l, moral, and
experimental reading, so to describe it, I have never met with any school
of authors for one moment to be compared with the great evangelical
mystics, especially when they treat of self, self-love, self-denial, the
daily cross, and all suchlike lessons. Take the great doctrinal and
experimental Puritans, such as John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, Richard Baxter,
John Howe, and Jonathan Edwards, and add on to them the greatest and best
mystics, such as Jacob Behmen, Thomas A Kempis, Francis Fenelon, Jeremy
Taylor, Samuel Rutherford, Robert Leighton, and William Law, and you will
have the profoundest, the most complete, the most perfect, and, I will
add, the most fascinating and enthralling of spiritual teaching in all
the world. And I will be bold enough to promise you that if you will but
join our Young Men's Class to-night, and will buy and read our mystical
books, and will resolve to put in practice what you hear and read in the
class, I will promise you, I say, that by the end of our short session
you will not only be ten times more open and hospitably-minded men, but
also ten times more spiritually-minded men, ten times more Christ-like
men, and with your joy in Christ and His joy in you all but full.

2. The Captain Self-denial was a young man, and he was also a townsman
in Mansoul. Young Self-denial and one other were all of Emmanuel's
captains who were townsmen in Mansoul. All his other captains Emmanuel
had brought with him; but the Captains Self-denial and Experience were
both born and reared to their full manhood in that besieged city. 'A
townsman.' How much there is for us all in that one word! How much
instruction! How much encouragement! How much caution and correction!
Our greatest grace; our most essential and indispensable grace; our most
experimental and evidential grace; that grace, indeed, without which all
our other graces are but specious shows and painted surfaces of graces;
that grace into which our Lord here gathers up all our other graces;--that
greatest of graces cannot be imputed, imported, or introduced; it must be
born, bred, exercised, reared up to its full maturity, and sent forth to
fight and to conquer, and all within the walls of its own native town; in
short, our self-denial must have its beginning and middle and end in our
own heart. Antinomians there were, as our Puritan fathers nicknamed all
those persons who glorified Christ by letting Him do all things for them,
bo