there was another individual in that age, except Leighton, whose piety could have produced so catholic, so unsectarian, so heavenly a work.

In accordance with what I have said, you will perceive how Bunyan commences with his Pilgrim. He begins with releasing himself and the position of the Dreamer from any positive locality; he does not suffer his personal situation or feelings to throw a single determinate shade upon the picture; he does not say, (as many persons would very naturally have said,) As I lay suffering for the Gospel in the prison of Bedford, but, As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted upon a certain place where was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream. Ah, it was a wilderness indeed, and no small part of Bunyan's life was spent in the deserts and caves of it. It is a wilderness to us all, but to many a wilderness of sinful pleasures infinitely more dangerous than dens and caves, bonds and imprisonments. It is a wilderness to the soul, away from its God, surrounded by dangers, exposed to the wiles of its great adversary the devil, in peril of eternal

ruin.

There are lions, chained and unchained, in the way, and temptations of every shape and name, and unseen dangers too, from which God alone can protect us. He only walks safely who walks as a stranger and a pilgrim.

Yet the dear path to thine abode,

Lies through this horrid land;

Lord, we would trace the dangerous road,

And run at thy command.

And if we do this, then a blessed Faith comes in, and ours is a more cheerful, delightful, heavenly vision. We walk under the gracious care, and in the safe dominions of the King of the Celestial City; we travel the king's own highway; we come to the land Beulah ;

We're marching through Immanuel's ground

To fairer worlds on high!

You will observe what honor, from his Pilgrim's first setting out, Bunyan puts upon the Word of God. He would give to no inferior instrumentality, not even to one of God's Providences, the business of awakening his Pilgrim to a sense of his danger; but he places him before us reading his book, awakened by the word. Now we know that it is often God's providence, in the way of sickness, the loss of friends, earthly disappointments, the voice and discipline of pain of various kinds, that awakens careless men in the first place, and leads them to the word of God; and kind and gracious providences are always, all through life, all through our Christian course, combining with the Word and the Spirit of God to help us on our pilgrimage, and make us wary in it; but in general it is the word of God, in some form, which God uses as the instrument in awakening men, as well as in converting them. And so Bunyan, with heavenly wisdom and truth, gives us the first picture of his Pilgrim, anxiously reading the word of God. And he makes the first efficacious motive in the mind of this Pilgrim, a salutary fear of the terrors of that word, a sense of the wrath to come, beneath the burden of sin upon his soul.

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There is a passage so beautiful, in the pages of a great writer, on this very point; that it might have been written as a commentary on this very opening of the Pilgrim's Progress, and I shall set it before you. "Awakened," says Mr. Coleridge, "by the cock-crow (a sermon, a calamity, a sick bed, or a providential escape) the Christian Pilgrim sets out in the morning twilight, while yet the truth is below the horizon. Certain necessary consequences of his past life and his present undertaking will be seen by the refraction of its light : more will be apprehended and conjectured. The phantasms, that had predominated during the hours of darkness, are still busy. No longer present as Forms, they will yet exist as moulding and formative Motions in the Pilgrim's soul. The Dream of the past night will transfer its shapes to the objects in the distance, while the objects give outwardness and reality to the shapings of the Dream. The fears inspired by long habits of selfishness and self-seeking cunning, though now purifying into that fear which is the beginning of wisdom, and ordained to be our guide and safeguard, till the sun of love, the perfect law of liberty, is fully arisen-these fears will set the fancy at work, and haply, for a time transform the mists of dim and imperfect knowledge into determinate superstitions. But in either case, whether seen clearly or dimly, whether beheld or only imagined, the consequences contemplated in their bearings on the individual's inherent desire of happiness and dread of pain become motives: and (unless all distinction in the words be done away with, and either prudence or virtue be reduced to a

superfluous synonyme, a redundancy in all the languages of the civilized world,) these motives, and the acts and forbearances directly proceeding from them, fall under the head of PRUDENCE, as belonging to one or other of its three very distinct species. It may be a prudence, that stands in opposition to a higher moral life, and tends to preclude it, and to prevent the soul from ever arriving at the hatred of sin for its own exceeding sinfulness, (Rom. vii. 13;) and this is an EVIL PRUDence. Or it may be a neutral prudence, not incompatible with spiritual growth and to this we may, with especial propriety, apply the words of our Lord, 'What is not against us is for us.' It is therefore an innocent, and (being such) a proper and coм

MENDABLE PRUDENCE.

:

Or it may lead and be subservient to a higher principle than itself. The mind and conscience of the individual may be reconciled to it, in the foreknowledge of the higher principle, and with a yearning towards it that implies a foretaste of future freedom. The enfeebled convalescent is reconciled to his crutches, and thankfully makes use of them, not only because they are necessary for his immediate support, but likewise, because they are the means and condition of EXERCISE ; and by exercise of establishing, gradatim paulatim, that strength, flexibility, and almost spontaneous obedience of the muscles, which the idea and cheering presentiment of health hold out to him. He finds their value in their present necessity, and their worth as they are the instruments This is a faithful, a of finally superseding it.

WISE PRUDENCE, having indeed its birth-place in the world, and the wisdom of this world for its father; but naturalized in a better land, and having the Wisdom from above for its Sponsor and Spiritual Parent."

The Pilgrim is in rags, the rags of depravity and sin, and the intolerable burden of sin is bending him down; but the book is in his hand, and his face is from his own house. Reading and pondering, and full of perplexity, foreboding and a sense of sin, gloom and wrath, he cries out, What shall I do! This is his first exclamation. He has not as yet advanced so far as to say, What shall I do to be saved? And now for some days the solemnity, and burden, and distress of his spirit increases; his unconverted friends see that he is "becoming serious;" they think it is some distemper of the mind or animal spirits; they hope he may sleep it away; they chide, neglect, deride him; carnal physic for a sick soul, as Bunyan describes it in the margin, is administered. But nothing answers. The sense of his mortal disease and danger, the painful sense of sin, and of what is to come on account of it, increases. Not even his wife and sweet babes can do any thing for him, but only add to his misery in a sense of their danger as well as his own. He pities and prays for those who deride him, and spends much solitary time in reading and praying. He looks this way and that way, as if he would run, and cries out in the anguish of his wounded spirit, What shall I do to be saved? This is the first stage of genuine conviction. "I perceive by the book in my hand, that