han a real occurrence. Inventive and realistic as
John Bunyan is, there is surely something here that goes beyond even his
genius. After making all allowance for Bunyan's unparalleled powers of
creation and narration, I am inclined to think, the oftener I read it,
that, after all, we have not so much John Bunyan here as very Nature
herself. Yes; John Gifford surely was Mr. Skill. Sister Bosworth surely
was Matthew's mother. And Matthew himself was Sister Bosworth's eldest
son, while one John Bunyan, a travelling tinker, was busy with his
furnaces and his soldering-irons in Dame Bosworth's kitchen. Young
Bunyan, with all his blackguardism, had never plashed down Beelzebub's
orchard. He swears he never did, and we are bound to believe him. But
young Bosworth had been tampering with the forbidden fruit, and Gifford
saw at a glance what was wrong. John Gifford was first an officer in the
Royalist army, then a doctor in Bedford, and now a Baptist Puritan
pastor; and the young tinker looked up to Gifford as the most wonderful
man for learning in books and in bodies and souls of men in all the
world. And when Gifford talked over young Bosworth's bed half to himself
and half to them about a medicine made _ex carne et sanguine Christi_,
the future author of the _Pilgrim's Progress_ never forgot the phrase. At
a glance Gifford saw what was the whole matter with the sick man. And
painful as the truth was to the sick man's mother, and humiliating with a
life-long humiliation to the sick man himself, Gifford was not the man or
the minister to beat about the bush at such a solemn moment. "This boy
has been tampering with that which will kill him unless he gets it taken
off his conscience and out of his heart immediately." Now, this same
divination into our pastoral cases is by far and away the most difficult
part of a minister's work. It is easy and pleasant with a fluent tongue
to get through our pulpit work; but to descend the pulpit stairs and deal
with life, and with this and that sin in the lives of our people,--that
is another matter. "We must labour," says Richard Baxter in his
_Reformed Pastor_, "to be acquainted with the state of all our people as
fully as we can; both to know the persons and their inclinations and
conversation; to know what sins they are most in danger of, what duties
they neglect, and what temptations they are most liable to. For, if we
know not their temperament or their disease, we are like