him, they are caught in a net by Flatterer,
and are smartly whipped by 'a shining one,' who lets them out of it.
False ideas and vanity lay them open once more to their most dangerous
enemy. They meet a man coming towards them from the direction in which
they are going. They tell him that they are on the way to Mount Zion.
He laughs scornfully and answers:--

'There is no such place as you dream of in all the world. When I was
at home in my own country, I heard as you now affirm, and from hearing
I went out to see; and have been seeking this city these twenty years,
but I find no more of it than I did the first day I went out. I am
going back again and will seek to refresh myself with things which I
then cast away for hopes of that which I now see is not.'

Still uncertainty--even on the verge of eternity--strange, doubtless,
and reprehensible to Right Reverend persons, who never 'cast away'
anything; to whom a religious profession has been a highway to
pleasure and preferment, who live in the comfortable assurance that as
it has been in this life so it will be in the next. Only moral
obliquity of the worst kind could admit a doubt about so excellent a
religion as this. But Bunyan was not a Right Reverend. Christianity
had brought him no palaces and large revenues, and a place among the
great of the land. If Christianity was not true his whole life was
folly and illusion, and the dread that it might be so clung to his
belief like its shadow.

The way was still long. The pilgrims reach the Enchanted Ground and
are drowsy and tired. Ignorance comes up with them again. He talks
much about himself. He tells them of the good motives that come into
his mind and comfort him as he walks. His heart tells him that he has
left all for God and Heaven. His belief and his life agree together,
and he is humbly confident that his hopes are well-founded. When they
speak to him of Salvation by Faith and Conviction by Sin, he cannot
understand what they mean. As he leaves them they are reminded of one
Temporary, 'once a forward man in religion.' Temporary dwelt in
Graceless, 'a town two miles from Honesty, next door to one Turnback.'
He 'was going on pilgrimage, but became acquainted with one Save Self,
and was never more heard of.'

These figures all mean something. They correspond in part to Bunyan's
own recollection of his own trials. Partly he is indulging his humour
by describing others who were more astray than he was. It was o