at that time of his life was his bellringing. I must give you his bell-ringing at length and in his own words. For it wholly spoils John Bunyan to put him into any other man’s words but his own.

‘Now, you must know, that before this I had taken much delight in bellringing, but my conscience beginning to be tender, I thought such practice was but vain, and therefore forced myself to leave it, yet my mind hankered. Wherefore, I should go to the steeple door and look on, though I durst not ring. But I thought this did not become religion neither, yet I forced myself, and would look on still. But quickly after, I began to think — How if one of the bells should fall! Then I chose to stand under a main beam that lay overthwart the steeple, thinking there I might stand sure. But then I should think again, should the bell fall with a swing it might first hit the wall, and then rebounding upon me, might kill me for all that beam. This made me stand in the steeple door; and now, thought I, I am safe enough, for if a bell should then fall, I can slip out behind these thick walls, and so be preserved notwithstanding. So after this I would go to see them ring, but would not go further than the steeple door. But, then, it came into my heart — How if the steeple itself should fall! And this thought — it may fall for ought I know, when I stood and looked on, did continually so shake my mind that I durst not stand at the steeple door any longer, but was forced to flee, for fear the steeple should fall on my head.’

Now from all that it comes out as clear as day that it was neither his bellringing nor his dancing in themselves that so tortured and terrified Bunyan. It was his old and evil associations with these amusements that so greatly distressed him now. It was the cruel way that his conscience took him by the throat as often as he returned to these now condemned indulgences. Bunyan’s conscience was now so scrupulous that she would not allow him so much as to touch one of his former bell-ropes, nor to lift so much as a foot in one of his former dances. And thus it is that our proper lesson out of Bunyan to-night is neither concerning bell-ringing, nor dancing, nor anything of that kind. Our proper lesson to-night is our own consciences; and the things, be they bells or dances, or what else, that lacerate and exasperate our consciences, and turn them into our fiercest accusers, and into our most relentless judges, and into our most cruel jailors.

‘We are fearfully and wonderfully made,’ says the Psalmist. And in nothing are we more fearfully and more wonderfully made than just in the matter of our conscience. For our conscience is set supreme and sovereign over all that is within us, and over all that we do without us. Our conscience is more than our conscience; our conscience may almost be said to be our God. So much so, that whatever our conscience commands us to do or not to do we must instantly obey her voice on pain of her heavy hand falling upon us and the still heavier hand of God Himself. So absolutely is our conscience the true and very voice of God to us that even when for any reason her voice is in anything dubious or doubtful, as it sometimes is, even to go against the dubiety and the doubt is to go against the clear command of God Himself. ‘He that doubteth is damned if he eat.’ Our conscience and God and our own immortal souls must always have the benefit of the doubt, and never once our supposed interests or our affections or our appetites. All Hebrew and Greek and Latin and English, both ethic and religion, are full of that. I could fill the whole of this discourse with the proofs and the illustrations of that. There may be no wrong to you in bell-ringing or in dancing, but there would have been mortal wrong to Bunyan had he gone on with these condemned indulgences after his conscience had once said No! For to him that esteemeth anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean. And how terrible the voice and the hand of conscience can be when she has been outraged and exasperated — of that the whole Bible and the whole of our best literature in all languages is full. And no literature is more full of that than our own Shakespeare, And a plain evangelical preacher has this:

O conscience! who can stand against thy power!

Endure thy stripes or agonies one hour!

Stone, gout, strappado, racks, whatever is Dreadful to sense are only toys to this. No pleasures, riches, honour, friends, can tell How to give ease to this: ‘tis like to hell. And then when the day of grace comes, as to the part that conscience performs in conversion, Dr. Newman sings:

Thus the Apostles tamed the pagan breast, They argued not, but preach’d, and conscience did the rest.

