The Enchanted Ground, on the other hand, threatened to throw Hopeful back again into his former light-minded state.  And there is no saying what shipwreck he might have made there had the older man not been with him to steady and reprove and instruct him.  As it was, a touch now and then of his old vain temper returned to him till it took all his companion’s watchfulness and wariness to carry them both out of that second Vanity Fair.  “I acknowledge myself in a fault,” said Hopeful to Christian, “and had I been here alone I had run in danger of death.  Hitherto, thy company hath been my mercy, and thou shalt have a good reward for all thy labour.”

Now, my brethren, in my opinion we owe a great debt of gratitude to John Bunyan for the large and the displayed place he has given to Hopeful in the Pilgrim’s Progress.  The fulness and balance and proportion of the Pilgrim’s Progress are features of that wonderful book far too much overlooked.  So far as my reading goes I do not know any other author who has at all done the justice to the saving grace of hope that John Bunyan has done both in his doctrinal and in his allegorical works.  Bunyan stands alone and supreme not only for the insight, and the power with which he has constructed the character and the career of Hopeful, but even for having given him the space at all adequate to his merits and his services.  In those eighty-seven so suggestive pages that form the index to Dr. Thomas Goodwin’s works I find some hundred and twenty-four references to “faith,” while there are only two references to “hope.”  And that same oversight and neglect runs through all our religious literature, and I suppose, as a consequence, through all our preaching too.  Now that is not the treatment the Bible gives to this so essential Christian grace, as any one may see at a glance who takes the trouble to turn up his Cruden.  Hope has a great place alongside of faith and love in the Holy Scriptures, and it has a correspondingly large and eloquent place in Bunyan.  Now, that being so, why is it that this so great and so blessed grace has so fallen out of our sermons and out of our hearts?  May God grant that our reading of Hopeful’s autobiography and his subsequent history to-night may do something to restore the blessed grace of hope to its proper place both in our pulpit and in all our hearts.

To kindle then, to quicken, and to anchor your hope, my brethren, may I have God’s help to speak for a little longer to your hearts concerning this neglected grace!  For, what is hope?  Hope is a passion of the soul, wise or foolish, to be ashamed of or to be proud of, just according to the thing hoped for, and just according to the grounds of the hope.  Hope is made up of these two ingredients—­desire and expectation.  What we greatly desire we take no rest till we find good grounds on which to build up our expectations of it; and when we have found good grounds for our expectations, then a glad hope takes