Elders with golden
crowns, and holy virgins with golden harps, and all clothed with
immortality as with a garment.' 'The hearing of all this,' cried
Pliable, 'is enough to ravish one's heart.' 'An overly faith,' says old
Thomas Shepard, 'is easily wrought.'
As if the text itself was not graphic enough, Bunyan's racy, humorous,
pathetic style overflows the text and enriches the very margins of his
pages, as every possessor of a good edition of _The Pilgrim_ knows.
'Christian and Obstinate pull for Pliable's soul' is the eloquent summary
set down on the side of the sufficiently eloquent page. As the picture
of a man's soul being pulled for rises before my mind, I can think of no
better companion picture to that of Pliable than that of poor, hard-beset
Brodie of Brodie, as he lets us see the pull for his soul in the honest
pages of his inward diary. Under the head of 'Pliable' in my Bunyan note-
book I find a crowd of references to Brodie; and if only to illustrate
our author's marginal note, I shall transcribe one or two of them. 'The
writer of this diary desires to be cast down under the facileness and
plausibleness of his nature, by which he labours to please men more than
God, and whence it comes that the wicked speak good of him .
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