5. As to the Hill Difficulty, that was no stick at all to Mr. Fearing; and as for the lions, he pulled their whiskers and snapped his fingers in their dumfoundered faces. For you must know that Mr. Fearing's trouble was not about such things as these at all; his only fear was about his acceptance at last. He beat Mr. Greatheart himself at getting down into the Valley of Humiliation, till the guide was fain to confess that he went down as well as he ever saw man go down in all his life. This pilgrim cared not how mean he was, so he might be but happy at last. That is the reason why so many of God's best saints take so kindly and so quietly to things that drive other men mad. You wonder sometimes when you see an innocent man sit down quietly under accusations and insults and injuries that you spend all the rest of your life resenting and repaying. And that is the reason also that so many of God's best saints in other ages and other communions used to pursue evangelical humility and ascetic poverty and seclusion till they obliterated themselves out of all human remembrance, and buried themselves in retreats of silence and of prayer. Yes, you are quite right. A garment of sackcloth may cover an unsanctified heart; and the fathers of the desert did not all escape the depths of Satan and the plague of their own heart. Quite true. A contrite heart may be carried about an applauding city in a coach and six; and a crucified heart may be clothed in purple and fine linen, and may fare sumptuously every day. A saint of God will sometimes sit on a throne with a more weaned mind than that with which Elijah or the Baptist will macerate themselves in the wilderness. Every man who is really set on heaven must find his own way thither; and he who is really intent on his own way thither will neither have the time nor the heart to throw stones at his brother who thinks he has discovered his own best way. All the pilgrims who got to the City at last did not get down Difficulty and through Humiliation so well as Mr. Fearing did; nor was it absolutely necessary that they should. It was not to lay down an iron-fast rule for others, but it was only to amuse the way with his account of Mr. Fearing, that the guide went on to say: "Yes, I think there was a kind of sympathy betwixt that valley and my man. For I never saw him better in all his pilgrimage than when he was in that valley. For here he would lie down, embrace the ground, and kiss the very flowers that grew in this valley. He would now be up every morning by break of day, tracing and walking to and fro in that valley."
6. Now, do you think you could guess how Mr. Fearing conducted himself in Vanity Fair? Your guess is important to us and to you to-night; for it will show whether or no John Bunyan and Mr. Greatheart have spent their strength for nought and in vain on you. It will show whether or no you have got inside of Mr. Fearing with all that has been said; and thus, inside of yourself. Guess, then. How did Mr. Fearing do in Vanity Fair, do you think? To give you a clue, recollect that he was the timidest of souls. And remember how you have often been afraid to look at things in a shop window lest the shopkeeper should come out and hold you to the thing you were looking at. Remember also that you are the life-long owners of some things just because they were thrown at your head. Remember how you sauntered into a sale on one occasion, and, out of sheer idleness and pure fun, made a bid, and to your consternation the encumbrance was knocked down to your name; and it fills up your house to- day till you would give ten times its value to some one to take it away for ever out of your sight. Well, what was it that those who were so shamelessly and so pesteringly cadging about places, and titles, and preferments, and wives, and gold, and silver, and such like--what was it they prevailed on this poor stupid countryman to cheapen and buy? Do you guess, or do you give it up? Well, Greatheart himself was again and again almost taken in; and would have been had not Mr. Fearing been beside him. But Mr. Fearing looked at all the jugglers, and cheats, and knaves, and apes, and fools as if he would have bitten a firebrand. "I thought he would have fought with all the men of the fair; I feared there we should have both been knock'd o' th' head, so hot was he against their fooleries." And then--for Greatheart was a bit of a philosopher, and liked to entertain and while the away with tracing things up to their causes--"it was all," he said, "because Mr. Fearing was so tender of sin. He was above many tender of sin. He was so afraid, not for himself only, but of doing injury to others, that he would deny himself the purchase and possession and enjoyment even of that which was lawful, because he would not offend." "All this while," says Bunyan himself, in the eighty- second paragraph of _Grace Abounding_, "as to the act of sinning I was never more tender than now. I durst not take a pin or a stick, though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore and would smart at every touch. I could not now tell how to speak my words for fear I should misplace them." "The highest flames," says Jeremy Taylor in his _Life of Christ_, "are the most tremulous."