1.  The Psalmist uses a very striking expression in the 94th Psalm when he is calling for justice, and is teaching God’s providence over men.  ’He that planted the ear,’ the Psalmist exclaims, ‘shall he not hear?’ And, considering his church and his day, that is not a bad remark of Cardinal Bellarmine on that psalm,—­’the Psalmist’s word planted,’ says that able churchman, ’implies design, in that the ear was not spontaneously evolved by an act of vital force, but was independently created by God for a certain object, just as a tree, not of indigenous growth, is of set purpose planted in some new place by the hand of man.’  The same thing is said in Genesis, you remember, about the Garden of Eden,—­the Lord planted it and put the man and the woman, whose ears he had just planted also, into the garden to dress it and keep it.  How they dressed the garden and kept it, and how they held the gate of their ear against him who squatted down before it with his innuendoes and his lies, we all know to our as yet unrepaired, though not always irreparable, cost.

2.  One would almost think that the scornful apostle had the Garden of Eden in his eye when he speaks so bitterly to Timothy of a class of people who are cursed with ‘itching ears.’  Eve’s ears itched unappeasably for the devil’s promised secret; and we have all inherited our first mother’s miserable curiosity.  How eager, how restless, how importunate, we all are to hear that new thing that does not at all concern us; or only concerns us to our loss and our shame.  And the more forbidden that secret is to us, and the more full of inward evil to us—­insane sinners that we are—­the more determined we are to get at it.  Let any forbidden secret be in the keeping of some one within earshot of us and we will give him no rest till he has shared the evil thing with us.  Let any specially evil page be published in a newspaper, and we will take good care that that day’s paper is not thrown into the waste-basket; we will hide it away, like a dog with a stolen bone, till we are able to dig it up and chew it dry in secret.  The devil has no need to blockade or besiege the gate of our ear if he has any of his good things to offer us.  The gate that can only be opened from within will open at once of itself if he or any of his newsmongers but squat down for a moment before it.  Shame on us, and on all of us, for our itching ears.

3.  Isaiah speaks of some men in his day whose ears were ‘heavy’ and whose hearts were fat, and the Psalmist speaks of some men in his day whose ears were ‘stopped’ up altogether.  And there is not a better thing in Bunyan at his very best than that surly old churl called Prejudice, so ill-conditioned and so always on the edge of anger.  By the devil’s plan of battle old Prejudice was appointed to be warder of Ear-gate, and to enable him to keep that gate for his master he had sixty deaf men put under him, men most advantageous for that