1.  Take Mr. Fearing, then, to begin with, at the Slough of Despond.  Christian and Pliable, they being heedless, did both fall into that bog.  But Mr. Fearing, whatever faults you may think he had—­and faults, too, that you think you could mend in him—­at any rate, he was never heedless.  Everybody has his fault to find with poor Mr. Fearing.  Everybody blames poor Mr. Fearing.  Everybody can improve upon poor Mr. Fearing.  But I will say again for Mr. Fearing that he was never heedless.  Had Peter been on the road at that period he would have stood up for Mr. Fearing, and would have taken his judges and would have said to them, with some scorn—­Go to, and pass the time of your sojourning here with something of the same silence and the same fear!  Christian’s excuse for falling into the Slough was that fear so followed him that he fled the next way, and so fell in.  But Mr. Fearing had no such fear behind him in his city as Christian had in his.  All Mr. Fearing’s fears were within himself.  If you can take up the distinction between actual and indwelling sin, between guilt and corruption, you have already in that the whole key to Mr. Fearing.  He was blamed and counselled and corrected and pitied and patronised by every morning-cloud and early-dew neophyte, while all the time he lived far down from the strife of tongues where the root of the matter strikes its deep roots still deeper every day.  “It took him a whole month,” tells Greatheart, “to face the Slough.  But he would not go back neither.  Till, one sunshiny morning, nobody ever knew how, he ventured, and so got over.  But the fact of the matter is,” said the shrewd-headed guide, “Mr. Fearing had, I think, a slough of despond in his own mind; and a slough that he carried everywhere with him.”  Yes, that was it.  Greatheart in that has hit the nail on the head.  With one happy stroke he has given us the whole secret of poor Mr. Fearing’s life-long trouble.  Just so; it was the slough in himself that so kept poor Mr. Fearing back.  This poor pilgrim, who had so little to fear in his past life, had yet so much scum and filth, spume and mire in his present heart, that how to get on the other side of that cost him not a month’s roaring only, but all the months and all the years till he went over the River not much above wet-shod.  And, till then, not twenty million cart-loads of wholesome instructions, nor any number of good and substantial steps, would lift poor Mr. Fearing over the ditch that ran so deep and so foul continually within himself.  “Yes, he had, I think, a slough of despond in his mind, a slough that he carried everywhere with him, or else he never could have been the man he was.”  I, for one, thank the great-hearted guide for that fine sentence.