The newspapers would be the pillory of our day,
were it not that, on the whole, the newspaper press is conducted with
such scrupulous fairness and with a love of truth and justice such that
no man need shrink from the path of duty through fear of insult and
injury.
But it is time to come to the encounter between Shame and Faithful in the
Valley of Humiliation. Shame, properly speaking, is not one of our
Bunyan gallery of portraits at all. Shame, at best, is but a kind of
secondary character in this dramatic book. We do not meet with Shame
directly; we only hear about him through the report of Faithful. That
first-class pilgrim was almost overcome of Shame, so hot was their
encounter; and it is the extraordinarily feeling, graphic, and realistic
account of their encounter that Faithful gives us that has led me to take
up Shame for our reproof and correction to-night.
Religion altogether, but especially all personal religion, said Shame to
Faithful, is an unmanly business. There is a certain touch of smallness
and pitifulness, he said, in all religion, but especially in experimental
religion.
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