But with all this, you must not suppose that this good woman, this mother in Israel, had forgotten her grandchildren.  She would sooner have forgotten her own children.  But she was too good a woman to forget either.  For long ago, away back at the river on this side the Delectable Mountains, she had said to her four daughters—­I must tell you exactly what she has said:  “Here,” she said, “in this meadow there are cotes and folds for sheep, and an house is built here also for the nourishing and bringing up of those lambs, even the babes of those women that go on pilgrimage.  Also there is One here who can have compassion and that can gather these lambs with His arm and carry them in His bosom.  This Man, she said, will house and harbour and succour the little ones, so that none of them shall be lacking in time to come.  This Man, if any of them go astray or be lost, He will bring them again, He will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen them that are sick.  So they were content to commit their little ones to that Man, and all this was to be at the charge of the King, and so it was as a hospital to young children and orphans.”

And now I shall sum up my chief impressions of Christiana under the three heads of her mind, her heart, and her widowhood indeed.

1.  The mother of Christian’s four sons was a woman of real mind, as so many of the maidens, and wives, and widows of Puritan England and Covenanting Scotland were.  You gradually gather that impression just from being beside her as the journey goes on.  She does not speak much; but, then, there is always something individual, remarkable, and memorable in what she says.  I have a notion of my own that Christiana must have been a reader of that princely Puritan, John Milton.  And if that was so, that of itself would be certificate enough as to her possession of mind.  There is always a dignity and a strength about her utterances that make us feel sure that she had always had a mind far above her neighbours, Mrs. Bat’s-eyes, Mrs. Light-mind, and Mrs. Know-nothing.  The first time she opens her mouth in our hearing she lets fall an expression that Milton had just made famous in his Samson—­

   “Ease to the body some, none to the mind
   From restless thoughts, that like a deadly swarm
   Of hornets armed no sooner found alone,
   But rush upon me thronging, and present
   Times past, what once I was, and what am now.”

Nor can I leave this point without asserting it to you that no church and no school of theology has ever developed the mind as well as sanctified the heart of the common people like the preaching of the Puritan pulpit.  Matthew Arnold was not likely to over-estimate the good that Puritanism had done to England.  Indeed, in his earlier writings he sometimes went out of his way to lament the hurt that the Puritan spirit had done to liberality of life and mind in his native land.  But in his riper years we find