When Madame Krudener was getting her foot measured by a pietist shoemaker, she was so struck with the repose and the sweetness and the heavenly joy of the poor man’s look and manner that she could not help but ask him what had happened to him that he had such a look on his countenance and such a light in his eye.  She was miserable, though she had all that heart could wish.  She had all that made her one of the most envied women in Europe; she had birth, talents, riches, rank, and the friendship of princes and princesses, and yet she was of all women the most miserable.  And here was a poor chance shoemaker whose whole heart was running over with a joy such that all her wealth could not purchase to her heart one single drop of it.  The simple soul soon told her his secret; it was no secret:  it was just Jesus Christ who had done it all.  And thus her poor shoemaker’s happy face was the means of this great lady’s conversion.  And, in like manner, it was the beholding of Christian and Faithful in their words and in their behaviour at the fair that decided Hopeful to join himself to Christian and henceforth to be his companion.

What were the things, asked Christian of his young companion, that first led you to leave off the vanities of the fair and to think to be a pilgrim?  Many things, replied Hopeful.  Sometimes if I did but meet a good man in the street.  Or if mine head began unaccountably, or mine heart, to ache.  Or if some one of my companions became suddenly sick.  Or if I heard the bell toll that some one was dead.  But, especially, when I thought of myself that I must quickly come to judgment.  And then it is told in the best style of the book how peace and rest and the beginning of true satisfaction came to poor Hopeful’s heart at last.  But you must promise me to read the passage for yourselves before you sleep to-night; and to read it again and again till, like Hopeful’s, your heart also is full of joy, and your eyes full of tears, and your affections running over with love to the name and to the people and to all the ways of Jesus Christ.

And then, it is very encouraging and reassuring to us to see how Hopeful’s true conversion so deepened and sobered and strengthened his whole character.  He remained to the end in his mental constitution and whole temperament, as we say, the same man he had always been; but, while remaining the same man, at the same time a most wonderful change gradually began to come over him, till, by slow but sure degrees, he became the Hopeful we know and look to and lean upon.  To use his own autobiographic words about himself, it was “by hearing and considering of things that are Divine” that his natural levity was so completely whipped out of his soul till he was made at last an indispensable companion to Christian, strong-minded and serious-minded man as he was.  “Conversion to God,” says William Law, “is often very sudden and instantaneous, unexpectedly raised from variety of occasions.  Thus, one by