giveness of injuries, in goodwill to all men, and in
self-denial that no one knows of,--in things like these we possess what
may be called the pocket-money of the spiritual life. All these things,
at their best, are not the true jewel that no thief can break through nor
steal; but though they are not our best and truest riches, yet they have
their place and play their part in sending us up the pilgrim way. By our
long and close study of the word of God, if that is indeed our case; by
divine truth dwelling richly and experimentally in our hearts; and by a
hidden life that is its own witness, and which always has the Holy
Spirit's seal set upon it that we are the children of God,--all that
keeps, and is designed by God to keep our hearts up amid the labours and
the faintings, the hopes and the fears of the spiritual life. All that
keeps us at the least and the worst above famine and beggary. Now, the
whole pity with Little-Faith was, that though he was not a bad man, yet
he never, even at his best days, had much of those things that make a
good and well-furnished pilgrim; and what little he had he had now clean
lost. He had never been much a reader of his Bible; he had never sat
over it as other men sat over their news-letters and their romances. He
had never had much taste or talent for spiritual books of any kind. He
was a good sort of man, but he was not exactly the manner of man on whose
broken heart the Holy Ghost sets the broad seal of heaven. But for his
dreadful misadventure, he might have plodded on, a decent, humdrum,
commonplace, everyday kind of pilgrim; but when that catastrophe fell on
him he had nothing to fall back upon. The secret ways of faith and love
and hope were wholly unknown to him. He had no practice in importunate
prayer. He had never prayed a whole night all his life. He had never
needed to do so. For were we not told when we first met him what a
blameless and pure and true and good man he had always been? He did not
know how to find his way about in his Bible; and as for the maps and
guide-books that some pilgrims never let out of their hand, even when he
had some spending money about him, he never laid it out that way. And a
more helpless pilgrim than Little-Faith was all the rest of the way you
never saw. He was forced to beg as he went, says his historian. That is
to say, he had to lean upon and look to wiser and better-furnished men
than himself. He had to share their meals,