danger all those ill-intended arbours scattered all up and
down that country become! Well, then, the first enchanted arbour that
the pilgrims came to was built just inside the borders of the land, and
it was called The Stranger's Arbour--so many new-comers had lain down in
it never to rise again. The young and the inexperienced, with those who
were naturally of a believing, buoyant, easy mind, lay down in hundreds
here. Hopeful's mind was naturally a mind of a soft and easy and self-
indulgent cast; and had he been alone that day, or had he had for a
companion a man of a less wary, less anxious, and less urgent mind than
Christian was, Hopeful had taken a nap, as he so confidingly called it--a
fatal nap in that arbour built by the enemy of pilgrims, just on purpose
for the young and the ignorant, the inexperienced and the self-indulgent.

3. The Slothful Man's Arbour has been already described. It was a warm
arbour, and it promised much refreshing to the pilgrims. It also had in
it a soft couch on which the weary might lean. "Let us lie down here and
take just one nap; we shall be refreshed if we take a nap!" "Do you not
remember," said the other, "that one of the shepherds bid us beware of
the Enchanted Ground? And he meant by that that we should beware of
sleeping; wherefore let us not sleep as do others, but let us watch and
be sober." Now, what is a nap? And what is it to take a nap in our
religion? The New Testament is full of warnings to those who read it and
go by it--most solemn and most fearful warnings--against _sleep_. Now,
have you any clear idea in your minds as to what this divinely denounced
sleep is? Sleep is good and necessary in our bodily life. We would not
live long if we did not sleep; we would soon go out of our mind; we would
soon lose our senses if we did not sleep. Insomnia is one of the worst
symptoms of our eager, restless, over-worked age. "He giveth His beloved
sleep"; and while they sleep their corn grows they know not how. But
sleep in the great exhortation-passages of the Holy Scriptures does not
mean rest and restoration; it means in all those passages insensibility,
stupidity, danger, and death. In our nightly sleep, and in the measure
of its soundness, we are utterly dead to the world around us. Men may
come into our house and rob us of our most precious possessions; they may
even come up to our bed and murder us; our whole house may be in a blaze
about us; we may onl