But, my brethren, worse than all that, we have all what good Bishop Hall calls ‘a stone of obstination’ in our hearts against God.  With all his own depth and clearness and plain-spokenness, Paul tells us that our hearts are by nature enmity against God.  Were we proud and obstinate and malicious against men only it would be bad enough, and it would be difficult enough to cure, but our case is dreadful beyond all description or belief when our obstinacy strikes out against God.  We know as well as we know anything, that in doing this and in not doing that we are going every day right in the teeth both of God’s law and God’s grace; and yet in the sheer obstinacy and perversity of our heart we still go on in what we know quite well to be the suicide of our souls.  We are told by our minister to do this and not to do that; to begin to do this at this new year and to break off from doing that; but, partly through obstinacy towards him, reinforced by a deeper and subtler and deadlier obstinacy against God, and against all the deepest and most godly of the things of God, we neither do the one nor cease from doing the other.  There is a sullenness in some men’s minds, a gloom and a bitter air that rises up from the unploughed, undrained, unweeded, uncultivated fens of their hearts that chills and blasts all the feeble beginnings of a better life.  The natural and constitutional obstinacy of the obstinate heart is exasperated when it comes to deal with the things of God.  For it is then reinforced with all the guilt and all the fear, all the suspicion and all the aversion of the corrupt and self-condemned heart.  There is an obdurateness of obstinacy against all the men, and the books, and the doctrines, and the precepts, and the practices that are in any way connected with spiritual religion that does not come out even in the obstinate man’s family life.

John Bunyan’s Obstinate, both by his conduct as well as by the etymology of his name, not only stands in the way of his own salvation, but he does all he can to stand in the way of other men setting out to salvation also.  Obstinate set out after Christian to fetch him back by force, and if it had not been that he met his match in Christian, The Pilgrim’s Progress would never have been written.  ‘That can by no means be,’ said Christian to his pursuer, and he is first called Christian when he shows that one man can be as obstinate in good as another man can be in evil.  ‘I never now can go back to my former life.’  And then the two obstinate men parted company for ever, Christian in holy obstinacy being determined to have eternal life at any cost, and Obstinate as determined against it.  The opening pages of The Pilgrim’s Progress set the two men very graphically and very impressively before us.

As to the cure of obstinacy, the rod in a firm, watchful, wise, and loving hand will cure it.  And in later life a long enough and close enough succession of humble, yielding, docile, submissive, self-chastening and thanksgiving acts will cure it.  Reading and obeying the best books on the subjugation and the regulation of the heart will cure it.  Descending with Dante to where the obstinate, and the embittered, and the gloomy, and the sullen have made their beds in hell will cure it.  And much and most agonising prayer will above all cure it.