’Now was Christian somewhat in a maze.  But at last, when every man started back for fear, Christian saw a man of a very stout countenance come up to him that sat there with the inkhorn to write, saying, Set down my name, sir!  At which there was a pleasant voice heard from those that were within, even of those who walked upon the top of that place, saying,

   “Come in, come in: 
   Eternal glory thou shalt win.”

Then Christian smiled, and said:  I think, verily, that I know the meaning of all this now.’

CHAPTER XVII—­FIVE PICKT MEN

   ’I took wise men and known and made them captains.’—­Moses.

John Bunyan never lost his early love for a soldier’s life any more than he ever forgot the rare delights of his bell-ringing days.  John Bunyan, all his days, never saw a bell-rope that his fingers did not tingle, and he never saw a soldier in uniform without instinctively shouldering his youthful musket.  Bunyan was one of those rare men who are of imagination all compact; and consequently it is that all his books are full of the scenes, the occupations, and the experiences of his early days.  Not that he says very much, in as many words, about what happened to him in the days when he was a soldier; it is only once in all his many books that he says that when he was a soldier such and such a thing happened to him.  At the same time, all his books bear the impress of his early days upon them; and as for this special book of Bunyan’s now open before us, it is full from board to board of the strife and the din of his early battles.  The Holy War is just John Bunyan’s soldierly life spiritualised—­spiritualised and so worked up into this fine English Classic.

Well, then, after Mansoul was taken and reduced, the victorious Prince determined so to occupy the town with His soldiers that it should never again either be taken by force from without, or ever again revolt by weakness or by fear from within.  And with this view He chose out five of His best captains—­My five pickt men, He always called them—­and placed those five captains and their thousands under them in the strongholds of the town.  On the margin of this page our versatile author speaks of that step of Emmanuel’s in the language of a philosopher, a moralist, and a divine.  ‘Five graces,’ he says, ’pickt out of an abundance of common virtues.’  This summing-up sentence stands on his stiff and dry margin.  But in the rich and living flow of the text itself our author goes on writing like the man of genius he is.  With all the warmth and colour and dramatic movement of which this whole book is full, this great writer goes on to set those five choice captains of our salvation before us in a way that we shall never forget.