writing is.  Suffice it to say that before the clippers could be rooted out, and confidence restored between buyer and seller, the greatest statesmen, the greatest financiers, and the greatest philosophers were all at their wits’ end.  Kings’ speeches, cabinet councils, bills of Parliament, and showers of pamphlets were all full in those days of the clipper and the coiner.  All John Locke’s great intellect came short of grappling successfully with the terrible crisis the clipper of the coin had brought upon England.  Carry all that, then, over into the life of personal religion, after the manner of our Lord’s parables, and after the manner of the Pilgrim’s Progress and the Holy War, and you will see what an able and impressive use John Bunyan will make of the shears of the coin-clippers of his day.  Macaulay has but made us ready to open and understand Bunyan.  ’After this, my Lord apprehended Clip-Promise.  Now, because he was a notorious villain, for by his doings much of the king’s coin was abused, therefore he was made a public example.  He was arraigned and judged to be set first in the pillory, then to be whipped by all the children and servants in Mansoul, and then to be hanged till he was dead.  Some may wonder at the severity of this man’s punishment, but those that are honest traders in Mansoul they are sensible of the great abuse that one clipper of promises in little time may do in the town of Mansoul; and, truly, my judgment is that all those of his name and life should be served out even as he.’

The grace of God is like a bullion mass of purest gold, and then Jesus Christ is the great ingot of that gold, and then Moses, and David, and Isaiah, and Hosea, and Paul, and Peter, and John are the inspired artists who have commission to take both bullion and ingot, and out of them to cut, and beat, and smelt, and shape, and stamp, and superscribe the promises, and then to issue the promises to pass current in the market of salvation like so many shekels, and pounds, and pence, and farthings, and mites, as the case may be.  And it was just these royal coins, imaged and superscribed so richly and so beautifully, that Clip-Promise so mutilated, abused, and debased, till for doing so he was hanged by the neck till he was dead.

1.  The very house of Israel herself, the very Mint-house, Tower Hill, and Lombard Street of Israel herself, was full of false coiners and clippers of the promises; as full as ever England was at her very worst.  Israel clipped her Messianic promises and lived upon the clippings instead of upon the coin.  Her coming Christ, and His salvation already begun, were the true spiritual currency of Old Testament times; while round that central Image of her great promise there ran an outside rim of lesser promises that all took their true and their only value from Him whose image and superscription stood within.  But those besotted and infatuated men of Israel, instead of entering into and living by the great spiritual promises