back to his youth and
childhood--and what an intolerable burden will be laid on his heart
before he is done! What a panorama of scarlet pictures will pass before
his inward eye! What a forest of accusing fingers will be pointed at
him! What hissing curses will be spat at him both by the lips of the
living and the dead! What untold pains he will see that he has caused to
the innocent and the helpless! What desolating disappointments, what
shipwrecks of hope to this man and to that woman! What a stone of
stumbling he has been to many who on that stone have been for ever broken
and lost! What a rock of offence even his mere innocent existence, all
unknown to himself till afterwards, has been! Swarms, said Christiana.
Swarms of hornets armed, said Samson. And many of us understand what
that bitter word means better than any commentator on Bunyan or on Milton
can tell us. One of the holiest men the Church of England ever produced,
and one of her best devotional writers, used to shut his door on the
night of every first day of the week, and on his knees spread out a
prayer which always contained this passage: "I worship Thee, O God, on my
face. I smite my breast and say with the publican, God be merciful to me
a sinner; the chief of sinners; a sinner far above the publican. Despise
me not--an unclean worm, a dead dog, a putrid corpse. Despise me not,
despise me not, O Lord. But look upon me with those eyes with which Thou
didst look upon Magdalene at the feast, Peter in the hall, and the thief
on the cross. O that mine eyes were a fountain of tears that I might
weep night and day before Thee! I despise and bruise myself that my
penitence is not deeper, is not fuller. Help Thou mine impenitence, and
more and more pierce, rend, and crush my heart. My sins are more in
number than the sand. My iniquities are multiplied, and I have no
relief." Perish your Puritanism, and your prayer-books too! I hear some
high-minded and indignant man saying. Perish your Celestial City and all
my desire after it, before I say the like of that about myself! Brave
words, my brother; brave words! But there have been men as blameless as
you are, and as brave-hearted over it, who, when the scales fell off
their eyes, were heard crying out ever after: O wretched man that I am!
And: Have mercy on me, the chief of sinners! And so, if it so please
God, will it yet be with you.

3. "Having had little to do this morning," said Mrs.