all his heart. He often felt guilty as he looked on them and knew in
himself that they did not have in him such a father as, God knew, he
wished he was, or ever in this world could hope to be. 'Yes,' he said,
'but I cannot take the pleasure in them that I would. I am sometimes as
if I had none. My sin sometimes drives me like a man bereft of his
reason and clean demented.' 'Who bid thee go this way to be rid of thy
burden? I beshrew him for his counsel. There is not a more troublesome
and dangerous way in the world than this is to which he hath directed
thee. And besides, though I used to have some of the same burden when I
was young, not since I settled in that town,' pointing to the town of
Carnal-Policy over the plain, 'have I been at any time troubled in that
way.' And then he went on to describe and denounce the way to the
Celestial City, and he did it like a man who had been all over it, and
had come back again. His alarming description of the upward way reads to
us like a page out of Job, or Jeremiah, or David, or Paul. 'Hear me,' he
says, 'for I am older than thou. Thou art like to meet with in the way
which thou goest wearisomeness, painfulness, hunger, perils, nakedness,
sword, lions, dragons, darkness, and in a word, death, and what not.' You
would think that you were reading the eighth of the Romans at the thirty-
fifth verse; only Mr. Worldly-Wiseman does not go on to finish the
chapter. He does not go on to add, 'I am persuaded that neither death,
nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present,
nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall
be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ our
Lord.' No; Worldly-Wiseman never reads the Romans, and he never hears a
sermon on that chapter when he goes to church.

Mr. Worldly-Wiseman became positively eloquent and impressive and all but
convincing as he went so graphically and cumulatively over all the
sorrows that attended on the way to which this pilgrim was now setting