And, then, over and above
that, as often as a boy reads Giant Despair and his dungeon to his father
and mother, the two hearers are like Christian and Hopeful when the
Delectable shepherds showed them what had happened to some who once went
in at By-Path stile: the two pilgrims looked one upon another with tears
gushing out, but yet said nothing to the shepherds.
John Bunyan's own experience enters deeply into these terrible pages. In
composing these terrible pages, Bunyan writes straight and bold out of
his own heart and conscience. The black and bitter essence of a whole
black and bitter volume is crushed into these four or five bitter pages.
Last week I went over _Grace Abounding_ again, and marked the passages in
which its author describes his own experiences of doubt, diffidence, and
despair, till I gave over counting the passages, they are so many. I had
intended to illustrate the passage before us to-night out of the kindred
materials that I knew were so abundant in Bunyan's terrible
autobiography, but I had to give up that idea. It would have taken two
or three lectures to itself to tell all that Bunyan suffered all his life
long from an easily-wounded spirit.
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