for his exhortation, and told him withal that they would have him speak further to them about the dangers of the way, I said at last to myself, that the thanks of one true Christian saved in anything and in any measure from the gun of the devil are far more to be attended to by a minister than the blame and the neglect of a hundred who do not know their hour of temptation and will not be told it.  And so I took my pen and set down some similarities between Vanity Fair and the approaching election, with some lessons to those who are not altogether beyond being taught.

Well, then, in the first place, the only way to the Celestial City ran through Vanity Fair; by no possibility could the advancing pilgrims escape the temptations and the dangers of the fatal fair.  He that will go to the Celestial City and yet not go through Vanity Fair must needs go out of the world.  And so it is with the temptations and trials of the next ten days.  We cannot get past them.  They are laid down right across our way.  And to many men now in this house the next ten days will be a time of simply terrible temptation.  If I had been quite sure that all my people saw that and felt that, I would not have introduced here to-night what some of them, judging too hastily, will certainly call this so secular and unseemly subject.  But I am so afraid that many not untrue, and in other things most earnest men amongst us, do not yet know sufficiently the weakness and the evil of their own hearts, that I wish much, if they will allow me, to put them on their guard. ‘’Tis hard,’ said Contrite, who was a householder and had a vote in the town of Vanity, ’’tis hard keeping our hearts and our spirits in any good order when we are in a cumbered condition.  And you may be sure that we are full of hurry at fair-time.  He that lives in such a place as this is, and that has to do with such as we have to do with, has need of an item to caution him to take heed every hour of the day.’  Now, if all my people, and all this day’s communicants, were only contrite enough, I would leave them to the hurry of the approaching election with much more comfort.  But as it is, I wish to give them such an item as I am able to caution them for the next ten days.  Let them know, then, that their way for the next fortnight lies, I will not say through a fair of jugglings and cheatings, carried on by apes and knaves, but, to speak without figure, their way certainly lies through what will be to many of them a season of the greatest temptation to the very worst of all possible sins—­to anger and bitterness and ill-will; to no end of evil-thinking and evil-speaking; to the breaking up of lifelong friendships; and to widespread and lasting damage to the cause of Christ, which is the cause of truth and love, meekness and a heavenly mind.  Now, amid all that, as Evangelist said to the two pilgrims, look well to your own hearts.  Let none of all these evil things enter your heart from the outside, and let none of all these evil things come out of your hearts from the inside.  Set your faces like a flint from the beginning against all evil-speaking and evil-thinking.  Let your own election to the kingdom of heaven be always before you, and walk worthy of it; and amid all the hurry of things seen and temporal, believe steadfastly concerning the things that are eternal, and walk worthy of them.