n the name of God, as if he had just been
created and sent up into your sky to let you see to serve God and your
neighbour for another day. And be often out of this world and up in
heaven. Beat all about you at building castles in the air; you have more
material and more reason. For is not faith the substance of things hoped
for, and the evidence of things not seen? Walk often in heaven's
friendly streets. Pass often into heaven's many mansions filled with
happy families. Imagine this unhappy life at an end, and imagine
yourself sent back to this probationary world to play the man for a few
short years before heaven finally calls you home. Little-Faith was a
good man, but there was no speculation in his eyes and no secrets of love
in his heart. And if your faith also is little, and your spending money
also is run low, try this way of love and imagination. If you have a
better way, then go on with it and be happy yourself and helpful to
others; but if your faith is at a standstill and is stricken with
barrenness, try my counsel of putting more heart and more inward eye,
more holy love and more heavenly joy, into your frigid and sterile
religion.

THE FLATTERER

"A man that flattereth his neighbour spreadeth a net for his
feet."--_The Wise Man_.

Both Ignorance and Little-Faith would have had their revenge and
satisfaction upon Christian and Hopeful had they seen those two so
Pharisaical old men taken in the Flatterer's net. For it was nothing
else but the swaggering pride of Hopeful over the pitiful case of Little-
Faith, taken along with the hard and hasty ways of Christian with that
unhappy youth Ignorance, that so soon laid them both down under the small
cords of the Shining One. This word of the wise man, that pride goeth
before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall, was fulfilled to
the very letter in Christian and Hopeful that high-minded day. At the
same time, it must be admitted that Christian and Hopeful would have been
more than human if they had not both felt and let fall some superiority,
some scorn, and some impatience in the presence of such a silly and
upsetting stripling as Ignorance was; as, also, over the story of such a
poor-spirited and spunging creature as Little-Faith was. Christian and
Hopeful had just come down from their delightful time among the
Delectable Mountains, and they were as full as they could hold of all
kinds of knowledge, and faith, and hope, a