malignity, deadliness, and unspeakable evil of sin as he had sin living
and working in himself. But all the resources of the Greek language,
that most resourceful of languages, utterly failed Paul for his pressing
purpose. And thus it is that, as if in scorn of the feebleness and
futility of that boasted tongue, he tramples its grammars and its
dictionaries under his feet, and makes new and unheard-of words and
combinations of words on the spot for himself and for his subject. He
heaps up a hyperbole the like of which no orator or rhetorician of Greece
or Rome had ever needed or had ever imagined before. He takes sin, and
he makes a name for sin out of itself. The only way to describe sin, he
feels, the only way to characterise sin, the only way to aggravate sin,
is just to call it sin; sinful sin; 'sin by the commandment became
exceeding sinful.' And, in like manner, John Bunyan, who has only his
own mother tongue to work with, in his straits to get a proper name for
this terrible fellow who was next to Diabolus himself, cannot find a
proud enough name for him but just by giving him his own name, and then
doubling it. Add will to will, multiply will by will, and multiply it
again, and after you have done all you are no nearer to a proper name for
that apostate, who, for pride, and insolence, and headstrongness, in one
word, for wilfulness, is next to Diabolus himself. But as Willbewill, if
he is to be named and described at all, is best named and described by
his own naked name; so Bunyan is always best illustrated out of his own
works. And I turn accordingly to the _Heavenly Footman_ for an excellent
illustration of the wilfulness of the will both in a good man and in a
bad; as, thus: 'Your self-willed people, nobody knows what to do with
them. We use to say, He will have his own will, do all we can. If a man
be willing, then any argument shall be matter of encouragement; but if
unwilling, then any argument shall give discouragement. The saints of
old, they being willing and resolved for heaven, what could stop them?
Could fire and fagot, sword or halter, dungeons, whips, bears, bulls,