present setting.  Five long, rich, closely packed columns stood under the head of “Condition”; and amid a thousand illustrations of its use, the text:  “1684, Bunyan, Pilgr., ii. 84.  He said that Mercy was a pretty lass, but troubled with ill conditions.”  Poor illiterate John Bunyan stood in the centre of a group of learned and famous men, composed of Chaucer, Wyclif, Skelton, Palsgrave, Raleigh, Featly, Richard Steel, and Walter Scott—­all agreeing in their use of our word, and all supplying examples of its use in the best English books.  By Mercy’s conditions, then, is just meant her cast of mind, her moral nature, her temper and her temperament, her dispositions and her inclinations, her habits of thought, habits of heart, habits of life, and so on.

“Well,” said Mercy proudly, “if nobody will have me, I will die a maid, or my conditions shall be to me as a husband.  For I cannot change my nature, and to have one that lies cross to me in this,—­that I purpose never to admit of as long as I live.”  By this time, though she is still little more than a girl, Mercy had her habits formed, her character cast, and, more than all, her whole heart irrevocably set on her soul’s salvation.  And everything—­husband and children and all—­must condition themselves to that, else she will have none of them.  She had sought first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and she will seek nothing, she will accept nothing—­no, not even a husband—­who crosses her choice in that.  She has chosen her life, and her husband with it.  Not the man as yet, but the whole manner of the man.  The conditions of the man, as she said about herself; else she will boldly and bravely die a maid.  And there are multitudes of married women who, when they read this page about Mercy, will gnash their teeth at the madness of their youth, and will wildly wish that they only were maids again; and, then, like Mercy, they would take good care to make for themselves husbands of their own conditions too—­of their own means, their own dispositions, inclinations, tastes, and pursuits.  For, according as our conditions to one another are or are not in our marriages,

   “They locally contain or heaven or hell;
   There is no third place in them.”

What untold good, then, may all our young women not get out of the loving study of Mercy’s sweet, steadfast, noble character!  And what untold misery may they not escape!  From first to last—­and we are not yet come to her last—­I most affectionately recommend Mercy to the hearts and minds of all young women here.  Single and married; setting out on pilgrimage and steadfastly persevering in it; sitting still till the husband with the right conditions comes, and then rising up with her warm, well-kept heart to meet him—­if any maiden here has no mother, or no elder sister, or no wise and prudent friend like Prudence or Christiana to take counsel of—­and even if she has—­let Mercy be her meditation and her model through all her maidenly days.