The Holy War

As I come to three powerful chapters on sexual purity from the Book of Proverbs, I can't help but think of our Lord Jesus Christ as the captain of our souls, the courageous warrior jumping down with sword in hand to the breach in the wall, defending the city from the imminent danger that that breach poses.

It's interesting, about a century after that Siege of Malta, John Bunyan wrote an allegory of the Christian warfare against sin called The Holy War.

It's not as famous as his other allegory, Pilgrim's Progress, but it's in the same pattern.

And there he likened an individual Christian soul to a walled fortress or a city, city of Mansoul, he called it.

That love that is confined to the body and its welfare and extends not to the soul and its happiness is not worth having." Then Charles ends his letter by alluding to a book by John Bunyan, the Puritan and the Baptist.

Now, Bunyan's most popular book, obviously, is The Pilgrim's Progress, but here he's alluding to another book, and it deals more with the interiority of the Christian life, so the struggles we feel within, even more so than The Pilgrim's Progress, and it's a book called The Holy War.

And in the book, the soul of the person is called Mansoul.

That's the city, and that's always under attack, and when Christ conquers that city and removes the usurper, Satan and, and sin, and Christ rules in that newly rescued soul, that born-again soul, well, there's still a war that goes on.