Bunyan began life with what Paul describes as a conscience seared with a red-hot iron. Now this would sometimes happen to Bunyan in his tinker days and in his father’s workshop. By some accident he would let fall a piece of red-hot iron on his hand or on his arm. And after a time of great agony the soft and tender flesh would be burned and seared into a hard and an unfeeling scar. And it would abide a hard and an unfeeling scar all his after days. Till afterwards he would often strike the scar with a sharp knife or with a red-hot rod, and would say like our Lord, So is the kingdom of heaven. The whole world was full of parables to Bunyan: his father’s workshop and all. He never opened his eyes that he did not, like our Lord, see the kingdom of heaven. So is it with sin, he would say. Sin turns the tender side of the soul into a seared scar. Till the sinner goes on in his sin without so much as a single twinge of conscience. So it was with Bunyan himself, all through his early days in the army and in the tinker’s stall. Till that never-to-be-forgotten Sabbath when the time of his merciful visitation had come at last. And then by the hand of the Holy Ghost Himself, the seared scar fell off Bunyan’s conscience, and the dark scales fell off his eyes. And ever after that day of salvation to Bunyan his conscience entered on her rightful office in Bunyan’s bosom, and she performed her office better and better down to the end of his obedient life. The first time you commit a certain sin your conscience will seize you by the throat and will hale you to judgment. But if you go on committing that sin in spite of your conscience her protest and her warning will grow weaker and weaker till you will take your fill of your sin without much remonstrance from your conscience. The time was when you could not sleep, such was the accusation of your conscience, but now she lies quietly on your pillow beside you and takes your sin as a matter of course. And when it comes to that — unless God visits you and your conscience as He visited Bunyan — you are a lost man. You will die in your sin; and then your conscience will awaken from her sleep and will be in your bosom and on your bed in hell, the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched. But as God would have it with Bunyan and as we read on in his masterly narrative we come to this remarkable and remarkably expressed paragraph:

‘But all this time, as to the act of sinning, I never was so tender as now. I durst not take a pin or a stick, though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch. I could not now tell how to speak my words for fear I should misplace them. Oh! how gingerly did I then go in all I said and did! I found myself as on a miry bog that shook if I did but stir; and I was as if I were there left of God, and man, and all good things.’ Have you ever had any experience of a tenderness of conscience like that? Let me take a case in illustration. And that not in bellringing, nor in dancing, but if only for a variety let me take say novel-reading. The time was with myself when I could not so much as open certain romances without my conscience becoming like John Bunyan’s 82nd paragraph. I was brought up to love and honour the Covenanters. I had early drunk in all I could lay my hands upon about those true makers of Scotland and of much more than Scotland. And I had gathered somehow and somewhere that a certain famous man in Edinburgh had laughed at the Covenanters in his novels, and had led the people of Edinburgh to laugh at them. And even when the time came that I could read those romances for myself, my conscience would not let me do that with entire comfort. And today I confess that I have a more tender heart than ever toward the Covenanters; and over against that I have a certain scrupulosity and a certain severity of conscience toward Sir Walter Scott that I cannot wholly get over. So much so that I never pass his monument in Princes Street that I do not wish that I could take off my hat with a more complete reverence and gratitude and love than I have ever attained to. I am quite well aware that I have lost not a little through my life-long grudge of conscience and heart against the great novelist. But then this is to be said in balance and in compensation of that: I get out of the Covenanters for my deepest needs more and more of what that wizard with all his genius cannot give me because he does not have it himself. I know what a master Sir Walter Scott is in some great departments of life and literature, and it is my daily lament that the great Covenanters did not take time to write English like his. But bad English and all, they are beyond all price to me. And you will agree with me when you have read, say, Rutherford, and Guthrie, and Durham, and Fraser, as often as I have read them. I have been led into that line of reflection through the truth, and the force, and the English of John Bunyan’s 33rd and 82nd paragraphs.

Take another illustration from another side of our daily life. Many men among us have an uneasy conscience, aye, many among us have a very angry conscience, over their self-condemned habit of taking intoxicating drink in these days. The awful ravages that intoxicating drink is making among our Scottish people, the fearful state of our Edinburgh slums, and all owing to intoxicating drink — these things come home to the consciences of many men who still resist and silence their consciences. ‘I thought it did not become religion,’ says Bunyan. And, again, ‘I was a full year before I could give it up.’ And, again, ‘Now, all the time my conscience would smart at every touch.’ Yes; there are thousands of men in Scotland to-day who feel exactly like Bunyan. They feel in their consciences that, in the present distress, they ought at once to give up all consumption of intoxicating drink at their tables, and all indulgence in it themselves. But, then, they like it and their guests like it; and interest and habit and fashion and appetite are so strong that they browbeat and silence conscience.

‘All our lives long,’ says Christina Rossetti, ‘we shall be bound to refrain our soul, and to keep it low; but what then? For the books we now forbear to read, we shall one day be endued with wisdom and knowledge. For the music we will not listen to, we shall join in the song of the redeemed. For the pictures from which we turn away, we shall gaze unabashed on the Beatific vision. For the companionships we shun, we shall be welcomed into angelic society, and into the communion of triumphant saints. For all the amusements we avoid, we shall keep the supreme jubilee. And for all the pleasures we miss, we shall abide, and shall for evermore abide, in the rapture of heaven.’