The life-history of many of the poets is inexpressibly sad.  Chatterton, Shelley, Byron, Poe—­their very names call up facts which those who admire their genius would gladly conceal.  Many artists are in the same category.  It explains nothing to ascribe their moral pollution to their finer sensibilities, for finer sensibilities ought to be attended by untarnished characters.  It is, perhaps, best not even to mention their names lest, thereby, we dull the appreciation of noble masterpieces which represent the better moods of the men.  One of imperial genius was a slave to wine, another to lust, another was too envious to detect any merit in the work of others of his craft.  There are statesmen of whose achievements we speak, but never of the men themselves; and there have been ministers of the Gospel, unhappily not a few, who have suddenly disappeared and been heard of no more.  Into a kindly oblivion they have gone, and that is all that any one needs to know.  What do such facts signify?  That many, or most, of these men have been essentially and totally bad?  Or that they are moral failures?  They signify only that they have not yet risen above the hindrances which they have found in their pathways.  The world knows of the temporary obscuration of a fair fame; it does not see the grief, the tears, the gradual gathering of the energies for a new assault upon the obstacles in the road; and it does not see how tenderly, but faithfully, Providence, through nature, is dealing with them.  Some time they will be brought to themselves—­The Eternal Goodness is the pledge of that.  It is not with this unseen and beneficent ministry of restoration, however, that I am now dealing, but with the awful wrecks and failures which are so common in human history, and concerning which most men know something in their own experiences.  How shall they be explained?—­since to evade them is impossible.  In other words when a man is awake, when he feels that he is in a moral order, is free, and hears the call of his destiny, why is his progress so slow and difficult?  No one has ever delineated this period in the soul’s growth with greater vividness than Bunyan.  The Valley of Humiliation, the Slough of Despond, Giant Despair, Doubting Castle are all pictures of human life taken with photographic accuracy.  What are some of these hindrances?

The soul is free, but its abode is in a limited body.  The movement of the soul is swift and unconstrained as thought.  It is not limited by time.  It may project itself a thousand years into the future or travel a thousand years into the past; but it dwells in the body and is more or less restrained by it.  Bodily limitation narrows experience and compels ignorance.  It makes large acquaintance impossible.  The flowers beneath the ice on the Alps are small; the flowers of the tropics have the proportions of trees.  Thus environment modifies growth.  The body cannot put fetters on the will, but it may hold in captivity