Let us shake up Simple first and ask him what it was that laid him so
soon and in such a plight and in such company in this bottom. It was not
that which from his name we might at first think it was. It was not the
weakness of his intellects, nor his youth, nor his inexperience. There
is danger enough, no doubt, in all these things if they are not carefully
attended to, but none of all these things in themselves, nor all of them
taken together, will lay any pilgrim by the heels. There must be more
than mere and pure simplicity. No blame attaches to a simple mind, much
less to an artless and an open heart. We do not blame such a man even
when we pity him. We take him, if he will let us, under our care, or we
put him under better care, but we do not anticipate any immediate ill to
him so long as he remains simple in mind, untainted in heart, and willing
to learn. But, then, unless he is better watched over than any young man
or young woman can well be in this world, that simplicity and
child-likeness and inexperience of his may soon become a fatal snare to
him. There is so much that is not simple and sincere in this world;
there is so much falsehood and duplicity; there are so many men abroad
whose endeavour is to waylay, mislead, entrap, and corrupt the simple-
minded and the inexperienced, that it is next to impossible that any
youth or maiden shall long remain in this world both simple and safe
also. My son, says the Wise Man, keep my words, and lay up my
commandments with thee. For at the window of my house I looked through
my casement, and beheld among the simple ones, I discerned among the
youths, a young man void of understanding;--and so on,--till a dart
strike through his liver, and he goeth as an ox to the slaughter. And
so, too often in our own land, the maiden in her simplicity also opens
her ear to the promises and vows and oaths of the flatterer, till she
loses both her simplicity and her soul, and lies buried in that same
bottom beside Sloth and Presumption.
It is not so much his small mind and his weak understanding that is the
fatal danger of their possessor, it is his imbecile way of treating his
small mind. In our experience of him we cannot get him, all we can do,
to read an instructive book. We cannot get him to attend our young men's
class with all the baits and traps we can set for him. Where does he
spend his Sabbath-day and week-day evenings? We cannot find out until we
hear some distressing thing about him, that, ten to one, he would have
escaped had he been a reader of good books, or a student with us, say, of
Dante and Bunyan and Rutherford, and a companion of those young men and
young women who talk about and follow such intellectual tastes and
pursuits. Now, if you are such a young man or young woman as that, or
such an old man or old woman, you will not be able to understand what in
the world Bunyan can mean by saying that he saw you in his dream fast
asleep in a bottom with irons on your heels. No; for to understand the
_Pilgrim's Progress_, beyond a nursery and five-year-old understanding of
it, you must have worked and studied and suffered your way out of your
mental and spiritual imbecility. You must have for years attended to
what is taught from the pulpit and the desk, and, alongside of that, you
must have made a sobering and solemnising application of it all to your
own heart. And then you would have seen and felt that the heels of your
mind and of your heart are only too firmly fettered with the irons of
ignorance and inexperience and self-complacency. But as it is, if you
would tell the truth, you would say to us what Simple said to Christian,
I see no danger. The next time that John Bunyan passed that bottom, the
chains had been taken off the heels of this sleeping fool and had been
put round his neck.