to understand the Pilgrim’s Progress, beyond a nursery and five-year-old understanding of it, you must have worked and studied and suffered your way out of your mental and spiritual imbecility.  You must have for years attended to what is taught from the pulpit and the desk, and, alongside of that, you must have made a sobering and solemnising application of it all to your own heart.  And then you would have seen and felt that the heels of your mind and of your heart are only too firmly fettered with the irons of ignorance and inexperience and self-complacency.  But as it is, if you would tell the truth, you would say to us what Simple said to Christian, I see no danger.  The next time that John Bunyan passed that bottom, the chains had been taken off the heels of this sleeping fool and had been put round his neck.

SLOTH

Sloth had a far better head than Simple had; but what of that when he made no better use of it?  There are many able men who lie all their days in a sad bottom with the irons of indolence and inefficiency on their heels.  We often envy them their abilities, and say about them, What might they not have done for themselves and for us had they only worked hard?  Just as we are surprised to see other men away above us on the mountain top, not because they have better abilities than we have, but because they tore the fetters of sloth out of their soft flesh and set themselves down doggedly to their work.  And the same sloth that starves and fetters the mind at the same time casts the conscience and the heart into a deep sleep.  I often wonder as I go on working among you, if you ever attach any meaning or make any application to yourselves of all those commands and counsels of which the Scriptures are full,—­to be up and doing, to watch and pray, to watch and be sober, to fight the good fight of faith, to hold the fort, to rise early, and even by night, and to endure unto death, and never for one moment to be found off your guard.  Do you attach any real meaning to these examples of the psalmists, to these continual commands and examples of Christ, and to these urgent counsels of his apostles?  Do you?  Against whom and against what do you thus campaign and fight?  For fear of whom or of what do you thus watch?  What fort do you hold?  What occupies your thoughts in night-watches, and what inspires and compels your early prayers?  It is your stupefying life of spiritual sloth that makes it impossible for you to answer these simple and superficial questions.  Sloth is not the word for it.  Let them give the right word to insanity like that who sleep and soak in sinful sloth no longer.