feel or know or believe that it is there.  Some sins again in themselves, and by reason of several aggravations, are far more heavy to bear than others, and by some sinners than others.  I was reading Bishop Andrewes to myself last night and came upon this pertinent passage.  “Sin:  its measure, its harm, its scandal.  Its quality:  how often—­how long.  The person by whom:  his age, condition, state, enlightenment.  Its manner, motive, time, and place.  The folly of it, the ingratitude of it, the hardness of it, the presumptuousness of it.  By heart, by mouth, by deed.  Against God, my neighbours, my own body.  By knowledge, by ignorance.  Willingly and unwillingly.  Of old and of late.  In boyhood and youth, in mature and old age.  Things done once, repeated often, hidden and open.  Things done in anger, and from the lust of the flesh and of the world.  Before and after my call.  Asleep by night and awake by day.  Things remembered and things forgotten.  Through the fiery darts of the enemy, through the unclean desires of the flesh—­I have sinned against Thee.  Have mercy on me, O God, and forgive me!” That is the way some men’s burdens are made up to such gigantic proportions and then bound on by such acute cords.  That is the way that Lancelot Andrewes and John Bunyan walked solitarily in the fields, sometimes reading and sometimes praying, till the one of them put himself into his immortal Devotions, and the other into his immortal Grace Abounding and Pilgrim’s Progress.

“Then I saw in my dream that Christian asked the Gatekeeper further if he could not help him off with his burden that was upon his back, for as yet he had not got rid of it, nor could he by any means get it off without help.  He told him, ’As to thy burden, be content to bear it until thou comest to the place of deliverance, for there it will fall from off thy back itself.’  Now I saw in my dream that the highway up which Christian was to go was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall is Salvation.  Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back.  He ran thus till he came to a place somewhat ascending, and upon that place stood a cross, and a little below in the bottom a sepulchre.  So I saw in my dream that just as Christian came up with the cross his burden loosed from off his back, and began to tumble and so continued to do till it came to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in and I saw it no more.  Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, ‘He hath given me rest by His sorrow, and life by His death!’”

   “Blest Cross! blest Sepulchre!  Blest rather be
   The Man that there was put to shame for me.”

But, then, how it could be that this so happy man was scarcely a stone-cast past the cross when he had begun again to burden himself with fresh sin, and thus to disinter all his former sin?  How a true pilgrim comes to have so many burdens to bear, and that till he ceases to be any longer a pilgrim,—­a burden of guilt, a burden of corruption, and a burden of bare creaturehood,—­I must leave all that, and all the questions connected with all that, for you all to think out and work out for yourselves; and you will not say any morning on this earth, like Mrs. Timorous, that you have little to do.