Sometimes, as with Christian at the slough, a man’s way in life is all slashed up into sudden ditches and pitfalls out of the sins of his youth.  His sins, by God’s grace, find him out, and under their arrest and overthrow he begins to seek his way to a better life and a better world; and then both the burden and the slough have their explanation and fulfilment in his own life every day.  But it is even more dreadful than a slough in a man’s way to have a slough in his mind, as both Bunyan himself and Mr. Fearing, his exquisite creation, had.  After the awful-enough slough, filled with the guilt and fear of actual sin, had been bridged and crossed and left behind, a still worse slough of inward corruption and pollution rose up in John Bunyan’s soul and threatened to engulf him altogether.  So terrible to Bunyan was this experience, that he has not thought it possible to make a parable of it, and so put it into the Pilgrim; he has kept it rather for the plain, direct, unpictured, personal testimony of the Grace Abounding.  I do not know another passage anywhere to compare with the eighty-fourth paragraph of Grace Abounding for hope and encouragement to a great inward sinner under a great inward sanctification.  I commend that powerful passage to the appropriation of any man here who may have stuck fast in the Slough of Despond to-day, and who could not on that account come to the Lord’s Table.  Let him still struggle out at the side of the slough farthest from his own house, and to-night, who can tell, Help may come and give that man his hand.  When the Slough of Despond is drained, and its bottom laid bare, what a find of all kinds of precious treasures shall be laid bare!  Will you be able to lay claim to any of it when the long-lost treasure-trove is distributed by command of the King to its rightful owners?

‘What are you doing there?’ the man whose name was Help demanded of Christian, as he still wallowed and plunged to the hither side of the slough, ‘and why did you not look for the steps?’ And so saying he set Christian’s feet upon sound ground again, and showed him the nearest way to the gate.  Help is one of the King’s officers who are planted all along the way to the Celestial City, in order to assist and counsel all pilgrims.  Evangelist was one of those officers; this Help is another; Goodwill will be another, unless, indeed, he is more than a mere officer; Interpreter will be another, and Greatheart, and so on.  All these are preachers and pastors and evangelists who correspond to all those names and all their offices.  Only some unhappy preachers are better at pushing poor pilgrims into the slough, and pushing them down to the bottom of it, than they are at helping a sinking pilgrim out; while some other more happy preachers and pastors have their manses built at the hither side of the slough and do nothing else all their days but help pilgrims out of their slough and direct them to the gate.  And then