consequence, was pliable to any influence, good or bad, that happened to
come across him. 'Don't revile,' are the first words that come from
Pliable's lips, and they are not unpromising words. Pliable is hurt with
Obstinate's coarse abuse of the Christian life, till he is downright
ashamed to be seen in his company. Pliable, at least, is a gentleman
compared with Obstinate, and his gentlemanly feelings and his good
manners make him at once take sides with Christian. Obstinate's foul
tongue has almost made Pliable a Christian. And this finely-conceived
scene on the plain outside the city gate is enacted over again every day
among ourselves. Where men are in dead earnest about religion it always
arouses the bad passions of bad men; and where earnest preachers and
devoted workers are assailed with violence or with bad language, there is
always enough love of fair play in the bystanders to compel them to take
sides, for the time at least, with those who suffer for the truth. And
we are sometimes too apt to count all that love of common fairness, and
that hatred of foul play, as a sure sign of some sympathy with the hated
truth itself. When an onlooker says 'Don't revile,' we are too ready to
set down that expression of civility as at least the first beginning of
true religion. But the religion of Jesus Christ cuts far deeper into the
heart of man than to the dividing asunder of justice and injustice,
civility and incivility, ribaldry and good manners. And it is always
found in the long-run that the cross of Christ and its crucifixion of the
human heart goes quite as hard with the gentlemanly-mannered man, the
civil and urbane man, as it does with the man of bad behaviour and of
brutish manners. 'Civil men,' says Thomas Goodwin, 'are this world's
saints.' And poor Pliable was one of them. 'My heart really inclines to
go with my neighbour,' said Pliable next. 'Yes,' he said, 'I begin to
come to a point. I really think I will go along with this good man. Yes,
I will cast in my lot with him. Come, good neighbour, let us be going.'