the world.  We soon see that she has so come out, as we begin to miss her from places and from employments her presence used to brighten; and, very unwillingly, we overhear men and women with her name on their lips in a way that makes us fear for her soul, till many, oh, in a single ministry, how many, who promised well at the gate and ran safely past many snares, at last sell all—­body and soul and Saviour—­in Vanity Fair.

Well, Evangelist remains Evangelist still.  Only, without losing any of his sweetness and freeness and fulness of promise, he adds to that some solemn warnings and counsels suitable now, as never before, to these two pilgrims.  If one may say so, he would add now such moral treatises as Butler’s Sermons and Serious Call to such evangelical books as Grace Abounding and A Jerusalem Sinner Saved.

To-morrow the two pilgrims will come out of the wilderness and will be plunged into a city where they will be offered all kinds of merchandise,—­houses, lands, places, honours, preferments, titles, pleasures, delights, wives, children, bodies, souls, and what not.  An altogether new world from anything they have yet come through, and a world where many who once began well have gone no further.  Such counsels as these, then, Evangelist gave Christian and Faithful as they left the lonely wilderness behind them and came out towards the gate of the seductive city—­’Let the Kingdom of Heaven be always before your eyes, and believe steadfastly concerning things that are invisible.’  Visible, tangible, sweet, and desirable things will immediately be offered to them, and unless they have a faith in their hearts that is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen, it will soon be all over with them and their pilgrimage.  ‘Let no man take your crown,’ he said also, as he foresaw at how many booths and counters, houses, lands, places, preferments, wives, husbands, and what not, would be offered them and pressed upon them in exchange for their heavenly crown.  ‘Above all, look well to your own hearts,’ he said.  Canon Venables laments over the teaching that Bunyan received from John Gifford.  ’Its principle,’ he says, ’was constant introspection and scrupulous weighing of every word and deed, and even of every thought, instead of leading the mind off from self to the Saviour.’  The canon seems to think that it was specially unfortunate for Bunyan to be told to keep his heart and to weigh well every thought of it; but I must point out to you that Evangelist puts as above all other things the most important for the pilgrims the looking well to their own hearts; and our plain-spoken author has used a very severe word about any minister who should whisper anything to any pilgrim that could be construed or misunderstood into putting Christ in the place of thought and word and deed, and the scrupulous weighing of every one of them.  ’Let nothing that is on this side the other world get within you; and above all, look well to your own hearts, and to the lusts thereof.’