this slough.  More cartloads than you could count of the best material for filling up a slough have been shot into it, and yet you would never know that so much as a single labourer had emptied his barrow here.  True, excellent stepping-stones have been laid across the slough by skilful engineers, but they are always so slippery with the scum and slime of the slough, that it is only now and then that a traveller can keep his feet upon them.  Altogether, our author’s picture of the Slough of Despond is such a picture that no one who has seen it can ever forget it.  But better than reading the best description of the slough is to see certain well-known pilgrims trying to cross it.  Mr. Fearing at the Slough of Despond was a tale often told at the tavern suppers of that country.  Never pilgrim attempted the perilous journey with such a chicken-heart in his bosom as this Mr. Fearing.  He lay above a month on the bank of the slough, and would not even attempt the steps.  Some kind Pilgrims, though they had enough to do to keep the steps themselves, offered him a hand; but no.  And after they were safely over it made them almost weep to hear the man still roaring in his horror at the other side.  Some bade him go home if he would not take the steps, but he said that he would rather make his grave in the slough than go back one hairsbreadth.  Till, one sunshiny morning,—no one knew how, and he never knew how himself—the steps were so high and dry, and the scum and slime were so low, that this hare-hearted man made a venture, and so got over.  But, then, as an unkind friend of his said, this pitiful pilgrim had a slough of despond in his own mind which he carried always and everywhere about with him, and made him the proverb of despondency that he was and is.  Only, that sunshiny morning he got over both the slough inside of him and outside of him, and was heard by Help and his family singing this song on the hither side of the slough: ‘He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.’

Our pilgrim did not have such a good crossing as Mr. Fearing.  Whether it was that the discharge from the city was deeper and fouler, or that the day was darker, or what, we are not told, but both Christian and Pliable were in a moment out of sight in the slough.  They both wallowed, says their plain-spoken historian, in the slough, only the one of the two who had the burden on his back at every wallow went deeper into the mire; when his neighbour, who had no such burden, instead of coming to his assistance, got out of the slough at the same side as he had entered it, and made with all his might for his own house.  But the man called Christian made what way he could, and still tumbled on to the side of the slough that was farthest from his own house, till a man called Help gave him his hand and set him upon sound ground.  Christiana, again, and Mercy and the boys found the slough in a far worse condition than it had ever been found before.  And the reason was not that the country that drained into the slough was worse, but that those who had the mending of the slough and the keeping in repair of the steps had so bungled their work that they had marred the way instead of mending it.  At the same time, by the tact and good sense of Mercy, the whole party got over, Mercy remarking to the mother of the boys, that if she had as good ground to hope for a loving reception at the gate as Christiana had, no slough of despond would discourage her, she said.  To which the older woman made the characteristic reply: ‘You know your sore and I know mine, and we shall both have enough evil to face before we come to our journey’s end.’

Now, I do not for a moment suppose that there is any one here who can need to be told what the Slough of Despond in reality is.  Indeed, its very name sufficiently declares it.  But if any one should still be at a loss to understand this terrible experience of all the pilgrims, the explanation offered by the good man who gave Christian his hand may here be repeated.  ‘This miry slough,’ he said, ‘is such a place as cannot be mended.  This slough is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction of sin doth continually run, and therefore it is called by the name of Despond, for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition there ariseth in his soul many fears and doubts and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place, and this is the reason of the badness of the ground.’  That is the parable, with its interpretation; but there is a passage in Grace Abounding which is no parable, and which may even better than this so pictorial slough describe some men’s condition here.  ‘My original and inward pollution,’ says Bunyan himself in his autobiography, ‘that, that was my plague and my affliction; that, I say, at a dreadful rate was always putting itself forth within me; that I had the guilt of to amazement; by reason of that I was more loathsome in my own eyes than a toad; and I thought I was so in God’s eyes also.  Sin and corruption would bubble up out of my heart as naturally as water bubbles up out of a fountain.  I thought now that every one had a better heart than I had.  I could have changed heart with anybody.  I thought none but the devil himself could equalise me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind.  I fell, therefore, at the sight of my own vileness, deeply into despair, for I concluded that this condition in which I was in could not stand with a life of grace.  Sure, thought I, I am forsaken of God; sure I am given up to the devil, and to a reprobate mind.’

‘Let no man, then, count me a fable maker,
Nor made my name and credit a partaker
Of their derision: what is here in view,
Of mine own knowledge I dare say is true.’

Sometimes, as with Christian at the slough, a man’s way in life is all slashed up into sudden ditches and pitfalls out of the sins of his youth.  His sins, by God’s grace, find him out, and under their arrest and overthrow he begins to seek his way to a better life and a better world; and then both the burden and the slough have their explanation and fulfilment in his own life every day.  But it is even more dreadful than a slough in a man’s way to have a slough in his mind, as both Bunyan himself and Mr. Fearing, his exquisite creation, had.  After the awful-enough slough, filled with the guilt and fear of actual sin, had been bridged and crossed and left behind, a still worse slough of inward corruption and pollution rose up in John Bunyan’s soul and threatened to engulf him altogether.  So terrible to Bunyan was this experience, that he has not thought it possible to make a parable of it, and so put it into the Pilgrim; he has kept it rather for the plain, direct, unpictured, personal testimony of the Grace Abounding.  I do not know another passage anywhere to compare with the eighty-fourth paragraph of Grace Abounding for hope and encouragement to a great inward sinner under a great inward sanctification.  I commend that powerful passage to the appropriation of any man here who may have stuck fast in the Slough of Despond to-day, and who could not on that account come to the Lord’s Table.  Let him still struggle out at the side of the slough farthest from his own house, and to-night, who can tell, Help may come and give that man his hand.  When the Slough of Despond is drained, and its bottom laid bare, what a find of all kinds of precious treasures shall be laid bare!  Will you be able to lay claim to any of it when the long-lost treasure-trove is distributed by command of the King to its rightful owners?

‘What are you doing there?’ the man whose name was Help demanded of Christian, as he still wallowed and plunged to the hither side of the slough, ‘and why did you not look for the steps?’  And so saying he set Christian’s feet upon sound ground again, and