r place, 'when
we meet them at first, are as the lion that roared upon Samson; but if we
overcome them, the next time we see them we shall find a nest of honey in
them.' O God, for grace and sense and imagination to see and understand
and apply all that to our own daily life! O to be able to take all that
home to-night and see it all there; lions and runaways, venturesome
souls, narrow paths, palaces of beauty, everlasting life and all! Open
Thou our eyes that we may see the wonderful things that await us in our
own house at home!

'Things out of hope are compassed oft with venturing.'

So they are; and so they were that day with our terrified pilgrim. He
made a venture at the supreme moment of his danger, and things that were
quite out of all hope but an hour before were then compassed and ever
after possessed by him. Make the same venture, then, yourselves
to-night. Naught venture, naught have. Your lost soul is not much to
venture, but it is all that Christ at this moment asks of you--that you
leave your lost soul in His hand, and then go straight on from this
moment in the middle of the path: the path, that is, as your case may be,
of purity, humility, submission, resignation, and self-denial. Keep your
mind and your heart, your eyes and your feet, in the very middle of that
path, and you shall have compassed the House Beautiful before you know.
The lions shall soon be behind you, and the grave and graceful damsels of
the House--Discretion and Prudence and Piety and Charity--shall all be
waiting upon you.

PRUDENCE {1}

'Let a man examine himself.'--Paul.

Let a man examine himself, says the apostle to the Corinthians, and so
let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup. And thus it was, that
before the pilgrim was invited to sit down at the supper table in the
House Beautiful, quite a number of most pointed and penetrating questions
were put to him by those who had charge of that house and its supper
table. And thus the time was excellently improved till the table was
spread, while the short delay and the successive exercises whetted to an
extraordinary sharpness the pilgrim's hunger for the supper. Piety and
Charity, who had joint charge of the house from the Master of the house,
held each a characteristic conversation with Christian, but it was left
to Prudence to hold the most particular discourse with him until supper
was ready, and it is to that so particular discourse that I m