4.  The Hill Difficulty, which might have helped to make a man of Feeble-mind, saw a laughable, if it had not been such a lamentable, spectacle.  For it saw this poor creature hanging as limp as wet linen on the back of one of the Interpreter’s sweating servants.  Your little boy will explain the parable to you.  Shall I do this? or, shall I rather do that? asks Feeble-mind at every stop.  Would it be right? or, would it be wrong?  Shall I read that book?  Shall I go to that ball?  Shall I marry that man?  Tell me what to do.  Give me your hand.  Take me up upon your back, and carry me over this difficult hill.  “I was carried up that,” says poor Feeble-mind, “by one of his servants.”

5.  “The one calamity of Mr. Feeble-mind’s history,” says our ablest commentator on Bunyan, “was the finest mercy of his history.”  That one calamity was his falling into Giant Slay-good’s hands, and his finest mercy was his rescue by Greatheart, and his consequent companionship with his deliverer, with Mr. Honest, and with Christiana and her party till they came to the river.  You constantly see the same thing in the life of the Church and of the Christian Family.  Some calamity throws a weak, ignorant, and immoral creature into close contact with a minister or an elder or a Christian visitor, who not only relieves him from his present distress, but continues to keep his eye upon his new acquaintance, introduces him to wise and good friends, invites him to his house, gives him books to read, and keeps him under good influences, till, of a weak, feeble, and sometimes vicious character, he is made a Christian man, till he is able for himself to say, It was good for me to be afflicted; the one calamity of my history has been my best mercy!

6.  Feeble-mind, I am ashamed to have to admit, behaved himself in a perfectly scandalous manner at the house of Gaius mine host.  He went beyond all bounds during those eventful weeks.  Those weeks were one long temptation to Feeble-mind—­and he went down in a pitiful way before his temptation.  Two marriages and two honeymoons, with suppers and dances every night, made the old hostelry like very Pandemonium itself to poor Feeble-mind.  He would have had Matthew’s and James’s marriages conducted next door to a funeral.  Because he would not eat flesh himself, he protested against Gaius killing a sheep.  “Man,” said old Honest, almost laying his quarterstaff over Feeble-mind’s shoulders—­“Man, dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” “I shall like no laughing,” said Feeble-mind; “I shall like no gay attire; I shall like no unprofitable questions.”  I think it took some self-conceit to refuse to sit at table beside Christiana because of her gay attire.  And I hope Mercy did not give up dressing well, even after she was married, to please that weak-minded old churl.  And as to unprofitable questions—­we are all tempted to think that question unprofitable