well, for so I am. If I then have given you My hand, and have helped
you, ye ought also to help one another.' Who, then, any more will
withhold such help as it is in his power to give to a sinking brother?
And you do not need to go far afield seeking the slough of desponding,
despairing, drowning men. This whole world is full of such sloughs.
There is scarce sound ground enough in this world on which to build a
slough-watcher's tower. And after it is built, the very tower itself is
soon stained and blinded with the scudding slime. Where are your eyes,
and full of what? Do you not see sloughs full of sinking men at your
very door; ay, and inside of your best built and best kept house? Your
very next neighbour; nay, your own flesh and blood, if they have nothing
else of Greatheart's most troublesome pilgrim about them, have at least
this, that they carry about a slough with them in their own mind and in
their own heart. Have you only henceforth a heart and a hand to help,
and see if hundreds of sinking hearts do not cry out your name, and
hundreds of slimy hands grasp at your stretched-out arm. Sloughs of all
kinds of vice, open and secret; sloughs of poverty, sloughs of youthful
ignorance, temptation, and transgression; sloughs of inward gloom, family
disquiet and dispute; lonely grief; all manner of sloughs, deep and miry,
where no man would suspect them. And how good, how like Christ Himself,
and how well-pleasing to Him to lay down steps for such sliding feet, and
to lift out another and another human soul upon sound and solid ground.
'Know ye what I have done to you? For I have given you an example, that
ye should do as I have done to you. If ye know these things, happy are
ye if ye do them.'




MR. WORLDLY-WISEMAN