or stolen something, or destroyed something.  To pray with him at such times, and to pray with him properly, and, if you feel able to do it, and are led to do it, to tell him something after the prayer about yourself, and your own not-yet-forgotten boyhood, and your father; it makes a fine time to mix talk and prayer together in that way.  Charity is not easily provoked, but the longer she lives and keeps the table in the House Beautiful the more she is provoked to think that there is far too little prayer among pilgrims; far too little of all kinds of prayer, but especially prayer with and for their children.  But hard as it was to tell all the truth at that moment about Christian’s past walk in his house at home, yet he was able with the simple truth to say that he had indeed prayed both with and for his children, and that, as they knew and could not but remember, not seldom.  Yes, he said, I did sometimes so pray with my boys, and that too, as you may believe, with much affection, for you must think that my four boys were all very dear to me.  And it is my firm belief that all that good man’s boys will come right yet:  Matthew and Joseph and James and Samuel and all.  ‘With much affection.’  I like that.  I have unbounded faith in those prayers, both for and with, in which there is much affection.  It is want of affection, and want of imagination, that shipwrecks so many of our prayers.  But this man’s prayers had both these elements of sure success in them, and they must come at last to harbour.  At that one word ‘with much affection,’ this man’s closet door flies open and I see the old pilgrim first alone, and then with his arms round his eldest son’s neck, and both father and son weeping together till they are ashamed to appear at supper till they have washed their faces and got their most smiling and everyday looks put on again.  You just wait and see if Matthew and all the four boys down to the last do not escape into the Celestial City before the gate is shut.  And when it is asked, Who are these and whence came they? listen to their song and you will hear those four happy children saying that their father, when they were yet boys, both talked with them and prayed for and with them with so much affection that therefore they are before the throne.

Why, then, with such a father and with such makable boys, why was this household brought so near everlasting shipwreck?  It was the mother that did it.  In one word, it was the wife and the mother that did it.  It was the mistress of the house who wrought the mischief here.  She was a poor woman, she was a poor man’s wife, and one would have thought that she had little enough temptation to harm upon this present world.  But there it was, she did hang upon it as much as if she had been the mother of the finest daughters and the most promising boys in all the town.  Things like this were from time to time reported to her by her neighbours.  One fine lady had been heard to say that she would