But it is time to come to the encounter between Shame and Faithful in the Valley of Humiliation.  Shame, properly speaking, is not one of our Bunyan gallery of portraits at all.  Shame, at best, is but a kind of secondary character in this dramatic book.  We do not meet with Shame directly; we only hear about him through the report of Faithful.  That first-class pilgrim was almost overcome of Shame, so hot was their encounter; and it is the extraordinarily feeling, graphic, and realistic account of their encounter that Faithful gives us that has led me to take up Shame for our reproof and correction to-night.

Religion altogether, but especially all personal religion, said Shame to Faithful, is an unmanly business.  There is a certain touch of smallness and pitifulness, he said, in all religion, but especially in experimental religion.  It brings a man into junctures and into companionships, and it puts offices and endurances upon one such as try a man if he has any greatness of spirit about him at all.  This life on which you are entering, said Shame, will cost you many a blush before you are done with it.  You will lay yourself open to many a scoff.  The Puritan religion, and all the ways of that religious fraternity, are peculiarly open to the shafts of ridicule.  Now, all that was quite true.  There was no denying the truth of what Shame said.  And Faithful felt the truth of it all, and felt it most keenly, as he confessed to Christian.  The blood came into my face as the fellow spake, and what he said for a time almost beat me out of the upward way altogether.  But in this dilemma also all true Christians can fall back, as Faithful fell back, upon the example of their Master.  In this as in every other experience of temptation and endurance, our Lord is the forerunner and the example of His people.  Our Lord was in all points tempted like as we are, and among all His other temptations He was tempted to be ashamed of His work on earth and of the life and the death His work led Him into.  He must have often felt ashamed at the treatment He received during His life of humiliation, as it is well called; and He must often have felt ashamed of His disciples:  but all that is blotted out by the crowning shame of the cross.  We hang our worst criminals rather than behead or shoot them, in order to heap up the utmost possible shame and disgrace upon them, as well as to execute justice upon them.  And what the hangman’s rope is in our day, all that the cross was in our Lord’s day.  And, then, as if the cross itself was not shame enough, all the circumstances connected with His cross were planned and carried out so as to heap the utmost possible shame and humiliation upon His head.  Our prison warders have to watch the murderers in their cells night and day, lest they should take their own life in order to escape the hangman’s rope; but our Lord, keenly as He felt His coming shame, said to His horrified disciples, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, when the Son of Man