better, nor my bad frame of heart that made my Righteousness worse:  for my Righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.  ’Twas glorious to me to see His exaltation, and the worth and prevalency of His benefits.  And that because I could now look from myself to Him and should reckon that all those graces of God that were now green in me were yet but like those crack-groats and four-pence halfpennies that rich men carry in their purses when their gold is in their trunks at home!  Oh, I saw that day that my gold was all in my trunk at home!  Even in Christ, my Lord and Saviour!  Now, Christ was all to me:  all my wisdom, all my righteousness, all my sanctification and all my redemption.”

   “Methinks in this God speaks,
   No tinker hath such power.”

LITTLE-FAITH

   “O thou of little faith.”—­Our Lord.

Little-Faith, let it never be forgotten, was, all the time, a good man.  With all his mistakes about himself, with his sad misadventure, with all his loss of blood and of money, and with his whole after-lifetime of doleful and bitter complaints,—­all the time, Little-Faith was all through, in a way, a good man.  To keep us right on this all-important point, and to prevent our being prematurely prejudiced against this pilgrim because of his somewhat prejudicial name—­because give a dog a bad name, you know, and you had better hang him out of hand at once—­because, I say, of this pilgrim’s somewhat suspicious name, his scrupulously just, and, indeed, kindly affected biographer says of him, and says it of him not once nor twice, but over and over and over again, that this Little-Faith was really all the time a truly good man.  And, more than that, this good man’s goodness was not a new thing with him it was not a thing of yesterday.  This man had, happily to begin with, a good father and a good mother.  And if there was a good town in all those parts for a boy to be born and brought up in it was surely the town of Sincere.  “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”  Well, Little-Faith had been so trained up both by his father and his mother and his schoolmaster and his minister, and he never cost either of them a sore heart or even an hour’s sleep.  One who knew him well, as well, indeed, as only one young man knows another, has been fain to testify, when suspicions have been cast on the purity and integrity of his youth, that nothing will describe this pilgrim so well in the days of his youth as just those beautiful words out of the New Testament—­“an example to all young men in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith even, and in purity”—­and that, if there was one young man in all that town of Sincere who kept his garments unspotted it was just our pilgrim of to-night.  Yes, said one who had known him all his days, if the child is the father of the man, then Little-Faith, as you so unaccountably to me call him, must have been all along a good man.