O God, Thou seest us.  And Thou seest all the imaginations of the thoughts of our hearts.  Oh give us all a mind and a heart and a conscience to think of nothing, to fear nothing, to watch and to pray about nothing compared with our thoughts.  ‘As for my secret thoughts,’ says the author of the Holy War and the creator of Master Think-well—­’As for my secret thoughts, I paid no attention to them.  I never knew I had them.  I had no pain, or shame, or guilt, or horror, or despair on account of them till John Gifford took me and showed me the way.’  And then when John Bunyan, being the man of genius he was,—­as soon as he began to attend to his own secret thoughts, then the first faint outline of this fine portrait of Think-well began to shine out on the screen of this great artist’s imagination, and from that sanctified screen this fine portrait of Think-well and his family has shined into our hearts to-night.

CHAPTER XXII—­MR. GOD’S-PEACE, A GOODLY PERSON, AND A SWEET-NATURED GENTLEMAN

   ’Let the peace of God rule in your hearts,—­the peace of God that
   passeth all understanding.’—­Paul.

John Bunyan is always at his very best in allegory.  In some other departments of work John Bunyan has had many superiors; but when he lays down his head on his hand and begins to dream, as we see him in some of the old woodcuts, then he is alone; there is no one near him.  We have not a few greater divines in pure divinity than John Bunyan.  We have some far better expositors of Scripture than John Bunyan, and we have some far better preachers.  John Bunyan at his best cannot open up a deep Scripture like that prince of expositors, Thomas Goodwin.  John Bunyan in all his books has nothing to compare for intellectual strength and for theological grasp with Goodwin’s chapter on the peace of God, in his sixth book in The Work of the Holy Ghost.  John Bunyan cannot set forth divine truth in an orderly method and in a built-up body like John Owen.  He cannot Platonize divine truth like his Puritan contemporary, John Howe.  He cannot soar high as heaven in the beauty and the sweetness of gospel holiness like Jonathan Edwards.  He has nothing of the philosophical depth of Richard Hooker, and he has nothing of the vast learning of Jeremy Taylor.  But when John Bunyan’s mind and heart begin to work through his imagination, then—­

      ’His language is not ours. 
   ‘Tis my belief God speaks; no tinker hath such powers.’

1.  In the beginning of his chapter on ‘Speaking peace,’ Thomas Goodwin tells his reader that he is going to fully couch all his intendments under a metaphor and an allegory.  But Goodwin’s reader has read and re-read the great chapter, and has not yet discovered where the metaphor and the allegory came in and where they went out.  But Bunyan does not need to advertise his reader that he is going to couch his teaching in his imagination.