keeps, and is designed by God to keep our hearts up amid the labours and
the faintings, the hopes and the fears of the spiritual life. All that
keeps us at the least and the worst above famine and beggary. Now, the
whole pity with Little-Faith was, that though he was not a bad man, yet
he never, even at his best days, had much of those things that make a
good and well-furnished pilgrim; and what little he had he had now clean
lost. He had never been much a reader of his Bible; he had never sat
over it as other men sat over their news-letters and their romances. He
had never had much taste or talent for spiritual books of any kind. He
was a good sort of man, but he was not exactly the manner of man on whose
broken heart the Holy Ghost sets the broad seal of heaven. But for his
dreadful misadventure, he might have plodded on, a decent, humdrum,
commonplace, everyday kind of pilgrim; but when that catastrophe fell on
him he had nothing to fall back upon. The secret ways of faith and love
and hope were wholly unknown to him. He had no practice in importunate
prayer. He had never prayed a whole night all his life. He had never
needed to do so. For were we not told when we first met him what a
blameless and pure and true and good man he had always been? He did not
know how to find his way about in his Bible; and as for the maps and
guide-books that some pilgrims never let out of their hand, even when he
had some spending money about him, he never laid it out that way. And a
more helpless pilgrim than Little-Faith was all the rest of the way you
never saw. He was forced to beg as he went, says his historian. That is
to say, he had to lean upon and look to wiser and better-furnished men
than himself. He had to share their meals, look to them to pay his
bills, keep close to their company, walk in their foot-prints, and at
night borrow their oil, and it was only in this poor dependent way that
Little-Faith managed to struggle on to the end of his dim and joyless
journey.