6.  But I see I must clip off my last point with you, which was to tell you what you already know only too well, and that is, what terrible shears a bad conscience is armed with, and what havoc she makes at all ages of a poor sinner’s Bible.  But you can spare that head.  You can preach on that text to yourselves far better than all your ministers.  Only, take home with you these two lines I have clipped out of Fraser of Brea for you.  Nothing in man, he says to us, is to be a ground of despair, since the whole ground of all our hope is in Christ alone.  Christ’s relation is always to men as they are sinners and not as they are righteous.  I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.  ’Tis with sinners, then, Christ has to do.  Nothing damns but unbelief; and unbelief is just holding back from pressing God with this promise, that Christ came to save sinners.  This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, and it is still to be found standing in the most clipped-up Bible, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.

CHAPTER XI—­STIFF MR. LOTH-TO-STOOP

   ’Thy neck is an iron sinew.’—­Jehovah to the house of Jacob.

   ’King Zedekiah humbled not himself, but stiffened his neck.’—­The
   Chronicles.

   ’He humbled himself.’—­Paul on our Lord.

All John Bunyan’s Characters, Situations, and Episodes are collected into this house to-night.  Obstinate and Pliable are here; Passion and Patience; Simple, Sloth, and Presumption; Madame Bubble and Mr. Worldly-wiseman; Talkative and By-ends; Deaf Mr. Prejudice is here also, and, sitting close beside him, stiff Mr. Loth-to-stoop; while good old Mr. Wet-eyes and young Captain Self-denial are not wholly wanting.  It gives this house an immense and an ever-green interest to me to see character after character coming trooping in, Sabbath evening after Sabbath evening, each man to see himself and his neighbour in John Bunyan’s so truthful and so fearless glass.  But it stabs me to the heart with a mortal stab to see how few of us out of this weekly congregation are any better men after all we come to see and to hear.  At the same time, such a constant dropping will surely in time wear away the hardest rock.  Let that so stiff old man, then, stiff old Mr. Loth-to-stoop, came forward and behold his natural face in John Bunyan’s glass again to-night.  ‘Lord, is it I?’ was a very good question, though put by a very bad man.  Let us, one and all, then, put the traitor’s question to ourselves to-night.  Am I stiff old Loth-to-stoop?—­let every man in this house say to himself all through this service, and then at home when reviewing the day, and then all to-morrow when to stoop will be so loathsome and so impossible to us all.