and judgment, heaven and hell.  “O my dear wife,” said Graceless, “and you the children of my bowels, I your dear friend am in myself undone by reason of a burden that lieth hard upon me; moreover, I am for certain informed that this our city will be burned with fire from heaven, in which fearful overthrow both myself, with thee my wife, and you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I see not) some way of escape can be found whereby we may be delivered.”  He would walk also solitarily in the fields, sometimes reading and sometimes praying; and thus for some days he spent his time.  Graceless at that time and at that stage would have satisfied the exigent author of the Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection where he says that “we are too apt also to think that we have sufficiently read a book when we have so read it as to know what it contains.  This reading may be quite sufficient as to many books; but as to the Bible we are not to think that we have read it enough because we have often read and heard what it teaches.  We must read our Bible, not to know what it contains, but to fill our hearts with the spirit of it.”  And, again, and on this same point, “There is this unerring key to the right use of the Bible.  The Bible has only one intent, and that is to make a man know, resist, and abhor the working of his fallen earthly nature, and to turn the faith, hope, and longing desire of his heart to God; and therefore we are only to read our Bibles with this view and to learn this one lesson from it . . .  The critic looks into his books to see how Latin and Greek authors have used the words ‘stranger’ and ‘pilgrim,’ but the Christian, who knows that man lives in labour and toil, in sickness and pain, in hunger and thirst, in heat and cold among the beasts of the field, where evil spirits like roaring lions seek to devour him—­he only knows in what truth and reality man is a poor stranger and a distressed pilgrim upon the earth.”  John Bunyan read neither Plato nor Aristotle, but he read David and Paul till he was the chief of sinners, and till he was first the Graceless and then the Christian of his own next-to-the-Bible book.

2.  In the second place, and as to his burden.  We are supplied with no particulars as to the first beginnings, the gradual make-up, and at last the terrible size of Christian’s burden.  What this pilgrim’s youthful life must have been in such a city as his native city was, and while he was still a young man of such a name and such a character in such a city, we are left to ourselves to think and consider.  Graceless was his name by nature, and his life was as his name and his nature were.  Still, as I have said, we have no detailed and particular account of his early life when his burden was still day and night in the making up.  How long into your life were you graceless, my brother?  And what kind of life did you lead day and night before you were persuaded or alarmed, as the case may have been with