ight before them, and it sounded to them as if he was dashed to
pieces by his fall. So they called to know the matter, but there was
none to answer, only they heard a groaning. Then said Hopeful: Where are
we now? Then was his fellow silent, as mistrusting that he had led
Hopeful out of the way. Now, all that also is true to the very life, and
has been taken down by Bunyan from the very life. We have all heard men
falling and heard them groaning just a little before us after we had left
the strait road. They had just gone a little farther wrong than we had
as yet gone,--just a very little farther; in some cases, indeed, not so
far, when they fell and were dashed to pieces with their fall. It was
well for us at that dreadful moment that we heard the same voice saying
to us for our encouragement as said to the two trembling transgressors:
'Let thine heart be toward the highway, even the way that thou wentest;
turn again.' Now, what is it in which you are at this moment going off
the right road? What is that life of disobedience or self-indulgence
that you are just entering on? Keep your ears open and you will hear
hundreds of men and women falling and being dashed to pieces before you
and all around you. Are you falling of late too much under the power of
your bodily appetites? It is not one man, nor two, well known to you,
who have fallen never to rise again out of that horrible pit. Are you
well enough aware that you are being led into bad company? Or, is your
companion, who is not a bad man in anything else, leading you, in this
and in that, into what at any rate is bad for you? You will soon, unless
you cut off your companion like a right hand, be found saying with
misguided and overruled Hopeful: Oh that I had kept me to my right way!
And so on in all manner of sin and trespass. Those who have ears to hear
such things hear every day one man after another falling through lust or
pride or malice or idleness or infidelity, till there is none to answer.

4. 'All hope abandon' was the writing that Dante read over the door of
hell. And the two prisoners all but abandoned all hope when they found
themselves in Giant Despair's dungeon. Only, Christian, the elder man,
had the most distress because their being where they now were lay mostly
at his door. All this part of the history also is written in Bunyan's
very heart's blood. 'I found it hard work,' he tells us of himself, 'to
pray to God because despair