And after it is built, the very tower itself is
soon stained and blinded with the scudding slime. Where are your eyes,
and full of what? Do you not see sloughs full of sinking men at your
very door; ay, and inside of your best built and best kept house? Your
very next neighbour; nay, your own flesh and blood, if they have nothing
else of Greatheart's most troublesome pilgrim about them, have at least
this, that they carry about a slough with them in their own mind and in
their own heart. Have you only henceforth a heart and a hand to help,
and see if hundreds of sinking hearts do not cry out your name, and
hundreds of slimy hands grasp at your stretched-out arm. Sloughs of all
kinds of vice, open and secret; sloughs of poverty, sloughs of youthful
ignorance, temptation, and transgression; sloughs of inward gloom, family
disquiet and dispute; lonely grief; all manner of sloughs, deep and miry,
where no man would suspect them. And how good, how like Christ Himself,
and how well-pleasing to Him to lay down steps for such sliding feet, and
to lift out another and another human soul upon sound and solid ground.
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