'Take heed what ye hear.'--_Our Lord in Mark_.
'Take heed how you hear.'--_Our Lord in Luke_.
This famous town of Mansoul had five gates, in at which to come, out at which to go, and these were made likewise answerable to the walls--to wit, impregnable, and such as could never be opened nor forced but by the will and leave of those within. 'The names of the gates were these, Ear- gate, Eye-gate,' and so on. Dr. George Wilson, who was once Professor of Technology in our University, took this suggestive passage out of the _Holy War_ and made it the text of his famous lecture in the Philosophical Institution, and then he printed the passage on the fly- leaf of his delightful book _The Five Gateways of Knowledge_. That is a book to read sometime, but this evening is to be spent with the master.
For, after all, no one can write at once so beautifully, so quaintly, so suggestively, and so evangelically as John Bunyan. 'The Lord Willbewill,' says John Bunyan, 'took special care that the gates should be secured with double guards, double bolts, and double locks and bars; and that Ear-gate especially might the better be looked to, for that was the gate in at which the King's forces sought most to enter. The Lord Willbewill therefore made old Mr. Prejudice, an angry and ill-conditioned fellow, captain of the ward at that gate, and put under his power sixty men, called Deafmen; men advantageous for that service, forasmuch as they mattered no words of the captain nor of the soldiers. And first the King's officers made their force more formidable against Ear-gate: for they knew that unless they could penetrate that no good could be done upon the town. This done, they put the rest of their men in their places; after which they gave out the word, which was, Ye must be born again! And so the battle began. Now, they in the town had planted upon the tower over Ear-gate two great guns, the one called High-mind and the other Heady. Unto these two guns they trusted much; they were cast in the castle by Diabolus's ironfounder, whose name was Mr. Puff-up, and mischievous pieces they were. They in the camp also did stoutly, for they saw that unless they could open Ear-gate it would be in vain to batter the wall.' And so on, through many allegorical, and, if sometimes somewhat laboured, yet always eloquent, pungent, and heart-exposing pages.
With these for our text let us now take a rapid glance at what some of the more Bunyan-like passages in the prophets and the psalms say about the ear; how it is kept and how it is lost; how it is used and how it is abused.
1. The Psalmist uses a very striking expression in the 94th Psalm when he is calling for justice, and is teaching God's providence over men. 'He that planted the ear,' the Psalmist exclaims, 'shall he not hear?' And, considering his church and his day, that is not a bad remark of Cardinal Bellarmine on that psalm,--'the Psalmist's word _planted_,' says that able churchman, 'implies design, in that the ear was not spontaneously evolved by an act of vital force, but was independently created by God for a certain object, just as a tree, not of indigenous growth, is of set purpose planted in some new place by the hand of man.' The same thing is said in Genesis, you remember, about the Garden of Eden,--the Lord planted it and put the man and the woman, whose ears he had just planted also, into the garden to dress it and keep it. How they dressed the garden and kept it, and how they held the gate of their ear against him who squatted down before it with his innuendoes and his lies, we all know to our as yet unrepaired, though not always irreparable, cost.