第132章 MR. FEARING(4)

Greatheart have spent their strength for nought and in vain on you.

It will show whether or no you have got inside of Mr. Fearing with all that has been said; and thus, inside of yourself. Guess, then.

How did Mr. Fearing do in Vanity Fair, do you think? To give you a clue, recollect that he was the timidest of souls. And remember how you have often been afraid to look at things in a shop window lest the shopkeeper should come out and hold you to the thing you were looking at. Remember also that you are the lifelong owners of some things just because they were thrown at your head. Remember how you sauntered into a sale on one occasion, and, out of sheer idleness and pure fun, made a bid, and to your consternation the encumbrance was knocked down to your name; and it fills up your house to-day till you would give ten times its value to some one to take it away for ever out of your sight. Well, what was it that those who were so shamelessly and so pesteringly cadging about places, and titles, and preferments, and wives, and gold, and silver, and such like--what was it they prevailed on this poor stupid countryman to cheapen and buy? Do you guess, or do you give it up? Well, Greatheart himself was again and again almost taken in; and would have been had not Mr. Fearing been beside him. But Mr. Fearing looked at all the jugglers, and cheats, and knaves, and apes, and fools as if he would have bitten a firebrand. "I thought he would have fought with all the men of the fair; I feared there we should have both been knock'd o' th' head, so hot was he against their fooleries." And then--for Greatheart was a bit of a philosopher, and liked to entertain and while the away with tracing things up to their causes--"it was all," he said, "because Mr.

Fearing was so tender of sin. He was above many tender of sin. He was so afraid, not for himself only, but of doing injury to others, that he would deny himself the purchase and possession and enjoyment even of that which was lawful, because he would not offend." "All this while," says Bunyan himself, in the eighty-

second paragraph of Grace Abounding, "as to the act of sinning I

was never more tender than now. I durst not take a pin or a stick, though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore and would smart at every touch. I could not now tell how to speak my words for fear I should misplace them." "The highest flames," says Jeremy Taylor in his Life of Christ, "are the most tremulous."

7. "But when he was come at the river where was no bridge, there, again, Mr. Fearing was in a heavy case. Now, he said, he should be drowned for ever, and so never see that Face with comfort that he had come so many miles to behold. And here also I took notice of what was very remarkable; the water of that river was lower at this time than ever I saw it in all my life, so he went over at last not much above wet-shod." Then said Christiana, "This relation of Mr.

Fearing has done me good. I thought nobody had been like me, but I

see there was some semblance betwixt this good man and I, only we differed in two things. His troubles were so great that they broke out, but mine I kept within. His also lay so hard upon him that he could not knock at the houses provided for entertainment, but my trouble was always such that it made me knock the louder." "If I

might also speak my heart," said Mercy, "I must say that something of him has also dwelt in me. For I have ever been more afraid of the lake, and the loss of a place in Paradise, than I have been of the loss of other things. Oh! thought I, may I have the happiness to have a habitation there: 'tis enough though I part with all the world to win it." Then said Matthew, "Fear was one thing that made me think that I was far from having that within me that accompanies salvation; but if it was so with such a good man as he, why may it not also go well with me?" "No fears, no grace," said James.

"Though there is not always grace where there is fear of hell; yet, to be sure, there is no grace where there is no fear of God."

"Well said, James," said Greatheart; "thou hast hit the mark, for the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom; and, to be sure, they that want the beginning have neither middle nor end." But we shall here conclude our discourse of Mr. Fearing after we have sent after him this farewell:-

"It is because Then thou didst fear, that now thou dost not fear.

Thou hast forestalled the agony, and so For thee the bitterness of death is past.

Also, because already in thy soul The judgment is begun. That day of doom, One and the same for this collected world -

That solemn consummation for all flesh, Is, in the case of each, anticipate Upon his death; and, as the last great day In the particular judgment is rehearsed, So now, too, ere thou comest to the Throne, A presage falls upon thee, as a ray Straight from the Judge, expressive of thy lot.

That calm and joy uprising in thy soul Is first-fruit to thy recompense, And heaven begun."