f an
emotional but rootless ministry. Come on, let us mend our pace! 'I am
sorry to say,' replied the man with the burden on his back, 'that I
cannot go so fast as I would.' 'Christian,' says Mr. Kerr Bain, 'has
more to carry than Pliable has, as, indeed, he would still have if he
were carrying nothing but himself; and he does have about him, besides, a
few sobering thoughts as to the length and labour and some of the
unforeseen chances of the way.' And as Dean Paget says in his profound
and powerful sermon on 'The Disasters of Shallowness': 'Yes, but there is
something else first; something else without which that inexpensive
brightness, that easy hopefulness, is apt to be a frail resourceless
growth, withering away when the sun is up and the hot winds of trial are
sweeping over it. We must open our hearts to our religion; we must have
the inward soil broken up, freely and deeply its roots must penetrate our
inner being. We must take to ourselves in silence and in sincerity its
words of judgment with its words of hope, its sternness with its
encouragement, its denunciations with its promises, its requirements,
with its offers, its absolute intolerance of sin with its inconceivable
and divine long-suffering towards sinners.' But preaching like this
would have frightened away poor Pliable. He would not have understood
it, and what he did understand of it he would have hated with all his
shallow heart.

'Where are we now?' called Pliable to his companion, as they both went
over head and ears into the Slough of Despond. 'Truly,' said Christian,
'I do not know.'--No work of man is perfect, not even the all-but-perfect
_Pilgrim's Progress_. Christian was bound to fall sooner or later into a
slough filled with his own despondency about himself, his past guilt, his
present sinfulness, and his anxious future. But Pliable had not
knowledge enough of himself to make him ever despond. He was always
ready and able to mend his pace. He had no burden on his back, and
therefore no doubt in his heart. But Christian had enough of both for
any ten men, and it was Christian's overflowing despondency and doubt at
this point of the road that suddenly filled his own slough, and, I
suppose, overflowed into a slough for Pliable also. Had Pliable only had
a genuine and original slough of his own to so sink and be bedaubed in,
he would have got out of it at the right side of it, and been a tender-
stepping pilgrim all his days.--'