When, all at once, the three men come on the
hill Difficulty. A severe act of self-denial has to be done at this
point of their pilgrimage. A proud heart has to be humbled to the dust.
A second, a third, a tenth place has to be taken in the praise of men. An
outbreak of anger and wrath has to be kept under for hours and days. A
great injury, a scandalous case of ingratitude, has to be forgiven and
forgotten; in short, as Rutherford says, an
impossible-to-be-counterfeited spiritual grace has to be put into its
severest and sorest exercise; and the result was--what we know. Our
pilgrim went and drank of the spring that always runs at the bottom of
the hill Difficulty, and thus refreshed himself against that hill; while
Formalist took the one low road, and Hypocrisy the other, which led him
into a wide field full of dark mountains, where he stumbled and fell and
rose no more. When, after his visit to the spring, Christian began to go
up the hill, saying:
'This hill, though high, I covet to ascend;
The difficulty will not me offend;
For I perceive the way to life lies here;
Come, pluck up heart; let's neither faint nor fear;
Better, though difficult, the right way to go,
Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.
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