"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."--Solomon.
"I have overcome the world."--Our Lord.
"Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof."--John.
"This bubble world."--Quarles.
Madam Bubble's portrait was first painted by the Preacher. And he painted her portrait with extraordinary insight, boldness, and truthfulness. There is that in the Preacher's portrait of Madam Bubble which only comes of the artist having mixed his colours, as Milman says that Tacitus mixed his ink, with resentment and with remorse. Out of His reading of Solomon and Moses and the Prophets on this same subject, as well as out of His own observation and experience, conflict and conquest, our Lord added some strong and deep and inward touches of His own to that well-known picture, and then named it by the New Testament name of the World. And then, after Him, His longest-lived disciple set forth the same mother and her three daughters under the three names that still stick to them to this day,--the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. But it was reserved for John Bunyan to fill up and to finish those outlines of Scripture and to pour over the whole work his own depth and strength of colour, till, altogether, Madam Bubble stands out as yet another masterpiece of our dreamer's astonishing genius. Let us take our stand before this heaving canvas, then, till we have taken attentive note of some of John Bunyan's inimitable touches and strokes and triumphs of truth and art. "One in very pleasant attire, but old . . . This woman is a witch . . . I am the mistress of the world, she said, and men are made happy by me . . . A tall, comely dame, something of a swarthy complexion." In the newly discovered portrait of a woman, by Albert Durer, one of the marks of its genuineness is the way that the great artist's initials A. D. are pencilled in on the embroidery of the lady's bodice. And you will note in this gentlewoman's open dress also how J. B. is inextricably woven in.
"She wears a great purse by her side also, and her hand is often in her purse fingering her money. Yea, this is she that has bought off many a man from a pilgrim's life after he had fairly begun it.
She is a bold and an impudent slut also, for she will talk with any man. If there be one cunning to make money in any place, she will speak well of him from house to house . . . She has given it out in some places also that she is a goddess, and therefore some do actually worship her . . . She has her times and open places of cheating, and she will say and avow it that none can show a good comparable to hers. And thus she has brought many to the halter, and ten thousand times more to hell. None can tell of the mischief that she does. She makes variance betwixt rulers and subjects, betwixt parents and children, 'twixt neighbour and neighbour, 'twixt a man and his wife, 'twixt a man and himself, 'twixt the flesh and the heart." And so on in the great original. "Had she stood by all this while," said Standfast, whose eyes were still full of her, "you could not have set Madam Bubble more amply before me, nor have better described her features." "He that drew her picture was a good limner," said Mr. Honest, "and he that so wrote of her said true".
1. "I am the mistress of this world," says Madam Bubble. And though all the time she is a bold and impudent slut, yet it is the simple truth that she does sit as a queen over this world and over the men of this world. For Madam Bubble has a royal family like all other sovereigns. She has a court of her own, too, with its ball-room presentations and its birthday honours. She has a cabinet council also, and a bar and a bench with their pleadings and their decisions. Far more than all that, she has a church which she has established and of which she is the head; and a faith also of which she is the defender. She has a standing army also for the extension and the protection of her dominions. She levies taxes, too, and sends out ambassadors, and makes treaties, and forms offensive and defensive alliances. But what a bubble all this World is to him whose eyes have at last been opened to see the hollowness and the heartlessness of it all! For all its pursuits and all its possessions, from a child's rattle to a king's sceptre, all is one great bubble. Wealth, fame, place, power; art, science, letters; politics, churches, sacraments, and scriptures--all are so many bubbles in Madam Bubble's World. This wicked enchantress, if she does not find all these things bubbles already, by one touch of her evil wand she makes them so. She turns gold into dross, God into an idle name, and His Word into words only; unless when in her malice she turns it into a fruitful ground of debate and contention; a ground of malice and hatred and ill-will. Vanity of vanities; all is vanity and vexation of spirit. Still, she sits a queen and a goddess to a great multitude: to all men, to begin with. And, like a goddess, she sheds abroad her spirit in her people's hearts and lifts up upon them for a time the light of her countenance.
