God has not
done as, in His free grace, He has done to you. For He has not only
begun a good work in you, but He has begun that special and peculiar work
which, when it goes on to perfection, makes a great and an eminent saint
of God. To know your own heart as you evidently know it, and to hate it
as you say you hate it, and to hunger after a clean heart as, with every
breath, you hunger,--all that, if you would only believe it, sets you, or
will yet set you, high up among the people of God. Be comforted; it is
your bounden duty to be comforted. God deserves it at your hands that
you be more than comforted amid such unmistakable signs of His eminent
grace to you. And be patient under your exceptional sanctification. Rome
was not built in a day. You cannot reverse the awful law of your
sanctification. You cannot be saved by Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit
without seeing yourself, and you cannot see yourself without hating
yourself, and you cannot begin to hate yourself without all your hatred
henceforth turning against yourself. You are deep in the red-hot bosom
of the refiner's fire. And when you are once sufficiently tried by the
Divine Refiner of Souls, He will in His own good time and way bring you
out as gold. Be patient, therefore, till the coming of the Lord. And
say continually amid all your increasing knowledge of yourself, and amid
all your increasing hatred of yourself, 'As for me, I will behold Thy
face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy
likeness.'

FAITHFUL IN VANITY FAIR {2}

'Be thou faithful.'--Rev. 2. 10.

The breadth of John Bunyan's mind, the largeness of his heart, and the
tolerance of his temper all come excellently out in his fine portrait of
Faithful. New beginners in personal religion, when they first take up
_The Pilgrim's Progress_ in earnest, always try to find out something in
themselves that shall somewhat correspond to the recorded experience of
Christian, the chief pilgrim. And they are afraid that all is not right
with them unless they, like him, have had, to begin with, a heavy burden
on their back. They look for something in their religious life that
shall answer to the Slough of Despond also, to the Hill Difficulty, to
the House Beautiful, and, especially and indispensably, to the place
somewhat ascending with a cross upon it and an open sepulchre beneath it.
And because they cannot always find all these things in themselves in the