love Him the more.  I find that true which Shepard says, ‘sin loses strength by every new fall.’”  Have you followed all that, my brethren?  Or have you stumbled at it?  Do you not understand it?  Does your superficial gin-horse mind incline to shake its empty head over all this?  I know that great names, and especially the great names of your own party, go much farther with you than the truth goes, and therefore I have sheltered this deep truth under a shield of great names.  For their sakes let this sure truth of God’s best saints lie in peace and undisputed beside you till you arrive to understand it.

But, to proceed,—the thing was this.  At this passage there comes down from Broadway-gate a lane called Dead-Man’s-lane, so called because of the murders that are commonly done there.  And this Little-Faith going on pilgrimage, as we now do, chanced to sit down there and fell fast asleep.  Yes; the thing was this: This good man had never been what one would call really awake.  He was not a bad man, as men went in the town of Sincere, but he always had a half-slept half-awakened look about his eyes, till now, at this most unfortunate spot, he fell stone-dead asleep.  You all know, I shall suppose, what the apostle Paul and John Bunyan mean by sleep, do you not?  You all know, at any rate, to begin with, what sleep means in the accident column of the morning papers.  You all know what sleep meant and what it involved and cost in the Thirsk signal-box the other night. {1}  When a man is asleep, he is as good as dead, and other people are as good as dead to him.  He is dead to duty, to danger, to other people’s lives, as well as to his own.  He may be having pleasant dreams, and may even be laughing aloud in his sleep, but that may only make his awaking all the more hideous.  He may awake just in time, or he may awake just too late.  Only, he is asleep and he neither knows nor cares.  Now, there is a sleep of the soul as well as of the body.  And as the soul is in worth, as the soul is in its life and in its death to the body, so is its sleep.  Many of you sitting there are quite as dead to heaven and hell, to death and judgment, and to what a stake other people as well as yourselves have in your sleep as that poor sleeper in the signal-box was dead to what was coming rushing on him through the black night.  And as all his gnashing of teeth at himself, and all his sobs before his judge and before the laid-out dead, and before distracted widows and half-mad husbands did not bring back that fatal moment when he fell asleep so sweetly, so will it be with you.  Lazarus! come forth!  Wise and foolish virgins both: Behold the Bridegroom cometh!  Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light!

And, with that, Guilt with a great club that was in his hand struck Little-Faith on the head, and with that blow felled him to the earth, where he lay bleeding as one that would soon bleed to death.  Yes, yes, all true to the very life.  A man may be the boast and the example of all the town, and yet, unknown to them all, and all but unknown to himself till he is struck down, he may have had guilt enough on his track all the time to lay him half dead at the mouth of Dead-Man’s-lane.  Good as was the certificate that all men in their honesty gave to Little-Faith, yet even he had some bad enough memories behind him and within him had he only kept them ever present with him.  But, then, it was just this that all along was the matter with Little-Faith.  Till, somehow, after that sad and yet not wholly evil sleep, all his past sins leapt out into the light and suddenly became and remained all the rest of his life like scarlet.  So loaded, indeed, was the club of Guilt with the nails and studs and clamps of secret aggravation, that every nail and stud left its own bleeding bruise in the prostrate man’s head.  I have myself, says the narrator of Little-Faith’s story, I have myself been engaged as he was, and I found it to be a terrible thing.  I would, as the saying is, have sold my life at that moment for a penny; but that, as God would have it, I was clothed with armour of proof: ay, and yet though I was thus harnessed, I found it hard work to quit myself like a man.  No man can tell what in that combat attends us but he that hath been in the battle himself.  Great-Grace himself,—whoso looks well upon his face shall see those cuts and scars that shall easily give demonstration of what I say.

Most unfortunately there was no good Samaritan with his beast on the road that day to take the half-dead man to an inn.  And thus it was that Little-Faith was left to lie in his blood till there was almost no more blood left in him.  Till at last, coming a little to himself, he made a shift to scrabble on his way.  When he was able to look a little to himself, besides all his wounds and loss of blood, he found that all his spending money was gone, and what was he to do, a stranger in such a plight on a strange road?  There was nothing for it but he must just beg his way with many a hungry belly for the remainder of his way.  You all understand the parable at this point?  Our knowledge of gospel truth; our personal experience of the life of God in our own soul; our sensible attainments in this grace of the Spirit and in that; in secret prayer, in love to God, in forgiveness of injuries, in goodwill to all men, and in self-denial that no one knows of,—in things like these we possess what may be called the pocket-money of the spiritual life.  All these things, at their best, are not the true jewel that no thief can break through nor steal; but though they are not our best and truest riches, yet they have their place and play their part in sending us up the pilgrim way.  By our long and close study of the word of God, if that is indeed our case; by divine truth dwelling richly and experimentally in our hearts; and by a hidden life that is its own witness, and which always has the Holy Spirit’s seal set upon it that we are the children of God,—all that keeps, and is designed by God to keep our hearts up amid the labours and the faintings, the hopes and the fears of the spiritual life.  All that keeps us at the least and the worst above famine and beggary.  Now, the whole pity with Little-Faith was, that though he was not a bad man, yet he never, even at his best days, had much of those things that make a good and well-furnished pilgrim; and what little he had he had now clean lost.  He had never been much a reader of his Bible; he had never sat over it as other men sat over their news-letters and their romances.  He had never had much taste or talent for spiritual books of any kind.  He was a good sort of man, but he was not exactly the manner of man on whose broken heart the Holy Ghost sets the broad seal of heaven.  But for his dreadful misadventure, he might have plodded on, a decent, humdrum, commonplace, everyday kind of pilgrim; but when that catastrophe fell on him he had nothing to fall back upon.  The secret ways of faith and love and hope were wholly unknown to him.  He had no practice in importunate prayer.  He had never prayed a whole night all his life.  He had never needed to do so.  For were we not told when we first met him what a blameless and pure and true and good man he had always been?  He did not know how to find his way about in his Bible; and as for the maps and guide-books that some pilgrims never let out of their hand, even when he had some spending money about him, he never laid it out that way.  And a more helpless pilgrim than Little-Faith was all the rest of the way you never saw.  He was forced to beg as he went, says his historian.  That is to say, he had to lean upon and look to wiser and better-furnished men than himself.  He had to share their meals, look to them to pay his bills, keep close to their company, walk in their foot-prints,