Transcribed from the 1894 Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier edition byDavid Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
BUNYAN CHARACTERS—SECOND SERIES
Lectures delivered in St. George’s Free Church Edinburgh
By Alexander Whyte, D.D.
IGNORANCE
“I was alive without the law once.”—Paul.
“I was now a brisk talker also myself in the matter of religion.”—Bunyan.
This is a new kind of pilgrim. There are not many pilgrimslike this bright brisk youth. A few more young gentlemen likethis, and the pilgrimage way would positively soon become fashionableand popular, and be the thing to do. Had you met with this younggentleman in society, had you noticed him beginning to come about yourchurch, you would have lost no time in finding out who he was. I can well believe it, you would have replied. Indeed, I feltsure of it. I must ask him to the house. I was quite struckwith his appearance and his manners. Yes; ask him at once to yourhouse; show him some pointed attentions and you will never regret it. For if he goes to the bar and works even decently at his cases, he willbe first a sheriff and then a judge in no time. If he should taketo politics, he will be an under-secretary before his first parliamentis out. And if he takes to the church, which is not at all unlikely,our West-end congregations will all be competing for him as their juniorcolleague; and, if he elects either of our Established churches to exercisehis profession in it, he will have dined with Her Majesty while halfof his class-fellows are still half-starved probationers. Societyfathers will point him out with anger to their unsuccessful sons, andsociety mothers will smile under their eyelids as they see him hangingover their daughters.
Well, as this handsome and well-appointed youth stepped out of hisown neat little lane into the rough road on which our two pilgrims werestaggering upward, he felt somewhat ashamed to be seen in their company. And I do not wonder. For a greater contrast you would not haveseen on any road in all that country that day. He was at yourvery first sight of him a gentleman and the son of a gentleman. A little over-dressed perhaps; as, also, a little lofty to the two ratherbattered but otherwise decent enough men who, being so much older thanhe, took the liberty of first accosting him. “Brisk”is his biographer’s description of him. Feather-headed,flippant, and almost impudent, you might have been tempted to say ofhim had you joined the little party at that moment. But thosetwo tumbled, broken-winded, and, indeed, broken-hearted old men hadbeen, as an old author says, so emptied from vessel to vessel—theyhad had a life of such sloughs and stiff climbs—they had beenin hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness so often—that it wasno wonder that their dandiacal companion walked on a little ahead ofthem. ‘Gentlemen,’ his fine clothes and his cane andhis head in the air all said to his two somewhat disreputable-lookingfellow-travellers,—“Gentlemen, you be utter strangers tome: I know you not. And, besides, I take my pleasure in walkingalone, even more a great deal than in company, unless I like it better.” But all his society manners, and all his costly and well-kept clothes,and all his easy and self-confident airs did not impose upon the twowary old pilgrims. They had seen too much of the world, and hadbeen too long mixing among all kinds of pilgrims, young and old, trueand false, to be easily imposed upon. Besides, as one could seefrom their weather-beaten faces, and their threadbare garments, theyhad found the upward way so dreadfully difficult that they both felta real apprehension as to the future of this light-hearted and light-headedyouth. “You may find some difficulty at the gate,”so