by every new fall.’” Have you followed all that, my brethren?  Or have you stumbled at it?  Do you not understand it?  Does your superficial gin-horse mind incline to shake its empty head over all this?  I know that great names, and especially the great names of your own party, go much farther with you than the truth goes, and therefore I have sheltered this deep truth under a shield of great names.  For their sakes let this sure truth of God’s best saints lie in peace and undisputed beside you till you arrive to understand it.

But, to proceed,—­the thing was this.  At this passage there comes down from Broadway-gate a lane called Dead-Man’s-lane, so called because of the murders that are commonly done there.  And this Little-Faith going on pilgrimage, as we now do, chanced to sit down there and fell fast asleep.  Yes; the thing was this:  This good man had never been what one would call really awake.  He was not a bad man, as men went in the town of Sincere, but he always had a half-slept half-awakened look about his eyes, till now, at this most unfortunate spot, he fell stone-dead asleep.  You all know, I shall suppose, what the apostle Paul and John Bunyan mean by sleep, do you not?  You all know, at any rate, to begin with, what sleep means in the accident column of the morning papers.  You all know what sleep meant and what it involved and cost in the Thirsk signal-box the other night. {1} When a man is asleep, he is as good as dead, and other people are as good as dead to him.  He is dead to duty, to danger, to other people’s lives, as well as to his own.  He may be having pleasant dreams, and may even be laughing aloud in his sleep, but that may only make his awaking all the more hideous.  He may awake just in time, or he may awake just too late.  Only, he is asleep and he neither knows nor cares.  Now, there is a sleep of the soul as well as of the body.  And as the soul is in worth, as the soul is in its life and in its death to the body, so is its sleep.  Many of you sitting there are quite as dead to heaven and hell, to death and judgment, and to what a stake other people as well as yourselves have in your sleep as that poor sleeper in the signal-box was dead to what was coming rushing on him through the black night.  And as all his gnashing of teeth at himself, and all his sobs before his judge and before the laid-out dead, and before distracted widows and half-mad husbands did not bring back that fatal moment when he fell asleep so sweetly, so will it be with you.  Lazarus! come forth!  Wise and foolish virgins both:  Behold the Bridegroom cometh!  Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light!