‘Set your faces like a flint,’ Evangelist proceeds.  How little like all that you hear in the counsels of the pulpit to young women coming out and to young men entering into business life.  I am convinced that if we ministers were more direct and plain-spoken to such persons at such times; if we, like Bunyan, told them plainly what kind of a world it is they are coming out to buy and sell in, and what its merchandise and its prices are; if our people would let us so preach to their sons and daughters, I feel sure far fewer young communicants would make shipwreck, and far fewer grey heads would go down with sorrow to the grave.  ’Be not afraid,’ said Robert Hall in his charge to a young minister, ’of devoting whole sermons to particular parts of moral conduct and religious duty.  It is impossible to give right views of them unless you dissect characters and describe particular virtues and vices.  The works of the flesh and the fruits of the Spirit must be distinctly pointed out.  To preach against sin in general without descending to particulars may lead many to complain of the evil of their hearts, while at the same time they are awfully inattentive to the evil of their conduct.’  Take Evangelist’s noble counsels at the gate of Vanity Fair, and then take John Bunyan’s masterly description of the Fair itself, with all that is bought and sold in it, and you will have a lesson in evangelical preaching that the evangelical pulpit needed in Bunyan’s day, in Robert Hall’s day, and not less in our own.

’My sons, you have heard the truth of the gospel, that you must through many tribulations enter the Kingdom of God.  When, therefore, you are come to the Fair and shall find fulfilled what I have here related, then remember your friend; quit yourselves like men, and commit the keeping of your souls to your God in well-doing as unto a faithful Creator.’

OBSTINATE

   ’Be ye not as the mule.’—­David.

Little Obstinate was born and brought up in the City of Destruction.  His father was old Spare-the-Rod, and his mother’s name was Spoil-the-Child.  Little Obstinate was the only child of his parents; he was born when they were no longer young, and they doted on their only child, and gave him his own way in everything.  Everything he asked for he got, and if he did not immediately get it you would have heard his screams and his kicks three doors off.  His parents were not in themselves bad people, but, if Solomon speaks true, they hated their child, for they gave him all his own way in everything, and nothing would ever make them say no to him, or lift up the rod when he said no to them.  When the Scriptures, in their pedagogical parts, speak so often about the rod, they do not necessarily mean a rod of iron or even of wood.  There are other ways of teaching an obstinate child than the way that Gideon took with the men of Succoth when he taught them with the thorns