3.  And then, few, very few, it is to be feared, will be any better of the Holy War.  For, to be any better of such a terrible book as this is, we must at all costs lay it, and lay it all, and lay it all at once, to heart.  We must submit ourselves to see ourselves continually in its blazing glass.  We must stoop to be told that it is all, in all its terrors and in all its horrors, literally true of ourselves.  We must deliberately and resolutely set open every gate that opens in on our heart—­Ear-gate and Eye-gate and all the gates of sense and intellect, day and night, to Jesus Christ to enter in; and we must shut and bolt and bar every such gate in the devil’s very face, and in the face of all his scouts and orators, day and night also.  But who that thinks, and that knows by experience what all that means, will feel himself sufficient for all that?  No man:  no sinful man.  But, among many other noble and blessed things, the Holy War will show us that our sufficiency in this impossibility also is all of God.  Who, then, will enlist?  Who will risk all and enlist?  Who will matriculate in the military school of Mansoul?  Who will submit himself to all the severity of its divine discipline?  Who will be made willing to throw open and to keep open his whole soul, with all the gates and doors thereof, to all the sieges, assaults, capitulations, submissions, occupations, and such like of the war of gospel holiness?  And who will enlist under that banner now?

‘Set down my name, sir,’ said a man of a very stout countenance to him who had the inkhorn at the outer gate.  At which those who walked upon the top of the palace broke out in a very pleasant voice,

   ’Come in, come in;
   Eternal glory thou shalt win.’

We have no longer, after what we have come through, any such stoutness in our countenance, yet will we say to-night with him who had it, Set down my name also, sir!

CHAPTER II—­THE CITY OF MANSOUL AND ITS CINQUE PORTS

   ’—­a besieged city.’—­Isaiah.

Our greatest historians have been wont to leave their books behind them and to make long journeys in order to see with their own eyes the ruined sites of ancient cities and the famous fields where the great battles of the world were lost and won.  We all remember how Macaulay made a long winter journey to see the Pass of Killiecrankie before he sat down to write upon it; and Carlyle’s magnificent battle-pieces are not all imagination; even that wonderful writer had to see Frederick’s battlefields with his own eyes before he could trust himself to describe them.  And he tells us himself how Cromwell’s splendid generalship all came up before him as he looked down on the town of Dunbar and out upon the ever-memorable country round about it.  John Bunyan was not a great historian; he was only a common soldier in the great Civil War of the seventeenth century;