第139章 GREAT-HEART(3)

5. When old Mr. Honest began to nod after the good supper that Gaius mine host gave to the pilgrims, "What, sir," cried Greatheart, "you begin to be drowsy; come, rub up; now here's a riddle for you." Then said Mr. Honest, "Let's hear it." Then said Mr. Greatheart, "He that will kill, must first be overcome;

Who live abroad would, first must die at home."

"Hah!" said Mr. Honest, "it is a hard one; hard to expound, and harder still to practise." Yes; this after-supper riddle of Mr.

Greatheart is a hard one in both respects; and for this reason, because the learned and much experienced guide--learned with all that his lifelong quarters in the Interpreter's House could teach him, and experienced with a lifetime's accumulated experience of the pilgrim life--has put all his learning and all his life into these two mysterious lines. But old Honest, once he had sufficiently rubbed up his eyes and his intellects, gave the answer:

"He first by grace must conquered be That sin would mortify.

And who, that lives, would convince me, Unto himself must die."

Exactly; shrewd old Honest; you have hit off both Greatheart and his riddle too. You have dived into the deepest heart of the Interpreter's man-servant. "The magnanimous man" was Aristotle's masterpiece. That great teacher of mind and morals created for the Greek world their Greatheart. But, "thou must understand," says Bunyan to his readers, "that I never went to school to Aristotle or Plato. No; but to Paul, who taught Bunyan that what Aristotle calls magnanimity is really pride--taught him that, till there is far more of the Christian religion in those two doggerel lines at Gaius's supper-table than there is in all The Ethics taken together. And it is only from a personal experience of the same life as that which the guide puts here into his riddle that any man's proud heart will become really humble and thus really great, really enlarged, and of an all-embracing hospitality like Cromwell's and Greatheart's and John Bunyan's own. Would you, then, become a Greatheart too? And would you be employed in your day as they were employed in their day? Then expound to yourself, and practise, and follow out that deep riddle with which Greatheart so woke up old Honest:

"He that will kill, must first be overcome;

Who live abroad would, first must die at home.

6. Greatheart again and again at the riverside, Greatheart sending pilgrim after pilgrim over the river with rapture, and he himself still summoned to turn his back on the Celestial City, and to retrace his steps through the land of Beulah, through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and through the Valley of Humiliation, and back to the Interpreter's house to take on another and another and another convoy of fresh pilgrims, and his own abundant entrance still put off and never to come,--our hearts bleed for poor Greatheart. Back and forward, back and forward, year after year, this noble soul uncomplainingly goes. And, ever as he waves his hand to another pilgrim entering with trumpets within the gates, he salutes his next pilgrim charge with the brave words: "Yet what I

shall choose I wot not. For I am in a strait betwixt two: having a desire to depart and to be with Christ. Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you, for your furtherance and joy of faith by my coming to you again." If Greatheart could not "usher himself out of this life" along with Christiana, and Mercy, and Mr.

Honest, and Standfast, and Valiant-for-truth--if he had still to toil back and bleed his way up again at the head of another happy band of pilgrims--well, after all is said, what had the Celestial City itself to give to Greatheart better than such blessed work?