to-morrow, even in so-called Christian homes, when any of the ladies round the table last read, and how often they have read, Grace Abounding, The Saint’s Rest, The Religious Affections, Jeremy Taylor, Law, a Kempis, Fenelon, or such like, and they will smile to one another and remark after you are gone on your strange taste for old-fashioned and long-winded and introspective books.  “Julia has buried her husband and married her daughters, and since that she spends her time in reading.  She is always reading foolish and unedifying books.  She tells you every time she sees you that she is almost at the end of the silliest book that ever she read in her life.  But the best of it is that it serves to dispose of a good deal of her spare time.  She tells you all romances are sad stuff, yet she is very impatient till she can get all she can hear of.  Histories of intrigue and scandal are the books that Julia thinks are always too short.  The truth is, she lives upon folly and scandal and impertinence.  These things are the support of her dull hours.  And yet she does not see that in all this she is plainly telling you that she is in a miserable, disordered, reprobate state of mind.  Now, whether you read her books or no, you perhaps think with her that it is a dull task to read only religious and especially spiritual books.  But when you have the spirit of true religion, when you can think of God as your only happiness, when you are not afraid of the joys of eternity, you will think it a dull task to read any other books.  When it is the care of your soul to be humble, holy, pure, and heavenly-minded; when you know anything of the guilt and misery of sin, or feel a real need of salvation, then you will find religious and truly spiritual books to be the greatest feast and joy of your mind and heart.”  Yes.  And then we shall thank God every day we live that He raised us up such helpers in our salvation as the gifted and gracious authors we have been speaking of.

5.  “The further I go the more danger I meet with,” said old Timorous, the father, to Christian, when Christian asked him on the Hill Difficulty why he was running the wrong way.  “I, too, was going to the City of Zion,” he said; “but the further on I go the more danger I meet with.”  And, in saying that, the old runaway gave our persevering pilgrim something to think about for all his days.  For, again and again, and times without number, Christian would have gone back too if only he had known where to go.  Go on, therefore, he must.  To go back to him was simply impossible.  Every day he lived he felt the bitter truth of what that old apostate had so unwittingly said.  But, with all that he kept himself in his onward way till, dangers and difficulties, death and hell and all, he came to the blessed end of it.  And that same has been the universal experience of all the true and out-and-out saints of God in all time.  If poor old Timorous had only known it, if he had only had some one beside