"THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS" UP TO DATE

I wonder how many of you have read a very clever and very keen satire upon religious life to-day, written by an American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, entitled “The Celestial Railroad.” He tells us how once, in a dream, he visited the City of Destruc- tion, and he found that now there had been opened from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City a railroad, and things were greatly changed, changed for the greater comfort and convenience of the pilgrims. Instead of the quaking morasses of the Slough of Despond there was good, firm ground.

No pilgrim need carry his burden upon his back, there were arrangements made for relieving pilgrims from all such needless incumbrances. As for the Hill Difficulty, why, they had tunnelled it, and the Valley of Humiliation had been filled up with the débris. And when he reached Vanity Fair, he found that now, instead of the old feuds between the pilgrims and those that dwell in Vanity Fair, a perfectly good understanding had been arrived at.

Trade was brisk between them that dwell there and the pilgrims. Nay, indeed, the Lord of the Town was himself the chief supporter of the railroad. It brought so much traffic to the place. And the chief nobles were the main stock-holders in the railroad.

There was wisdom under the satire and deepest piercing truth that some of us would do well to take home unto ourselves. Nay, you know that the friendship of the world is enmity with God. Go to, go to, we say; should not the Church and the world go into partnership? Time was when the old distinction between the Church and the world had blood in it.

It was real. For then things were black or they were white; to-day they shade off into a sort of neutral grey, and now the wisest cannot tell where the world ends and the Church begins (James iv.

4).-DR. W. L. WATKINSON.