Christian had enough of both for any ten men, and it was Christian’s overflowing despondency and doubt at this point of the road that suddenly filled his own slough, and, I suppose, overflowed into a slough for Pliable also.  Had Pliable only had a genuine and original slough of his own to so sink and be bedaubed in, he would have got out of it at the right side of it, and been a tender-stepping pilgrim all his days.—­’Is this the happiness you have told me all this while of?  May I get out of this with my life, you may possess the brave country alone for me.’  And with that he gave a desperate struggle or two, and got out of the mire on that side of the slough which was next his own house; so he went away, and Christian saw him no more.  ‘The side of the slough which was next his own house.’  Let us close with that.  Let us go home thinking about that.  And in this trial of faith and patience, and in that, in this temptation to sin, and in that, in this actual transgression, and in that, let us always ask ourselves which is the side of the slough that is farthest away from our own house, and let us still struggle to that side of the slough, and it will all be well with us at the last.

HELP

   ’I was brought low, and He helped me.’—­David.

The Slough of Despond is one of John Bunyan’s masterpieces.  In his description of the slough, Bunyan touches his highest water-mark for humour, and pathos, and power, and beauty of language.  If we did not have the English Bible in our own hands we would have to ask, as Lord Jeffrey asked Lord Macaulay, where the brazier of Bedford got his inimitable style.  Bunyan confesses to us that he got all his Latin from the prescription papers of his doctors, and we know that he got all his perfect English from his English Bible.  And then he got his humour and his pathos out of his own deep and tender heart.  The God of all grace gave a great gift to the English-speaking world and to the Church of Christ in all lands when He created and converted John Bunyan, and put it into his head and his heart to compose The Pilgrim’s Progress.  His heart-affecting page on the slough has been wetted with the tears of thousands of its readers, and their tears have been mingled with smiles as they read their own sin and misery, and the never-to-be-forgotten time and place where their sin and misery first found them out, all told so recognisably, so pathetically, and so amusingly almost to laughableness in the passage upon the slough.  We see the ocean of scum and filth pouring down into the slough through the subterranean sewers of the City of Destruction and of the Town of Stupidity, which lies four degrees beyond the City of Destruction, and from many other of the houses and haunts of men.  We see His Majesty’s sappers and miners at their wits’ end how to cope with the deluges of pollution that pour into this slough that they have been ordained