for purity of doctrine and for purity of worship, when we protest against popery and priestcraft, when we resist rationalism and infidelity, when we do battle now for national religion, as we call it, and now for the freedom of the church, let us do it all in love to all men, else we had better not do it at all.  If we cannot do it with clean and all-men-loving hearts, let us leave all debate and contention to stronger and better men than we are.  The truth will never be advanced or guarded by us, nor will the Lord of truth and love accept our service or bless our souls, till we put on the divine nature, and have our hearts and our mouths still more full of love than our minds and our mouths are full of truth.  Let us watch ourselves, lest with all our so-called love of truth we be found reprobates at last because we loved the truth for some selfish or party end, and hated and despised our brother, and believed all evil and disbelieved all good concerning our brother.  Truth without love makes a hypocrite, says Dr. Pusey; and evangelical truth without evangelical love makes an evangelical hypocrite, says Thomas Shepard.  Only where the whole truth is united to a heart full of love have we the perfect New Testament Christian.

TIMOROUS AND MISTRUST

   ’There is a lion in the way.’—­The Slothful Man.

   ’I must venture.’—­Christian.

‘I at any rate must venture,’ said Christian to Timorous and Mistrust.  ’Whatever you may do I must venture, even if the lions you speak of should pull me to pieces.  I, for one, shall never go back.  To go back is nothing but death; to go forward is fear of death and everlasting life beyond it.  I will yet go forward.’  So Mistrust and Timorous ran down the hill, and Christian went on his way.  George Offor says, in his notes on this passage, that civil despotism and ecclesiastical tyranny so terrified many young converts in John Bunyan’s day, that multitudes turned back like Mistrust and Timorous; while at the same time, many like Bunyan himself went forward and for a time fell into the lion’s mouth.  Civil despotism and ecclesiastical tyranny do not stand in our way as they stood in Bunyan’s way—­at least, not in the same shape:  but every age has its own lions, and every Christian man has his own lions that neither civil despots nor ecclesiastical tyrants know anything about.

Now, who or what is the lion in your way?  Who or what is it that fills you with such timorousness and mistrust, that you are almost turning back from the way to life altogether?  The fiercest of all our lions is our own sin.  When a man’s own sin not only finds him out and comes roaring after him, but when it dashes past him and gets into the woods and thickets before him, and stands pawing and foaming on the side of his way, that is a trial of faith and love and trust indeed.  Sometimes a man’s past sins will fill all his future life