dgment to the hill-top without help had His back not been wet
with blood. What with a whole and an unwealed body, a well-rested and
well-nourished body, He could easily have carried, with His broken body
and broken heart He quite sank under. And so it is with His people. One
of His heart-broken, heart-bleeding people will sink down to death and
hell under a burden of sin and corruption that another of them will
scarcely feel or know or believe that it is there. Some sins again in
themselves, and by reason of several aggravations, are far more heavy to
bear than others, and by some sinners than others. I was reading Bishop
Andrewes to myself last night and came upon this pertinent passage. "Sin:
its measure, its harm, its scandal. Its quality: how often--how long.
The person by whom: his age, condition, state, enlightenment. Its
manner, motive, time, and place. The folly of it, the ingratitude of it,
the hardness of it, the presumptuousness of it. By heart, by mouth, by
deed. Against God, my neighbours, my own body. By knowledge, by
ignorance. Willingly and unwillingly. Of old and of late. In boyhood
and youth, in mature and old age. Things done once, repeated often,
hidden and open. Things done in anger, and from the lust of the flesh
and of the world. Before and after my call. Asleep by night and awake
by day. Things remembered and things forgotten. Through the fiery darts
of the enemy, through the unclean desires of the flesh--I have sinned
against Thee. Have mercy on me, O God, and forgive me!" That is the way
some men's burdens are made up to such gigantic proportions and then
bound on by such acute cords. That is the way that Lancelot Andrewes and
John Bunyan walked solitarily in the fields, sometimes reading and
sometimes praying, till the one of them put himself into his immortal
_Devotions_, and the other into his immortal _Grace Abounding_ and
_Pilgrim's Progress_.

"Then I saw in my dream that Christian asked the Gatekeeper further if he
could not help him off with his burden that was upon his back, for as yet
he had not got rid of it, nor could he by any means get it off without
help. He told him, 'As to thy burden, be content to bear it until thou
comest to the place of deliverance, for there it will fall from off thy
back itself.' Now I saw in my dream that the highway up which Christian
was to go was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall is
Salvation. Up this way, there