'Why,' replied the pilgrim, and the water stood in his eyes, 'why, there
I hope to see Him alive that did hang dead on the cross; and there I hope
to be rid of all those things that to this day are an annoyance to me;
there they say is no death, and there shall I dwell with such company as
I love best. For, to tell you truth, I love Him, because by Him I was
eased of my burden, and I am weary of my inward sickness; and I would
fain be where I shall die no more, and for ever with that company that
shall continually cry, Holy, holy, holy.'

CHARITY

'I will walk within my house with a perfect heart.'--David.

There can be nobody here to-night so stark stupid as to suppose that the
pilgrim had run away from home and left his wife and children to the work-
house. There have been wiseacres who have found severe fault with John
Bunyan because he made his Puritan pilgrim such a bad husband and such an
unnatural father. But nobody possessed of a spark of common sense, not
to say religion or literature, would ever commit himself to such an utter
imbecility as that. John Bunyan's pilgrim, whatever he may have been
before he became a pilgrim, all the time he was a pilgrim, was the most
faithful, affectionate, and solicitous husband in all the country round
about, and the tenderest, the most watchful, and the wisest of fathers.
This pilgrim stayed all the more at home that he went so far away from
home; he accomplished his whole wonderful pilgrimage beside his own forge
and at his own fireside; and he entered the Celestial City amid trumpets
and bells and harps and psalms, while all the time sleeping in his own
humble bed. The House Beautiful, therefore, to which we have now come in
his company, is not some remote and romantic mansion away up among the
mountains a great many days' journey distant from this poor man's
everyday home. The House Beautiful was nothing else,--what else better,
what else so good could it be?--than just this Christian man's first
communion Sabbath and his first communion table (first, that is, after
his true conversion from sin to God and his confessed entrance into a new
life), while the country from whence he had come out, and concerning
which both Piety and Prudence catechised him so closely, was just his
former life of open ungodliness and all his evil walk and conversation
while he was as yet living without God and without hope in the world. The
country on which he confessed that he