'
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.
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