t. We are called to be pilgrims and
strangers for a season with God upon the earth. We are told to endure to
the end. It is to be through faith and patience that we, with our
fathers, shall at last inherit the promises. Holiness is not a Jonah's
gourd. It does not come up in a night, and it does not perish in a
night. Holiness is the Divine nature, and it takes a lifetime to make us
partakers of it. But, then, if the time is long the thing is sure. Let
us, then, with a holy and a submissive patience wait for it.

'I saw moreover in my dream that Passion seemed to be much discontent,
but Patience was very quiet. Then Christian asked, What is the reason of
the discontent of Passion? The Interpreter answered, The governor of
them would have him stay for his best things till the beginning of the
next year; but he will have them all now. But Patience is willing to
wait.'

SIMPLE, SLOTH, AND PRESUMPTION

'Ye did run well, who did hinder you?'--Paul.

It startles us not a little to come suddenly upon three pilgrims fast
asleep with fetters on their heels on the upward side of the
Interpreter's House, and even on the upward side of the cross and the
sepulchre. We would have looked for those three miserable men somewhere
in the City of Destruction or in the Town of Stupidity, or, at best,
somewhere still outside of the wicket-gate. But John Bunyan did not lay
down his _Pilgrim's Progress_ on any abstract theory, or on any easy and
pleasant presupposition, of the Christian life. He constructed his so
lifelike book out of his own experiences as a Christian man, as well as
out of all he had learned as a Christian minister. And in nothing is
Bunyan's power of observation, deep insight, and firm hold of fact better
seen than just in the way he names and places the various people of the
pilgrimage. Long after he had been at the Cross of Christ himself, and
had seen with his own eyes all the significant rooms in the Interpreter's
House, Bunyan had often to confess that the fetters of evil habit, unholy
affection, and a hard heart were still firmly riveted on his own heels.
And his pastoral work had led him to see only too well that he was not
alone in the temptations and the dangers and the still-abiding bondage to
sin that had so surprised himself after he was so far on in the Christian
life. It was the greatest sorrow of his heart, he tells us in a powerful
passage in his _Grace Abounding_, that so many