1.  To begin, then, at the very bottom of this whole matter, take stiff old Loth-to-stoop as a guilty sinner in the sight of God.  Let us take this stiff old man in this dreadful character to begin with, because it is in this deepest and most dreadful aspect of his nature and his character that he is introduced to us in the Holy War.  And I shall stand aside and let John Bunyan himself describe Loth-to-stoop in the matter of his justification before God.  ’That is a great stoop for a sinner to have to take,’ says our apostolic author in another classical place, ’a too great stoop to have to suffer the total loss of all his own righteousness, and, actually, to have to look to another for absolutely everything of that kind.  That is no easy matter for any man to do.  I assure you it stretches every vein in his heart before he will be brought to yield to that.  What! for a man to deny, reject, abhor, and throw away all his prayers, tears, alms, keeping of Sabbaths, hearing, reading, and all the rest, and to admit both himself and them to be abominable and accursed, and to be willing in the very midst of his sins to throw himself wholly upon the righteousness and obedience of another man!  I say to do that in deed and in truth is the biggest piece of the cross, and therefore it is that Paul calls it a suffering.  “I have suffered the loss of all things that I might win Christ, and be found in Him, not having mine own righteousness."’ That is John Bunyan’s characteristic comment on stiff old Loth-to-stoop as a guilty sinner, with the offer of a full forgiveness set before him.

2.  And then our so truthful and so fertile author goes on to give us Loth-to-stoop as a half-saved sinner; a sinner, that is, trying to make his own terms with God about his full salvation.  Through three most powerful pages we see stiff old Loth-to-stoop engaged in beating down God’s unalterable terms of salvation, and in bidding for his full salvation upon his own reduced and easy terms.  It was the tremendous stoop of the Son of God from the throne of God to the cradle and the carpenter’s shop; and then, as if that were not enough, it was that other tremendous stoop of His down to the Garden and the Cross,—­it was these two so tremendous stoops of Jesus Christ that made stiff old Loth-to-stoop’s salvation even possible.  But, with all that, his true salvation was not possible without stoop after stoop of his own; stoop after stoop which, if not so tremendous as those of Christ, were yet tremendous enough, and too tremendous, for him.  Old Loth-to-stoop carries on a long and a bold debate with Emmanuel in order to lessen the stoop that Emmanuel demands of him; and your own life and mine, my brethren, at their deepest and at their closest to our own heart, are really at bottom, like Loth-to-stoop’s life, one long roup of salvation, in which God tries to get us up to His terms and in which we try to get Him down to our terms.  His terms are, that we