1.  Now, let us try to learn two or three lessons to-night from Old Honest, his history, his character, and his conversation.  And, to begin with, let all those attend to Old Honest who are slow in the uptake in the things of religion.  O fools and slow of heart! exclaimed our Lord at the two travellers to Emmaus.  And this was Old Honest to the letter when he first entered on the pilgrimage life; he was slow as sloth itself in the things of the soul.  I have often wondered, said Greatheart, that any should come from your place; for your town is worse than is the City of Destruction itself.  Yes, answered Honest, we lie more off from the sun, and so are more cold and senseless.  And his biographer here annotates on the margin this reflection:  “Stupefied ones are worse than merely carnal.”  So they are; though it takes some insight to see that, and some courage to carry that through.  Now, to be downright stupid in a man’s natural intellects is sad enough, but to be stupid in the intellects of the soul and of the spirit is far more sad.  You will often see this if you have any eyes in your head, and are not one of the stupid people yourself.  You will see very clever people in the intellects of the head who are yet as stupid as the beasts in the stall in the far nobler intellects of the heart.  You will meet every day with men and women who have received the best college education this city can give them, who are yet stark stupid in everything that belongs to true religion.  They are quick to find out the inefficiency of a university chair, or a schoolmaster’s desk, but they know no more of what a New Testament pulpit has been set up for than the stupidest sot in the city.  The Divine Nature, human nature, sin, grace, redemption, salvation, holiness, heart-corruption, spiritual life, prayer, communion with God, a conversation and a treasure in heaven,—­to all these noblest of studies and divinest of exercises they are as a beast before God.  When you come upon a man who is a sot in his senses and in his understanding, you expect him to be the same in his spiritual life.  But to meet with an expert in science, a classical scholar, an author or a critic in letters, a leader in political or ecclesiastical or municipal life, and yet to discover that he is as stupid as any sot in the things of his own soul, is one of the saddest and most disheartening sights you can see.  Much sadder and much more disheartening than to see stairs and streets of people who can neither read nor write.  And yet our city is full of such stupid people.  You will find as utter spiritual stupidity among the rich and the lettered and the refined of this city as you will find among the ignorant and the vicious and the criminal classes.  Is stupidity a sin? asks Thomas in his Forty-Sixth Question.  And the great schoolman answers himself, “Stupidity may come of natural incapacity, in which case it is not a sin.  But it may come, on the other hand, of a man immersing