other chastisements.  You all understand, my brethren, that the man black of flesh but covered with a white robe was no wayside seducer who met Christian and Hopeful at that dangerous part of the road only and only on that high-minded day.  You know from yourselves surely that both Christian and Hopeful carried that black but smooth-spoken man within themselves.  The Flatterer who led the two pilgrims so fatally wrong that day was just their own heart taken out of their own bosom and personified and dramatised by Bunyan’s dramatic genius, and so made to walk and talk and flatter and puff up outside of themselves till they came again to see who in reality he was and whence he came,—­that is to say, till they were brought to see what they themselves still were, and would always be, when they were left to themselves.  “Where did you lie last night? asked the Shining One with the whip.  With the Shepherds on the Delectable Mountains, they answered.  He asked them then if they had not of those shepherds a note of direction for the way?  They answered, Yes.  But did you not, said he, when you were at a stand pluck out and read your note?  They answered, No.  He asked them why?  They said they forgot.  He asked, moreover if the shepherds did not bid them beware of the Flatterer?  They answered, Yes; but we did not imagine, said they, that this fine-spoken man had been he.”

All good literature, both sacred and profane, both ancient and modern, is full of the Flatterer.  Let me not, protests Elihu in his powerful speech in the book of Job, let me not accept any man’s person; neither let me give flattering titles unto man, lest in so doing my Maker should soon take me away.  And the Psalmist in his powerful description of the wicked men of his day:  There is no faithfulness in their mouth; their inward part is very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulchre; they flatter with their tongue.  And again:  They speak with flattering lips, and with a double heart do they speak.  But the Lord shall cut off all flattering lips, and the tongue that speaketh proud things.  “The perpetual hyperbole” of pure love becomes in the lips of impure love the impure bait that leads the simple ones astray on the streets of the city as seen and heard by the wise man out of his casement.  My son, say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister, and call understanding thy kinswoman; that they may keep thee from the strange woman, from the stranger which flattereth thee with her words, which forsaketh the guide of her youth, and forgetteth the covenant of her God.  And then in the same book of Hebrew aphorisms we find this text which Bunyan puts on the margin of the page:  “A man that flattereth his neighbour spreadeth a net for his feet.”  And now, before we leave the ancient world, if you would not think it beneath the dignity of the place we are in, I would like to read to you a passage out of a round-about paper written by a satirist of Greece about the time of Ezra and Nehemiah in Jerusalem.