be put into a way to be rid of my heavy burden.’  ’Hast thou a wife and children?’ Yes; he is ashamed to say that he has.  But he confesses that he cannot to-day take the pleasure in them that he used to do.  Since his sin so came upon him, he is sometimes as if he had neither wife nor child nor a house over his head.  John Bunyan was of Samuel Rutherford’s terrible experience,—­that our sins and our sinfulness poison all our best enjoyments.  We do not hear much of Rutherford’s wife and children, and that, no doubt, for the sufficient reason that he gives us in his so open-minded letter.  But Bunyan laments over his blind child with a lament worthy to stand beside the lament of David over Absalom, and again over Saul and Jonathan at Mount Gilboa.  At the same time, John Bunyan often felt sore and sad at heart that he could not love and give all his heart to his wife and children as they deserved to be loved and to have all his heart.  He often felt guilty as he looked on them and knew in himself that they did not have in him such a father as, God knew, he wished he was, or ever in this world could hope to be.  ‘Yes,’ he said, ’but I cannot take the pleasure in them that I would.  I am sometimes as if I had none.  My sin sometimes drives me like a man bereft of his reason and clean demented.’  ’Who bid thee go this way to be rid of thy burden?  I beshrew him for his counsel.  There is not a more troublesome and dangerous way in the world than this is to which he hath directed thee.  And besides, though I used to have some of the same burden when I was young, not since I settled in that town,’ pointing to the town of Carnal-Policy over the plain, ’have I been at any time troubled in that way.’  And then he went on to describe and denounce the way to the Celestial City, and he did it like a man who had been all over it, and had come back again.  His alarming description of the upward way reads to us like a page out of Job, or Jeremiah, or David, or Paul.  ‘Hear me,’ he says, ’for I am older than thou.  Thou art like to meet with in the way which thou goest wearisomeness, painfulness, hunger, perils, nakedness, sword, lions, dragons, darkness, and in a word, death, and what not.’  You would think that you were reading the eighth of the Romans at the thirty-fifth verse; only Mr. Worldly-Wiseman does not go on to finish the chapter.  He does not go on to add, ’I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.’  No; Worldly-Wiseman never reads the Romans, and he never hears a sermon on that chapter when he goes to church.