'How now, good fellow? Whither away after this burdened manner?' What a
contrast those two men were to one another in the midst of that plain
that day! Our pilgrim was full of the most laborious going; sighs and
groans rose out of his heart at every step; and then his burden on his
back, and his filthy, slimy rags all made him a picture such that it was
to any man's credit and praise that he should stop to speak to him. And
then, when our pilgrim looked up, he saw a gentleman standing beside him
to whom he was ashamed to speak. For the gentleman had no burden on his
back, and he did not go over the plain laboriously. There was not a spot
or a speck, a rent or a wrinkle on all his fine raiment. He could not
have been better appointed if he had just stepped out of the gate at the
head of the way; they can wear no cleaner garments than his in the
Celestial City itself. 'How now, good fellow? Whither away after this
burdened manner?' 'A burdened manner, indeed, as ever I think poor
creature had. And whereas you ask me whither away, I tell you, sir, I am
going to yonder wicket gate before me; for there, as I am informed, I
shall be put into a way to be rid of my heavy burden.' 'Hast thou a wife
and children?' Yes; he is ashamed to say that he has. But he confesses
that he cannot to-day take the pleasure in them that he used to do. Since
his sin so came upon him, he is sometimes as if he had neither wife nor
child nor a house over his head. John Bunyan was of Samuel Rutherford's
terrible experience,--that our sins and our sinfulness poison all our
best enjoyments. We do not hear much of Rutherford's wife and children,
and that, no doubt, for the sufficient reason that he gives us in his so
open-minded letter. But Bunyan laments over his blind child with a
lament worthy to stand beside the lament of David over Absalom, and again
over Saul and Jonathan at Mount Gilboa. At the same time, John Bunyan
often felt sore and sad at heart that he could not love and give all his
heart to his wife and children as they deserved to be loved and to have