the highest of all the sciences, the knowledge and the love of God. Love
Him, then, till you arrive at loving Him for Himself, and then you shall
be for ever delivered from all self-love and by-ends, and shall both
glorify and enjoy God for ever. As all they now do who engaged their
hearts on earth to the service and the love and the enjoyment of God is
such psalms and prayers as these: 'Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and
there is no one on earth that I desire beside Thee. How excellent is Thy
loving-kindness, O God! The children of men shall put their trust under
the shadow of Thy wings. For with Thee is the fountain of life, and in
Thy light shall we see light. As for me, I will behold Thy face in
righteousness: I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness. Thou
wilt show me the path of life; in Thy presence is fullness of joy, and at
Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.'

GIANT DESPAIR

'A wounded spirit who can bear?'--Solomon.

Every schoolboy has Giant Despair by heart. The rough road after the
meadow of lilies, the stile into By-Path-Meadow, the night coming on, the
thunder and the lightning and the waters rising amain, Giant Despair's
apprehension of Christian and Hopeful, their dreadful bed in his dungeon
from Wednesday morning till Saturday night, how they were famished with
hunger and beaten with a grievous crab-tree cudgel till they were not
able to turn, with many other sufferings too many and too terrible to be
told which they endured till Saturday about midnight, when they began to
pray, and continued in prayer till almost break of day;--John Bunyan is
surely the best story-teller in all the world. And, then, over and above
that, as often as a boy reads Giant Despair and his dungeon to his father
and mother, the two hearers are like Christian and Hopeful when the
Delectable shepherds showed them what had happened to some who once went
in at By-Path stile: the two pilgrims looked one upon another with tears
gushing out, but yet said nothing to the shepherds.

John Bunyan's own experience enters deeply into these terrible pages. In
composing these terrible pages, Bunyan writes straight and bold out of
his own heart and conscience. The black and bitter essence of a whole
black and bitter volume is crushed into these four or five bitter pages.
Last week I went over _Grace Abounding_ again, and marked the passages in
which its author describes his own experiences of