dinary kindness and unwearied
attention. And since he could not remain at the gate, but must go on to
the city of all goodwill itself, our pilgrim set himself all his days to
copy this gatekeeper when he met with any fellow-pilgrim who had any
story that he wished to tell. And many were the lonely and forgotten
souls that Christian cheered and helped on, not by his gold or his
silver, nor by anything else, but just by his open ear. To listen with
patience and with attention to a fellow-pilgrim's wrongs and sorrows, and
even his smallest interests, said this Christian to himself, is just what
Goodwill so winningly did to me.

With all his goodwill the grave gatekeeper could not say that the way to
the Celestial City was other than a narrow, a stringent, and a
heart-searching way. 'Come,' he said, 'and I will tell thee the way thou
must go.' There are many wide ways to hell, and many there be who crowd
them, but there is only one way to heaven, and you will sometimes think
you must have gone off it, there are so few companions; sometimes there
will be only one footprint, with here and there a stream of blood, and
always as you proceed, it becomes more and more narrow, till it strips a
man bare, and sometimes threatens to close upon him and crush him to the
earth altogether. Our Lord in as many words tells us all that. Strive,
He says, strive every day. For many shall seek to enter into the way of
salvation, but because they do not early enough, and long enough, and
painfully enough strive, they come short, and are shut out. Have you,
then, anything in your religious life that Christ will at last accept as
the striving He intended and demanded? Does your religion cause you any
real effort--Christ calls it _agony_? Have you ever had, do you ever
have, anything that He would so describe? What cross do you every day
take up? In what thing do you every day deny yourself? Name it. Put
your finger on it. Write it in cipher on the margin of your Bible. Would
the most liberal judgment be able to say of you that you have any fear
and trembling in the work of your salvation? If not, I am afraid there
must be some mistake somewhere. There must be great guilt somewhere. At
your parents' door, or at your minister's, or, if their hands are clean,
then at your own. Christ has made it plain to a proverb, and John Bunyan
has made it a nursery and a schoolboy story, that the way to heaven is
steep and narrow and lonely a