Is this the happiness you have told me
all this while of? May I get out of this with my life, you may possess
the brave country alone for me.' And with that he gave a desperate
struggle or two, and got out of the mire on that side of the slough which
was next his own house; so he went away, and Christian saw him no more.
'The side of the slough which was next his own house.' Let us close with
that. Let us go home thinking about that. And in this trial of faith
and patience, and in that, in this temptation to sin, and in that, in
this actual transgression, and in that, let us always ask ourselves which
is the side of the slough that is farthest away from our own house, and
let us still struggle to that side of the slough, and it will all be well
with us at the last.
HELP
'I was brought low, and He helped me.'--David.
The Slough of Despond is one of John Bunyan's masterpieces. In his
description of the slough, Bunyan touches his highest water-mark for
humour, and pathos, and power, and beauty of language. If we did not
have the English Bible in our own hands we would have to ask, as Lord
Jeffrey asked Lord Macaulay, where the brazier of Bedford got his
inimitable style. Bunyan confesses to us that he got all his Latin from
the prescription papers of his doctors, and we know that he got all his
perfect English from his English Bible. And then he got his humour and
his pathos out of his own deep and tender heart. The God of all grace
gave a great gift to the English-speaking world and to the Church of
Christ in all lands when He created and converted John Bunyan, and put it
into his head and his heart to compose _The Pilgrim's Progress_. His
heart-affecting page on the slough has been wetted with the tears of
thousands of its readers, and their tears have been mingled with smiles
as they read their own sin and misery, and the never-to-be-forgotten time
and place where their sin and misery first found them out, all told so
recognisably, so pathetically, and so amusingly almost to laughableness
in the passage upon the slough. We see the ocean of scum and filth
pouring down into the slough through the subterranean sewers of the City
of Destruction and of the Town of Stupidity, which lies four degrees
beyond the City of Destruction, and from many other of the houses and
haunts of men. We see His Majesty's sappers and miners at their wits'
end how to cope with the deluges of pollution that pour into
|