nd assurance; when, most
unfortunately, as it turned out, they first came across Ignorance, and
then, after quarrelling with him, they fell out between themselves over
the case of Little-Faith. Their superior knowledge of the truth, and
their superior strength of faith, ought to have made them more able to
bear with the infirmities of the weak, and with the passing moods,
however provoking, of one another. But no. And their impatience and
contempt and bad temper all came at this crisis to such a head with them
that they could only be cured by the small cords and the stinging words
of the Shining One. The true key to this so painful part of the parable
hangs at our own girdle. We who have been born and brought up in an
evangelical church are thrown from time to time into the company of
men--ministers and people--who have not had our advantages and
opportunities. They have been born, baptized, and brought up in
communities and churches the clean opposite of ours; and they are as
ignorant of all New Testament religion as Ignorance himself was; or, on
the other hand, they are as full of superstition and terror and spiritual
starvation as Little-Faith was. And then, instead of recollecting and
laying to heart Who made us to differ from such ignorance and such
unbelief, and thus putting on love and humility and patience toward our
neighbours, we speak scornfully and roughly to them, and boast ourselves
over them, and as good as say to them, Stand by thyself, come not near to
me, for I am wiser, wider-minded, stronger, and better every way than
thou. And then, ere ever we are aware of what we are doing, we have let
the arch-flatterer of religious superiority and of spiritual pride seduce
us aside out of the lowly and heavenly way of love and humility till we
are again brought back to it with rebukes of conscience and with other
chastisements. You all understand, my brethren, that the man black of
flesh but covered with a white robe was no wayside seducer who met
Christian and Hopeful at that dangerous part of the road only and only on
that high-minded day. You know from yourselves surely that both
Christian and Hopeful carried that black but smooth-spoken man within
themselves. The Flatterer who led the two pilgrims so fatally wrong that
day was just their own heart taken out of their own bosom and personified
and dramatised by Bunyan's dramatic genius, and so made to walk and talk
and flatter and puff up outside of t