gave him his hand and set him upon sound ground.  Christiana, again, and Mercy and the boys found the slough in a far worse condition than it had ever been found before.  And the reason was not that the country that drained into the slough was worse, but that those who had the mending of the slough and the keeping in repair of the steps had so bungled their work that they had marred the way instead of mending it.  At the same time, by the tact and good sense of Mercy, the whole party got over, Mercy remarking to the mother of the boys, that if she had as good ground to hope for a loving reception at the gate as Christiana had, no slough of despond would discourage her, she said.  To which the older woman made the characteristic reply:  ’You know your sore and I know mine, and we shall both have enough evil to face before we come to our journey’s end.’

Now, I do not for a moment suppose that there is any one here who can need to be told what the Slough of Despond in reality is.  Indeed, its very name sufficiently declares it.  But if any one should still be at a loss to understand this terrible experience of all the pilgrims, the explanation offered by the good man who gave Christian his hand may here be repeated.  ‘This miry slough,’ he said, ’is such a place as cannot be mended.  This slough is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction of sin doth continually run, and therefore it is called by the name of Despond, for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition there ariseth in his soul many fears and doubts and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place, and this is the reason of the badness of the ground.’  That is the parable, with its interpretation; but there is a passage in Grace Abounding which is no parable, and which may even better than this so pictorial slough describe some men’s condition here.  ’My original and inward pollution,’ says Bunyan himself in his autobiography, ’that, that was my plague and my affliction; that, I say, at a dreadful rate was always putting itself forth within me; that I had the guilt of to amazement; by reason of that I was more loathsome in my own eyes than a toad; and I thought I was so in God’s eyes also.  Sin and corruption would bubble up out of my heart as naturally as water bubbles up out of a fountain.  I thought now that every one had a better heart than I had.  I could have changed heart with anybody.  I thought none but the devil himself could equalise me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind.  I fell, therefore, at the sight of my own vileness, deeply into despair, for I concluded that this condition in which I was in could not stand with a life of grace.  Sure, thought I, I am forsaken of God; sure I am given up to the devil, and to a reprobate mind.’

   ’Let no man, then, count me a fable maker,
   Nor made my name and credit a partaker
   Of their derision:  what is here in view,
   Of mine own knowledge I dare say is true.’