6. Now, do you think you could guess how Mr. Fearing conducted himself
in Vanity Fair? Your guess is important to us and to you to-night; for
it will show whether or no John Bunyan and Mr. 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 life-long
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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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