Now, in the Holy War John Bunyan says a thing about the ear, as distinguished from the eye, that I cannot subscribe to in my own experience at any rate.  In describing the terrible war that raged round Ear-gate, and finally swept up through that gate and into the streets of the city, he says that the ear is the shortest and the surest road to the heart.  I confess I cannot think that to be the actual case.  I am certain that it is not so in my own case.  My eye is very much nearer my heart than my ear is.  My eye much sooner affects, and much more powerfully affects, my heart than my ear ever does.  Not only is my eye by very much the shortest road to my heart, but, like all other short roads, it is cram-full of all kinds of traffic when my ear stands altogether empty.  My eye is constantly crowded and choked with all kinds of commerce; whole hordes of immigrants and invaders trample one another down on the congested street that leads from my eye to my heart.  Speaking for myself, for one assault that is made on my heart through my ear there are a thousand assaults successfully made through my eye.  Indeed, were my eye but stopped up; had I but obedience and courage and self-mortification enough to pluck both my eyes out, that would be half the cleansing and healing and holiness of my evil heart; or at least, the half of its corruption, rebellion, and abominable wickedness would henceforth be hidden from me.  I think I can see what led John Bunyan in his day and in this book to make that too strong statement about the ear as against the eye; but it is not like him to have let such an over-statement stand and continue in his corrected and carefully finished work.  The prophet Jeremiah, I feel satisfied, would not have subscribed to what is said in the Holy War in extenuation of the eye.  That heart-broken prophet does not say that it has been his ear that has made his head waters.  It is his eye, he says, that has so affected his heart.  The Prophet of the Captivity had all the Holy War potentially in his imagination when he penned that so suggestive sentence.  And the Latin poet of experience, the grown-up man’s own poet, says somewhere that the things that enter by his eye seize and hold his heart much more swiftly and much more surely than those things that but enter by his ear.  I shall continue, then, to hold by my text, ’Mine eye affecteth mine heart.’

1.  Turning then, to the prophets and proverb-makers of Israel, and then to the New Testament for the true teaching on the eye, I come, in the first place, on that so pungent saying of Solomon that ’the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth.’  Look at that born fool, says Solomon, who has his eyes and his heart committed to him to keep.  See him how he gapes and stares after everything that does not concern him, and lets the door of his own heart stand open to every entering thief.  London is a city of three million inhabitants, and they are