us a handsome and
well-dressed young man of the period, with his well-belted doublet, his
voluminous ruffles, his heavily-studded cuffs, his small cane, his
divided hair, and his delicate hand,--altogether answering excellently to
his name, were it not for the dashed look of surprise with which he gets
his answer, and, with what jauntiness he can at the moment command, takes
his departure. "Mr. Brisk was a man of some breeding," says Bunyan, "and
that pretended to religion; but a man that stuck very close to the
world." That Mr. Brisk made any pretence to religion at any other time
and in any other place is not said; only that he put on that pretence
with his best clothes when he came once or twice or more to Mercy and
offered love to her at the House Beautiful. The man with the least
religion at other times, even the man with no pretence to religion at
other times at all, will pretend to some religion when he is in love with
a young woman of Mercy's mind. And yet it would not be fair to say that
it is all pretence even in such a man at such a time. Grant that a man
is really in love; then, since all love is of the nature of religion, for
the time, the true lover is really on the borders of a truly religious
life. It may with perfect truth be said of all men when they first fall
in love that they are, for the time, not very far away from the kingdom
of heaven. For all love is good, so far as it goes. God is Love; and
all love, in the long-run, has a touch of the divine nature in it. And
for once, if never again, every man who is deeply in love has a far-off
glimpse of the beauty of holiness, and a far-off taste of that ineffable
sweetness of which the satisfied saints of God sing so ecstatically. But,
in too many instances, a young man's love having been kindled only by the
creature, and, never rising from her to his and her Creator, as a rule,
it sooner or later burns low and at last burns out, and leaves nothing
but embers and ashes in his once so ardent heart. Mr. Brisk's
love-making might have ended in his becoming a pilgrim but for this fatal
flaw in his heart, that even in his love-making he stuck so fast to the
world. It is almost incredible: you may well refuse to believe it--that
any young man in love, and especially a young gentleman of Mr. Brisk's
breeding, would approach his mistress with the question how much she
could earn a day. As Mr. Brisk looks at Mercy's lap so full of hats and
hosen and s