pilgrim way.  By our long and close study of the word of God, if that is indeed our case; by divine truth dwelling richly and experimentally in our hearts; and by a hidden life that is its own witness, and which always has the Holy Spirit’s seal set upon it that we are the children of God,—­all that keeps, and is designed by God to keep our hearts up amid the labours and the faintings, the hopes and the fears of the spiritual life.  All that keeps us at the least and the worst above famine and beggary.  Now, the whole pity with Little-Faith was, that though he was not a bad man, yet he never, even at his best days, had much of those things that make a good and well-furnished pilgrim; and what little he had he had now clean lost.  He had never been much a reader of his Bible; he had never sat over it as other men sat over their news-letters and their romances.  He had never had much taste or talent for spiritual books of any kind.  He was a good sort of man, but he was not exactly the manner of man on whose broken heart the Holy Ghost sets the broad seal of heaven.  But for his dreadful misadventure, he might have plodded on, a decent, humdrum, commonplace, everyday kind of pilgrim; but when that catastrophe fell on him he had nothing to fall back upon.  The secret ways of faith and love and hope were wholly unknown to him.  He had no practice in importunate prayer.  He had never prayed a whole night all his life.  He had never needed to do so.  For were we not told when we first met him what a blameless and pure and true and good man he had always been?  He did not know how to find his way about in his Bible; and as for the maps and guide-books that some pilgrims never let out of their hand, even when he had some spending money about him, he never laid it out that way.  And a more helpless pilgrim than Little-Faith was all the rest of the way you never saw.  He was forced to beg as he went, says his historian.  That is to say, he had to lean upon and look to wiser and better-furnished men than himself.  He had to share their meals, look to them to pay his bills, keep close to their company, walk in their foot-prints, and at night borrow their oil, and it was only in this poor dependent way that Little-Faith managed to struggle on to the end of his dim and joyless journey.

It would have been far more becoming and far more profitable if Christian and Hopeful, instead of falling out of temper and calling one another bad names over the sad case of Little-Faith, had tried to tell one another why that unhappy pilgrim’s faith was so small, and how both their own faith and his might from that day have been made more.  Hopeful, for some reason or other, was in a rude and boastful mood of mind that day, and Christian was more tart and snappish than we have ever before seen him; and, altogether, the opportunity of learning something useful out of Little-Faith’s story has been all but lost to us.  But, now, since there are so many of Little-Faith’s kindred among ourselves—­so many good men who are either half asleep in their religious life or are begging their way from door to door—­let them be told, in closing, one or two out of many other ways in which their too little faith may possibly be made stronger and more fruitful.