more remorseful eternity on it than will the other.  No man among you, minister or no minister, good minister or bad, will be able to sin with impunity.  But he who sins on and on after good preaching will be beaten with many stripes.  ’Woe unto thee, Chorazin!  Woe unto thee, Bethsaida!  For if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.  But I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment than for you.’  ‘Thou that hast knowledge,’ says a powerful old preacher, ’canst not sin so cheap as another that is ignorant.  Places of much knowledge’—­he was preaching in the university pulpit of Oxford—­’and plentiful in the means of grace are dear places for a man to sin in.  To be drunken or unclean after a powerful sermon, and after the Holy Ghost has enlightened thee, is more than to have so sinned twenty times before.  Thou mightest have sinned ten times more and been damned less.  For does not Jesus Christ the Judge say to thee, This is thy condemnation, that so much light has come to thee?’ And, taking the then way of execution as a sufficiently awful illustration, the old Oxford Puritan goes on to say that to sin against light is the highest step of the ladder before turning off.  And, again, that if there are worms in hell that die not, it is surely gospel light that breeds them.

EXPERIENCE

   ’My heart had great experience.’—­The Preacher.

   ‘I will give them pastors after Mine own heart.’

Experience, the excellent shepherd of the Delectable Mountains, had a brother in the army, and he was an equally excellent soldier.  The two brothers—­they were twin-brothers—­had been brought up together till they were grown-up men in the same town of Mansoul.  All the Experience family, indeed, had from time immemorial hailed from that populous and important town, and their family tree ran away back beyond the oldest extant history.  The two brothers, while in all other things as like as two twin-brothers could be, at the same time very early in life began to exhibit very different talents and tastes and dispositions; till, when we meet with them in their full manhood, the one is a soldier in the army and the other a shepherd on the Delectable Mountains.  The soldier-brother is thus described in one of the military histories of his day:  ’A man of conduct and of valour, and a person prudent in matters.  A comely person, moreover, well-spoken in negotiations, and very successful in undertakings.  His colours were the white colours of Mansoul and his scutcheon was the dead lion and the dead bear.’