The apocalyptic side of some men’s imaginations is very easily worked upon.  No kind of book sells better among those of our people who have no root in themselves than just picture-books about heaven.  Our missionaries make use of lantern-slides to bring home the scenes in the Gospels to the dull minds of their village hearers, and with good success.  And at home a magic-lantern filled with the splendours of the New Jerusalem would carry multitudes of rootless hearts quite captive for a time.  ‘Well said; and what else?  This is excellent; and what else?’ Christian could not tell Pliable fast enough about the glories of heaven.  ’There we shall be with seraphim and cherubim, creatures that will dazzle your eyes to look on them.  There also you shall meet with thousands and ten thousands who have gone before us to that place.  Elders with golden crowns, and holy virgins with golden harps, and all clothed with immortality as with a garment.’  ‘The hearing of all this,’ cried Pliable, ‘is enough to ravish one’s heart.’  ‘An overly faith,’ says old Thomas Shepard, ‘is easily wrought.’

As if the text itself was not graphic enough, Bunyan’s racy, humorous, pathetic style overflows the text and enriches the very margins of his pages, as every possessor of a good edition of The Pilgrim knows.  ‘Christian and Obstinate pull for Pliable’s soul’ is the eloquent summary set down on the side of the sufficiently eloquent page.  As the picture of a man’s soul being pulled for rises before my mind, I can think of no better companion picture to that of Pliable than that of poor, hard-beset Brodie of Brodie, as he lets us see the pull for his soul in the honest pages of his inward diary.  Under the head of ‘Pliable’ in my Bunyan note-book I find a crowd of references to Brodie; and if only to illustrate our author’s marginal note, I shall transcribe one or two of them.  ’The writer of this diary desires to be cast down under the facileness and plausibleness of his nature, by which he labours to please men more than God, and whence it comes that the wicked speak good of him . . .  The Lord pity the proneness of his heart to comply with the men who have the power . . .  Lord, he is unsound and double in his heart, politically crafty, selfish, not savouring nor discerning the things of God . . .  Let not self-love, wit, craft, and timorousness corrupt his mind, but indue him with fortitude, patience, steadfastness, tenderness, mortification . . .  Shall I expose myself and my family to danger at this time?  A grain of sound faith would solve all my questions.’  ’Die Dom.  I stayed at home, partly to decline the ill-will and rage of men and to decline observation.’  Or, take another Sabbath-day entry:  ’Die Dom.  I stayed at home, because of the time, and the observation, and the Earl of Moray . . . Came to Cuttiehillock.  I am neither cold nor hot.  I am not rightly principled as to the time.  I suspect that it is not all conscience