say, if anything arises to vex or thwart or disappoint them with their
church, they incontinently pull up their roots and their religion with
it, and transplant both to any other church that for the time better
pleases them, or to no church at all. Others, again, have all their
religiosity rooted in their family life. Their religion is all made up
of domestic sentiment. They love their earthly home with that supreme
satisfaction and that all-absorbing affection that truly religious men
entertain for their heavenly home. And thus it is that when anything
happens to disturb or break up their earthly home their rootless
religiosity goes with it. Other men's religion, again, and all their
interest in it, is rooted in their shop; you can make them anything or
nothing in religion, according as you do or do not do business in their
shop. Companionship, also, accounts for the fluctuations of many men's,
and almost all women's, religious lives. If they happen to fall in with
godly lovers and friends, they are sincerely godly with them; but if
their companions are indifferent or hostile to true religion, they
gradually fall into the same temper and attitude. We sometimes see
students destined for the Christian ministry also with all their religion
so without root in themselves that a session in an unsympathetic class, a
sceptical book, sometimes just a sneer or a scoff, will wither all the
promise of their coming service. And so on through the whole of human
life. He that hath not the root of the matter in himself dureth for a
while, but by and by, for one reason or another, he is sure to be
offended.

So much, then,--not enough, nor good enough--for our Lord's swift stroke
at the heart of His hearers. But let us now pass on to Pliable, as he so
soon and so completely discovers himself to us under John Bunyan's so
skilful hand. Look well at our author's speaking portrait of a
well-known man in Bedford who had no root in himself, and who, as a