IGNORANCE

   “I was alive without the law once.”—­Paul.

   “I was now a brisk talker also myself in the matter of
   religion.”—­Bunyan.

This is a new kind of pilgrim.  There are not many pilgrims like this bright brisk youth.  A few more young gentlemen like this, and the pilgrimage way would positively soon become fashionable and popular, and be the thing to do.  Had you met with this young gentleman in society, had you noticed him beginning to come about your church, you would have lost no time in finding out who he was.  I can well believe it, you would have replied.  Indeed, I felt sure of it.  I must ask him to the house.  I was quite struck with his appearance and his manners.  Yes; ask him at once to your house; show him some pointed attentions and you will never regret it.  For if he goes to the bar and works even decently at his cases, he will be first a sheriff and then a judge in no time.  If he should take to politics, he will be an under-secretary before his first parliament is out.  And if he takes to the church, which is not at all unlikely, our West-end congregations will all be competing for him as their junior colleague; and, if he elects either of our Established churches to exercise his profession in it, he will have dined with Her Majesty while half of his class-fellows are still half-starved probationers.  Society fathers will point him out with anger to their unsuccessful sons, and society mothers will smile under their eyelids as they see him hanging over their daughters.

Well, as this handsome and well-appointed youth stepped out of his own neat little lane into the rough road on which our two pilgrims were staggering upward, he felt somewhat ashamed to be seen in their company.  And I do not wonder.  For a greater contrast you would not have seen on any road in all that country that day.  He was at your very first sight of him a gentleman and the son of a gentleman.  A little over-dressed perhaps; as, also, a little lofty to the two rather battered but otherwise decent enough men who, being so much older than he, took the liberty of first accosting him.  “Brisk” is his biographer’s description of him.  Feather-headed, flippant, and almost impudent, you might have been tempted to say of him had you joined the little party at that moment.  But those two tumbled, broken-winded, and, indeed, broken-hearted old men had been, as an old author says, so emptied from vessel to vessel—­they had had a life of such sloughs and stiff climbs—­they had been in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness so often—­that it was no wonder that their dandiacal companion walked on a little ahead of them.  ‘Gentlemen,’ his fine clothes and his cane and his head in the air all said to his two somewhat disreputable-looking fellow-travellers,—­“Gentlemen, you be utter strangers to me:  I know you not.  And, besides, I take my pleasure in walking alone,