g." Now, before we
go further: Do all you young gentlemen do as much as that? Have you
always been good livers? Have you paid every man and woman their due? Do
you pray to be called prayer? And, if so, when, and where, and what for,
and how long at a time? I do not ask if your private prayer-book is like
Bishop Andrewes' _Devotions_, which was so reduced to pulp with tears and
sweat and the clenching of his agonising hands that his literary
executors were with difficulty able to decipher it. Clito in the
_Christian Perfection_ was so expeditious with his prayers that he used
to boast that he could both dress and do his devotions in a quarter of an
hour. What was the longest time you ever took to dress or undress and
say your prayers? Then, again, there is another Anglican young gentleman
in the same High Church book who always fasts on Good Friday and the
Thirtieth of January. Did you ever deny yourself a glass of wine or a
cigar or an opera ticket for the church or the poor? Could you honestly
say that you know what tithes are? And is there a poor man or woman or
child in this whole city who will by any chance put your name into their
prayers and praises at bedtime to-night? I am afraid there are not many
young gentlemen in this house to-night who could cast a stone at that
brisk lad Ignorance, Vain-Hope, door in the side of the hill, and all. He
was not far from the kingdom of heaven; indeed, he got up to the very
gate of it. How many of you will get half as far?

Now (what think you?), was it not a very bold thing in John Bunyan, whose
own descent was of such a low and inconsiderable generation, his father's
house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the
families in the land--was it not almost too bold in such a clown to take
such a gentleman-scholar as Saul of Tarsus, the future Apostle of the
Lord, and put him into the _Pilgrim's Progress_, and there go on to
describe him as a very brisk lad and nickname him with the nickname of
Ignorance? For, in knowledge of all kinds to be called knowledge,
Gamaliel's gold medallist could have bought the unlettered tinker of
Elstow in one end of the market and sold him in the other. And nobody
knew that better than Bunyan did. And yet such a lion was he for the
truth, such a disciple of Luther was he, and such a defender and preacher
of the one doctrine of a standing or falling church, that he fills page
after page with the crass ignorance