It is not so much his small mind and his weak understanding that is the
fatal danger of their possessor, it is his imbecile way of treating his
small mind. In our experience of him we cannot get him, all we can do,
to read an instructive book. We cannot get him to attend our young men's
class with all the baits and traps we can set for him. Where does he
spend his Sabbath-day and week-day evenings? We cannot find out until we
hear some distressing thing about him, that, ten to one, he would have
escaped had he been a reader of good books, or a student with us, say, of
Dante and Bunyan and Rutherford, and a companion of those young men and
young women who talk about and follow such intellectual tastes and
pursuits. Now, if you are such a young man or young woman as that, or
such an old man or old woman, you will not be able to understand what in
the world Bunyan can mean by saying that he saw you in his dream fast
asleep in a bottom with irons on your heels. No; for to understand the
_Pilgrim's Progress_, beyond a nursery and five-year-old understanding of
it, you must have worked and studied and suffered your way out of your
mental and spiritual imbecility.
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