rth and of the work of God in their hearts, which
comforted and strengthened them against the temptations of the Devil.'

The language of the poor women has lost its old meaning. They
themselves, if they were alive, would not use it any longer. The
conventional phrases of Evangelical Christianity ring untrue in a
modern ear like a cracked bell. We have grown so accustomed to them as
a cant, that we can hardly believe that they ever stood for sincere
convictions. Yet these forms were once alive with the profoundest of
all moral truths; a truth not of a narrow theology, but which lies at
the very bottom of the well, at the fountain-head of human morality;
namely, that a man who would work out his salvation must cast out
self, though he rend his heart-strings in doing it; not love of
self-indulgence only, but self-applause, self-confidence, self-conceit
and vanity, desire or expectation of reward; self in all the subtle
ingenuities with which it winds about the soul. In one dialect or
another, he must recognise that he is himself a poor creature not
worth thinking of, or he will not take the first step towards
excellence in any single thing which he undertakes.

Bunyan left the women and went about his work, but their talk went
with him. 'He was greatly affected.' 'He saw that he wanted the true
tokens of a godly man.' He sought them out and spoke with them again
and again. He could not stay away; and the more he went the more he
questioned his condition.

'I found two things,' he says, 'at which I did sometimes marvel,
considering what a blind ungodly wretch but just before I was; one a
great softness and tenderness of heart, which caused me to fall under
the conviction of what, by Scripture, they asserted; the other a great
bending of my mind to a continual meditating on it. My mind was now
like a horse-leech at the vein, still crying Give, give; so fixed on
eternity and on the kingdom of heaven (though I knew but little), that
neither pleasure, nor profit, nor persuasion, nor threats could loosen
it or make it let go its hold. It is in very deed a certain truth; it
would have been then as difficult for me to have taken my mind from
heaven to earth, as I have found it often since to get it from earth
to heaven.'

Ordinary persons who are conscious of trying to do right, who resist
temptations, are sorry when they slip, and determine to be more on
their guard for the future, are well contented with the condition
whic