1.  ’Well, now, as He who dwells on high would have it, there was one whose name was Mr. Prywell, a great lover of the town of Mansoul.’  In other words:  self-observation, self-examination, strict, jealous, sleepless self-examination, is of God.  Our God who searches our hearts and tries our reins would have it so.  And if He does not have it so in us, our souls are not as our God would have them to be.  ’Bunyan employs pry,’ says Miss Peacock in her excellent notes, ’in a more favourable sense than it now bears.  As, for instance, it is said in another part of this same book that the men of Mansoul were allowed to pry into the words of the Holy Ghost and to expound them to their best advantage.  Honest anxiety for the welfare of his fellow-townsmen was Mr. Prywell’s chief characteristic. Pry is another form of peer—­to look narrowly, to look closely.’  And God, says John Bunyan, would have it so.

2.  ‘A great lover of Mansoul,’ ‘always a lover of Mansoul’; again and again that is testified concerning Mr. Prywell.  It was not love for the work that led Mr. Prywell to give up his days and his nights as his history tells us he did.  Mr. Prywell ran himself into many dangerous situations both within and without the city, and he lost himself far more friends than he made by his devotion to his thankless task.  But necessity was laid upon him.  And what held him up was the sure and certain knowledge that his King would have that service at his hands.  That, and his love for the city, for the safety and the deliverance of the city,—­all that kept Mr. Prywell’s heart fixed.  Am I therefore your enemy? he would say to some who would have had it otherwise than the King would have it.  But it is a good thing to be zealously affected in a work like mine, he would say, in self-defence and in self-encouragement.  And then, though not many, there were always some in the city who said, Let him smite me and it shall be a kindness; let him reprove me and it shall be an excellent oil which shall not break my head.  It was in Mansoul with Mr. Prywell as it was in Kidderminster with Richard Baxter, when some of his people said to one another, ’We will take all things well from one that we know doth entirely love us.’  ‘Love them,’ said Augustine, ‘and then say anything you like to them.’  Now, that was Mr. Prywell’s way.  He loved Mansoul, and then he said many things to her that a false lover and a flatterer would never have dared to say.

3.  Then, as the saying is, it goes without saying that ’Mr. Prywell was always a jealous man.’  Great lovers are always jealous men, and Mr. Prywell showed himself to be a great lover by the great heat of his jealousy also.  ‘Vigilant,’ says the excellent editress again; ’cautious against dishonour, reasonably mistrustful—­low Latin zelosus, full of zeal.  “And he said, I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts."’ Now, it so happened that some of