Now from the texts that I have taken out of James and out of this so significant room in the Interpreter’s House, let me try to tell you something profitable, if so it may be, about passion; the nature of it, the place it holds, and the part it performs both in human nature and in the life and the character of a Christian man.

The name of Passion has already told us his nature, his past life, and his present character.  The whole nomenclature of The Pilgrim’s Progress and of The Holy War is composed on the divine, original, and natural principle of embodying the nature of a man in his name.  God takes His own names to Himself on that principle.  The Creator gave Adam his name also on that same principle; and then Adam gave their names to all cattle, to the fowls of the air, and to every beast of the field on the same principle on which he had got his own name.  And so it was at first with all the Bible names of men and of nations of men.  Their name contained their nature.  And John Bunyan was such a student of the Bible, and of no other book but the Bible, that all his best books are all full, like the Bible, of the most descriptive and suggestive names.  As soon as Bunyan tells us the name of some new acquaintance or fellow-traveller, we already know him, so exactly is his nature put into his name.  And thus it is that when we stop for a moment at the door of this little significant room in the Interpreter’s House and ask ourselves the meaning of the name Passion, we see at once where we are and what we have here before us.  For a ‘passion’ is just some excitement or agitation of the mind caused by some outward thing acting on the mind.  The inward world of the mind and heart of man, and this outward world down into which God has placed man, instantly and continually respond to one another.  And what are called, with so much correctness and propriety, our passions, are just those inward responses, excitements, and agitations that the outward world causes in the inward world when those two worlds meet together.  ‘Passion’ and ‘perturbation’ are the old classical names that the ancient philosophers and moralists gave to what they felt in themselves as their minds and their hearts were affected by the world of men and things around them.  And they used to illustrate their teaching on the subject of the passions by the figure of a storm at sea.  They said that it was because God had made the sea sensitive and responsive to the winds that blew over it that a storm at sea ever arose.  The storm did not arise and the ships were not wrecked by anything from within the sea itself; it was the outward world of the winds striking against the quiet and inward world of the waters that roused the storms and sank the ships.  And with that illustration well printed in the minds and imaginations of their scholars the old moralists felt their work among their scholars was already all but done.  For, so full of adaptation