1.  ’The first was that famous captain, the noble Captain Credence.  His were the red colours, and Mr. Promise bare them.  And for a scutcheon he had the Holy Lamb and the golden shield; and he had ten thousand men at his feet.’  Now, this same Captain Credence from first to last of the war always led the van both within and around Mansoul.  In ordinary and peaceful days; in days of truce and parley; when the opposite armies were laid up in their winter quarters, or were, for any cause, drawn off from one another, some of the other captains might be more in evidence.  But in every exploit to be called an exploit; in every single enterprise of danger; when any new position was to be taken up, or any forlorn hope was to be led, there, in the very van of labour and of danger, was sure to be seen Captain Credence with his blood-red colours in his own hand.  You understand your Bunyan by this time, my brethren?  Captain Credence, your little boy at school will tell you, is just the soldier-like faith of your sanctification. Credo, he will tell you, is ‘I believe’; it is to have faith in God and in the word of God.  You will borrow your Latin from your little boy, and then you will pay him back by telling him how Captain Credence has always led the van in your soul.  You will tell him and show him what a wonderful writer on the things of the soul John Bunyan is, till you make John Bunyan one of your son’s choicest authors for all his days.  You will do this if you will tell him how and when this same Captain Credence with his crimson colours first led the van in your salvation.  You will tell him this with more and more depth and more and more plainness as year after year he reads his Holy War, and better and better understands it, till he has had it all fulfilled in himself as a pickt captain and good soldier of Jesus Christ.  You will tell him about yourself, till, at this forlorn hope in his own life, and at that sounded advance, in some new providence and in some new duty; in this commanded attack on an inwardly entrenched enemy, and in that resolute assault on some battlement of evil habit, he recollects his noble, confiding, and loving father and plays the man again, and that all the more if only for his father’s sake.  Ask your son what he knows and what you do not know, and then as long as his heart and his ear are open tell him what you know and what you have by faith come through, and that will be a priceless possession to him, especially when he is put in possession of it by you.

Well on toward the end of the war, the Captain Credence had so acquitted himself that he was summoned one day to the Prince’s quarters, when the following colloquy ensued:  ‘What hath my Lord to say to His servant?’ And then, after a sign or two of favour, it was said to him:  ’I have made thee lieutenant over all the forces in Mansoul; so that, from this day forward, all men in Mansoul shall be at thy word; and thou shalt be he that shall