born.  Nor will I attempt to explain or to vindicate what he says.  Those of you who love the sight of your own misery as sinners will understand what Hopeful says without any explanation; while those who do not understand him would only be the more stumbled by any explanation of him.  The love of the sight of their misery, and the unearthly sweetness of their sorrow for sin, are only another two of those provoking paradoxes of which the lives of God’s true saints are full—­paradoxes and impossibilities and incoherencies that make the literature of experimental religion to be positively hateful and unbearable to Temporary and to all his self-seeking and apostate kindred.

3.  But even where the consciences of such men are occasionally awakened, proceeds Hopeful, in his so searching discovery of Temporaries, yet their minds are not changed.  There you are pretty near the business, replied his fellow; for the bottom of all is, for want of a change of their mind and will.  Now, one would have been afraid and ashamed for one moment to suspect that Temporary’s mind was not completely changed, so “forward” was he at first in his religion.  But, no:  forward before all his neighbours as Temporary was, to begin with, yet all the time his mind was not really changed.  His forwardness did not properly spring out of his true mind at all, but only out of his momentarily awakened conscience and his momentarily excited heart.  A sinner with a truly changed mind is never forward.  His mind is so changed that forwardness in anything is utterly alien to it, and especially all forwardness in the profession of religion.  The change that had taken place in Temporary, whatever was the seat of it, only led him to bully men like Christian and Hopeful, who would not go fast enough for him.  “Come,” said Pliable, in the beginning of the book, “come on and let us mend our pace.”  “I cannot go so fast as I would,” humbly replied Christian, “because of this burden on my back.”  It is a common observation among mountaineers that he who takes the hill at the greatest spurt is the last climber to come to the top, and that many who so ostentatiously make spurts at the bottom of the hill never come within sight of the top at all.  And this is one of the constant dangers that wait on all revivals, religious retreats, conferences, and even communion seasons.  Our hot fits, the hotter they are, are only the more likely, unless we take the greatest care, to cast us down into all the more deadly a chill.  It is this danger that our Lord points out so plainly in His parable of apostasy.  The same is he, says our Lord, that heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it; yet hath he not root in himself, but dureth for a while.  In Hopeful’s words, his mind and will were never changed with all his joy, only his passing moods and his momentary emotions.