portrait of Think-well began to
shine out on the screen of this great artist's imagination, and from that
sanctified screen this fine portrait of Think-well and his family has
shined into our hearts to-night.

CHAPTER XXII--MR. GOD'S-PEACE, A GOODLY PERSON, AND A SWEET-NATURED
GENTLEMAN

'Let the peace of God rule in your hearts,--the peace of God that
passeth all understanding.'--_Paul_.

John Bunyan is always at his very best in allegory. In some other
departments of work John Bunyan has had many superiors; but when he lays
down his head on his hand and begins to dream, as we see him in some of
the old woodcuts, then he is alone; there is no one near him. We have
not a few greater divines in pure divinity than John Bunyan. We have
some far better expositors of Scripture than John Bunyan, and we have
some far better preachers. John Bunyan at his best cannot open up a deep
Scripture like that prince of expositors, Thomas Goodwin. John Bunyan in
all his books has nothing to compare for intellectual strength and for
theological grasp with Goodwin's chapter on the peace of God, in his
sixth book in _The Work of the Holy Ghost_. John Bunyan cannot set forth
divine truth in an orderly method and in a built-up body like John Owen.
He cannot Platonize divine truth like his Puritan contemporary, John
Howe. He cannot soar high as heaven in the beauty and the sweetness of
gospel holiness like Jonathan Edwards. He has nothing of the
philosophical depth of Richard Hooker, and he has nothing of the vast
learning of Jeremy Taylor. But when John Bunyan's mind and heart begin
to work through his imagination, then--

'His language is not ours.
'Tis my belief God speaks; no tinker hath such powers.'

1. In the beginning of his chapter on 'Speaking peace,' Thomas Goodwin
tells his reader that he is going to fully couch all his intendments
under a metaphor and an allegory. But Goodwin's reader has read and re-
read the great chapter, and has not yet discovered where the metaphor and
the allegory came in and where they went out. But Bunyan does not need
to advertise his reader that he is going to couch his teaching in his
imagination.

'But having now my method by the end,
Still, as I pulled it came: and so I penned
It down; until at last it came to be
For length and breadth the bigness that you see.'

The Blessed Prince, he begins, did also ordain a new officer in the town,
and a goo