ments of Christian's life
and character and experience. And I shall collect these fragments into
the three baskets of his book, his burden, and his sealed roll and
certificate.

1. And first, a few things as to his book. "As I slept I dreamed, and
behold I saw a man clothed in rags standing in a certain place, with his
face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his
back. I looked and saw him open the book and read therein; and as he
read he wept and trembled; and not being able longer to contain he broke
out with a lamentable cry, saying, What shall I do?" We hear a great
deal in these advertising days, and not one word too much, about the
books that have influenced and gone largely to the making of our great
men; but Graceless, like John Bunyan, his biographer, was a man of but
one book. But, then, that book was the most influential of all books; it
was the Book of books; it was God's very own and peculiar Book. And
those of us who, like this man, have passed out of a graceless into a
gracious state will for ever remember how that same Book at that time
influenced us till it made us what we are and shall yet be. We read many
other good books at that epoch in our life, but it was the pure Bible
that we read and prayed over out of sight the most. We needed no
commentators or exegetes on our simple Bible in those days. The great
texts stood out to our eyes in those days as if they had been written
with a sunbeam; while all other books (and we read nothing but the best
books in those days) looked like twilight and rushlight beside our Bible.
In those immediate, direct, and intense days we would have satisfied
Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold themselves in the way we read our Bible
with our eye never off the object. The Four Last Things were ever before
us--death and judgment, heaven and hell. "O my dear wife," said
Graceless, "and you the children of my bowels, I your dear friend am in
myself undone by reason of a burden that lieth hard upon me; moreover, I
am for certain informed that this our city will be burned with fire from
heaven, in which fearful overthrow both myself, with thee my wife, and
you my sweet babes, shall miserably come to ruin, except (the which yet I
see not) some way of escape can be found whereby we may be delivered." He
would walk also solitarily in the fields, sometimes reading and sometimes
praying; and thus for some days he spent his time. Graceless at that
ti