led the van both within and around Mansoul. In ordinary and
peaceful days; in days of truce and parley; when the opposite armies were
laid up in their winter quarters, or were, for any cause, drawn off from
one another, some of the other captains might be more in evidence. But
in every exploit to be called an exploit; in every single enterprise of
danger; when any new position was to be taken up, or any forlorn hope was
to be led, there, in the very van of labour and of danger, was sure to be
seen Captain Credence with his blood-red colours in his own hand. You
understand your Bunyan by this time, my brethren? Captain Credence, your
little boy at school will tell you, is just the soldier-like faith of
your sanctification. _Credo_, he will tell you, is 'I believe'; it is to
have faith in God and in the word of God. You will borrow your Latin
from your little boy, and then you will pay him back by telling him how
Captain Credence has always led the van in your soul. You will tell him
and show him what a wonderful writer on the things of the soul John
Bunyan is, till you make John Bunyan one of your son's choicest authors
for all his days. You will do this if you will tell him how and when
this same Captain Credence with his crimson colours first led the van in
your salvation. You will tell him this with more and more depth and more
and more plainness as year after year he reads his _Holy War_, and better
and better understands it, till he has had it all fulfilled in himself as
a pickt captain and good soldier of Jesus Christ. You will tell him
about yourself, till, at this forlorn hope in his own life, and at that
sounded advance, in some new providence and in some new duty; in this
commanded attack on an inwardly entrenched enemy, and in that resolute
assault on some battlement of evil habit, he recollects his noble,
confiding, and loving father and plays the man again, and that all the
more if only for his father's sake. Ask your son what he knows and what
you do not know, and then as long as his heart and his ear are open tell
him what you know and what you have by faith come through, and that will
be a priceless possession to him, especially when he is put in possession
of it by you.

Well on toward the end of the war, the Captain Credence had so acquitted
himself that he was summoned one day to the Prince's quarters, when the
following colloquy ensued: 'What hath my Lord to say to His servant?' And
then, a