3.  The two transgressors had not gone far on their own way when night came on and with the night a very great darkness.  But what soon added to the horror of their condition was that they heard a man fall into a deep pit right before them, and it sounded to them as if he was dashed to pieces by his fall.  So they called to know the matter, but there was none to answer, only they heard a groaning.  Then said Hopeful:  Where are we now?  Then was his fellow silent, as mistrusting that he had led Hopeful out of the way.  Now, all that also is true to the very life, and has been taken down by Bunyan from the very life.  We have all heard men falling and heard them groaning just a little before us after we had left the strait road.  They had just gone a little farther wrong than we had as yet gone,—­just a very little farther; in some cases, indeed, not so far, when they fell and were dashed to pieces with their fall.  It was well for us at that dreadful moment that we heard the same voice saying to us for our encouragement as said to the two trembling transgressors:  ’Let thine heart be toward the highway, even the way that thou wentest; turn again.’  Now, what is it in which you are at this moment going off the right road?  What is that life of disobedience or self-indulgence that you are just entering on?  Keep your ears open and you will hear hundreds of men and women falling and being dashed to pieces before you and all around you.  Are you falling of late too much under the power of your bodily appetites?  It is not one man, nor two, well known to you, who have fallen never to rise again out of that horrible pit.  Are you well enough aware that you are being led into bad company?  Or, is your companion, who is not a bad man in anything else, leading you, in this and in that, into what at any rate is bad for you?  You will soon, unless you cut off your companion like a right hand, be found saying with misguided and overruled Hopeful:  Oh that I had kept me to my right way!  And so on in all manner of sin and trespass.  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