erienced, only the great day
will fully disclose.

And then, two men of great weight and authority with us, tell us what we
who are ministers would have found out without them: this, namely, that
the greatest atheists are they who are ever handling holy things without
feeling them.

"Is it true," said Christian to Hopeful, his fellow, "is it true what
this man hath said?" "Take heed," said Hopeful, "remember what it hath
cost us already for hearkening to such kind of fellows. What! No Mount
Zion! Did we not see from the Delectable Mountains the gate of the City?
And, besides, are we not to walk by faith? Let us go on lest the man
with the whip overtakes us again." Christian: "My brother, I said that
but to prove thee, and to fetch from thee a fruit of the honesty of thy
heart." Many a deep and powerful passage has Butler composed on that
thesis which Hopeful here supplies him with; and many a brilliant sermon
has Newman preached on that same text till he has made our
"predispositions to faith" a fruitful and an ever fresh commonplace to
hundreds of preachers. Yes; the best bulwark of faith is a good and
honest heart. To such a happy heart the truth is its own unshaken
evidence. To whom can we go but to Thee?--they who have such a heart
protest. The whole bent of such men's minds is toward the truth of the
gospel. Their instincts keep them on the right way even when their
reason and their observation are both confounded. As Newman keeps on
saying, they are "easy of belief." They cannot keep away from Christ and
His church. They cannot turn back. They must go on. Though He slay
them they will die yearning after Him. They often fall into great error
and into great guilt, but their seed remaineth in them, and they cannot
continue in error or in guilt, because they are born of God. They are
they in whom

"Persuasion and belief
Have ripened into faith; and faith become
A passionate intuition."

HOPEFUL

"We are saved by hope."--_Paul_

Up till the time when Christian and Faithful passed through Vanity Fair
on their way to the Celestial City, Hopeful was one of the most light-
minded men in all that light-minded town. By his birth, and both on his
father's and his mother's side, Hopeful was, to begin with, a youth of an
unusually shallow and silly mind. In the jargon of our day he was a man
of a peculiarly optimistic temperament. No one ever blamed him for being
too subjective