carry me over this difficult hill. "I was carried up that," says
poor Feeble-mind, "by one of his servants."

5. "The one calamity of Mr. Feeble-mind's history," says our ablest
commentator on Bunyan, "was the finest mercy of his history." That one
calamity was his falling into Giant Slay-good's hands, and his finest
mercy was his rescue by Greatheart, and his consequent companionship with
his deliverer, with Mr. Honest, and with Christiana and her party till
they came to the river. You constantly see the same thing in the life of
the Church and of the Christian Family. Some calamity throws a weak,
ignorant, and immoral creature into close contact with a minister or an
elder or a Christian visitor, who not only relieves him from his present
distress, but continues to keep his eye upon his new acquaintance,
introduces him to wise and good friends, invites him to his house, gives
him books to read, and keeps him under good influences, till, of a weak,
feeble, and sometimes vicious character, he is made a Christian man, till
he is able for himself to say, It was good for me to be afflicted; the
one calamity of my history has been my best mercy!

6. Feeble-mind, I am ashamed to have to admit, behaved himself in a
perfectly scandalous manner at the house of Gaius mine host. He went
beyond all bounds during those eventful weeks. Those weeks were one long
temptation to Feeble-mind--and he went down in a pitiful way before his
temptation. Two marriages and two honeymoons, with suppers and dances
every night, made the old hostelry like very Pandemonium itself to poor
Feeble-mind. He would have had Matthew's and James's marriages conducted
next door to a funeral. Because he would not eat flesh himself, he
protested against Gaius killing a sheep. "Man," said old Honest, almost
laying his quarterstaff over Feeble-mind's shoulders--"Man, dost thou
think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?"
"I shall like no laughing," said Feeble-mind; "I shall like no gay
attire; I shall like no unprofitable questions." I think it took some
self-conceit to refuse to sit at table beside Christiana because of her
gay attire. And I hope Mercy did not give up dressing well, even after
she was married, to please that weak-minded old churl. And as to
unprofitable questions--we are all tempted to think that question
unprofitable which our incapacity or our ignorance keeps us silent upon
at table. We think that t