Those who have ears to hear
such things hear every day one man after another falling through lust or
pride or malice or idleness or infidelity, till there is none to answer.
4. 'All hope abandon' was the writing that Dante read over the door of
hell. And the two prisoners all but abandoned all hope when they found
themselves in Giant Despair's dungeon. Only, Christian, the elder man,
had the most distress because their being where they now were lay mostly
at his door. All this part of the history also is written in Bunyan's
very heart's blood. 'I found it hard work,' he tells us of himself, 'to
pray to God because despair was swallowing me up. I thought I was as
with a tempest driven away from God. About this time I did light on that
dreadful story of that miserable mortal, Francis Spira, a book that was
to my troubled spirit as salt when rubbed into a fresh wound; every groan
of that man with all the rest of his actions in his dolours, as his
tears, his prayers, his gnashing of teeth, his wringing of hands, was as
knives and daggers in my soul, especially that sentence of his was
frightful to me: "Man knows the beginning of sin, but who bounds the
issues thereof?"' We never read anything like Spira's experience and
_Grace Abounding_ and Giant Despair's dungeon in the books of our day.
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