The breadth of John Bunyan’s mind, the largeness of his heart, and the tolerance of his temper all come excellently out in his fine portrait of Faithful.  New beginners in personal religion, when they first take up The Pilgrim’s Progress in earnest, always try to find out something in themselves that shall somewhat correspond to the recorded experience of Christian, the chief pilgrim.  And they are afraid that all is not right with them unless they, like him, have had, to begin with, a heavy burden on their back.  They look for something in their religious life that shall answer to the Slough of Despond also, to the Hill Difficulty, to the House Beautiful, and, especially and indispensably, to the place somewhat ascending with a cross upon it and an open sepulchre beneath it.  And because they cannot always find all these things in themselves in the exact order and in the full power in which they are told of Christian in Bunyan’s book, they begin to have doubts about themselves as to whether they are true pilgrims at all.  But here is Faithful, with whom Christian held such sweet and confidential discourse, and yet he had come through not a single one of all these things.  The two pilgrims had come from the same City of Destruction indeed, and they had met at the gate of Vanity and passed through Vanity Fair together, but, till they embraced one another again in the Celestial City, that was absolutely all the experience they had in common.  Faithful had never had any such burden on his back as that was which had for so long crushed Christian to the earth.  And the all but complete absence of such a burden may have helped to let Faithful get over the Slough of Despond dry shod.  He had the good lot to escape Sinai also and the Hill Difficulty, and his passing by the House Beautiful and not making the acquaintance of Discretion and Prudence and Charity may have had something to do with the fact that one named Wanton had like to have done him such a mischief.  His remarkable experiences, however, with Adam the First, with Moses, and then with the Man with holes in His hands, all that makes up a page in Faithful’s autobiography we could ill have spared.  His encounter with Shame also, and soon afterwards with Talkative, are classical passages in his so individual history.  Altogether, it would be almost impossible for us to imagine two pilgrims talking so heartily together, and yet so completely unlike one another.  A very important lesson surely as to how we should abstain from measuring other men by ourselves, as well as ourselves by other men; an excellent lesson also as to how we should learn to allow for all possible varieties among good men, both in their opinions, their experiences, and their attainments.  True Puritan as the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress is, he is no Procrustes.  He does not cut down all his pilgrims to one size, nor does he clip them all into one pattern.  They are all thinking men, but they are not all men of one way of thinking.  John Bunyan is as fresh as Nature herself, and as free and full as Holy Scripture herself in the variety, in the individuality, and even in the idiosyncrasy of his spiritual portrait gallery.