all the time.  Why, I could compose all his past life myself now.  I have his father and his mother and his nurse at my finger-ends now.  This poor pilgrim—­unless it would be impertinence to call him poor any more—­had no limbs to be called limbs.  Such limbs as he had were only an encumbrance to this unique pedestrian.  All the limbs he had were in his crutches.  He had not one atom of strength to lean upon apart from his crutches.  A bone, a muscle, a tendon, a sinew, may be ill-nourished, undeveloped, green, and unknit, but, at the worst, they are inside of a man and they are his own.  But a crutch, of however good wood it may be made, and however good a lame man may be at using it—­still, a crutch at its best is but an outside additament; it is not really and originally a part of a man’s very self at all.  And yet a lame man is not himself without his crutch.  Other men do not need to give a moment’s forethought when they wish to rise up to walk, or to run, or to leap, or to dance.  But the lame man has to wait till his crutches are brought to him; and then, after slowly and painfully hoisting himself up upon his crutches, with great labour, he at last takes the road.  Mr. Ready-to-halt, then, is a man of God; but he is one of those men of God who have no godliness within themselves.  He has no inward graces.  He has no past experiences.  He has no attainments that he can for one safe moment take his stand upon, or even partly lean upon.  Mr. Ready-to-halt is absolutely and always dependent upon the promises.  The promises of God in Holy Scripture are this man’s very life.  All his religion stands in the promises.  Take away the promises, and Mr. Ready-to-halt is a heap of heaving rags on the roadside.  He cannot take a single step unless upon a promise.  But, at the same time, give Mr. Ready-to-halt a promise in his hand and he will wade the Slough upon it, and scale up and slide down the Hill Difficulty upon it, and fight a lion, and even brain Beelzebub with it, till he will with a grudge and a doubt exchange it even for the chariots and the horses that wait him at the river.  What a delight our Lord would have taken in Mr. Ready-to-halt had He come across him on His way to the passover!  How He would have given Mr. Ready-to-halt His arm; how He would have made Himself late by walking with him, and would still have waited for him!  Nay, had that been a day of chap-books in carpenters’ shops and on the village stalls, how He would have had Mr. Ready-to-halt’s story by heart had any brass-worker in Galilee told the history!  Our Lord was within an inch of telling that story Himself, when He showed Thomas His hands and His side.  And at another time and in another place we might well have had Mr. Ready-to-halt as one more of our Lord’s parables for the common people.  Only, He left the delight and the reward of drawing out this parable to one He already saw and dearly loved in a far-off island of the sea, the Puritan tinker of Evangelical England.