I

There is always a peculiar pleasure in visiting those places about which there hang wealthy clusters of historic associations. Who does not love to explore old battlefields, to poke about the ruins of crumbling castles and to gaze upon the landscapes that have been consecrated by the great struggles and hoary traditions of golden days gone by? And the delight of such an experience is enhanced when the scenery is as enchanting as that amidst which I passed this afternoon. I took a stroll from the gates of the Palace Beautiful down the Valley of Humiliation, as far as the monument that stands near Forgetful Green to mark the spot on which Christian vanquished Apollyon. I could find none of those marks of the conflict to which Greatheart drew Christiana’s attention; but what could I expect? I am, I think, to be congratulated on having located the site of the Palace, only some scattered vestiges of which now remain, and on having been able to trace the road down to Forgetful Green. As a matter of fact, it is not now a green at all. Not a blade of grass is to be seen. It has been cut up for settlement, and is smothered with roads and residences. The monument is still there, although the inscription has perished, and few of the people in the district seem to know its story. Some surprises were in store for me. That is the beauty of visiting such places. Your preconceived notion of the event has to be remodelled. You find that things cannot have been just as you had pictured them. You are compelled to rearrange the details in your fancy in order to make them suit the lie of the land. In this connection I may say that I had that experience this afternoon.

I had no idea, for example, until I visited the scene, that the conflict with Apollyon took place so near to the Palace Beautiful; and I had never before grasped the essential connection between the two places, To my astonishment I discovered to-day that the one spot is within sight of the other. The monument can just be seen from the Palace. From the pretty lattice window of the quiet little chamber whose name was Peace — the Chamber in which the spent pilgrim slept so soundly — a watcher could have seen the whole of that grim conflict in the valley. And, from the monument, you can distinctly make out the hill on which the Palace stood. Christian was probably too much engrossed in his terrible combat to notice it; or else he might have caught occasional glimpses, over his antagonist’s shoulder, of the turrets and windows of the lovely place in which he had been so royally welcomed and so hospitably entertained.

II

I saw this afternoon, as I have never seen before, the absolutely vital part that the Sisters of the Palace — Discretion, Piety, Charity, and Prudence — took in the fearful combat. When Christian reached the Palace he was at the fag end of everything. He was weary, spent, famished, and exhausted. Supposing there had been no Palace Beautiful! Supposing there had been no gracious sisterhood to entertain him! The thought makes one shudder. He would have been compelled to struggle on along the road down which I passed this afternoon and would have fallen, unarmed and unprepared, into the hands of his frightful foe! Until you have actually visited the place, you do not realize all this. In the story, as Bunyan naively tells it, the peaceful scenes in the Palace do not directly relate themselves to the deadly combat later on. The Sisters did not even mention to their happy guest the awful struggle in which they knew that he would so soon be engaged. Yet, but for them, the pilgrim must have been destroyed as soon as he left the Palace grounds, and must have left his bones to bleach in the darksome vale near by. For it was by them that he had been rested, refreshed, strengthened, instructed, and equipped. The very last room into which they took him was the armoury. ‘And when he came there they harnessed him from head to foot with what was of proof, lest perhaps he should meet with assaults in the way.’ And there they buckled to his belt that redoubtable sword, with its two sharp edges, with which he subsequently vanquished his foe. Even then they were loth to leave him. They accompanied him down the hill, and, when at length they turned back, they gave him a loaf of bread and a flagon of wine to carry with him on his journey. And it was well for him that they did. For, although he was victorious over his dread antagonist, he was so utterly spent that, but for that sustaining bread and stimulating flagon, he might have perished afterward from sheer exhaustion.

In his Anselm of Canterbury, Mr. J. M. Rigg tells a pretty story of Anselm’s escape from his father’s home in the valley of Aosta. On his way to the monastery of Bec under Lanfranc, which he hoped to enter, he found himself without food or water in high Alpine solitudes. He and his companion had vainly searched every corner of their baggage for a morsel of bread, and were trying to assuage their misery by filling their mouths with snow. In a frenzy of despair, Anselm opened his ransacked wallet once more — perhaps delirium was beginning to creep over him — and, to his amazement, he saw in it a white loaf made of the finest flour. It was small, but it sufficed to keep life within the travellers until the snowfields had been left behind. It was thus that the Sisters of the Palace Beautiful forefancied and forestalled the desperate necessities of the lonely pilgrim. All this occurred to me this afternoon as I sauntered down the valley. I stood on a grassy knoll and glanced back along the road by which the pilgrims used to travel. And, standing there, I caught myself cogitating this suggestive question. If the Sisters of the Palace Beautiful had never shown Christian such charming hospitality, where else could the exhausted pilgrim have been rested and refreshed in preparation for the impending conflict? If they had failed to arm him with helmet and with breastplate, with sword and with shield, who else would have equipped him for that terrible encounter? If they had forgotten to furnish his wallet with the loaf of bread and the flagon of wine that so revived him when he lay, wounded and spent, upon the ground, who else would have moistened his lips in the hour of his extremity? To these questions there is no answer.

III

If, as all the teachers say, the Palace Beautiful is Bunyan’s picture of the church, I suppose that the loaf of bread and the flagon of wine represent the church’s unrecorded and unconscious ministry. The Sisters never saw how much help and comfort these gifts afforded. They knew that the armour would be essential and it was part of their business to equip the pilgrims in that way. But the loaf of bread and the flagon of wine was a kind of extra; a morsel of womanly thought fulness in taking farewell of their guest. It would at least have a sacramental value. As he sat beside the road, eating the bread and quaffing the wine, the pilgrim would think fondly of the hospitalities and hostesses of the Palace. There is always something sacramental about the law of association, I chanced only this morning on a story of a little orphan boy who was being taken to a new and untried home among strangers. His family had been of the very poor. The father had died several years before, and the mother battled against want and failing health, striving as best she might to provide for herself and her child. Now death had taken her also ; there were no relatives to care for the boy, and a place had therefore been found for him with a family in the country. It was a ride of several miles to the strange home, and the- farmer who had agreed to transport him thither noticed that the little fellow sitting so shyly beside him in the great wagon often thrust his hand into his worn blouse as if to make sure of some treasure. Curiosity at last prompted the man to ask what it was. He had shown the boy frequent kindnesses during the journey, and was now repaid by the timid confidence of his young companion.

‘It’s just a piece of mother’s dress,’ he said. ‘When I get kind — kind o’ lonesome — I like to feel it. ‘Most seems ’sif she — wasn’t so far off.’

The same law meets us at every turn; and the Sisters knew that, wherever the body of the pilgrim might be when he ate of the bread and drank of the wine, his soul would be fcack in the Palace Beautiful. This, I say, the Sisters, womanwise, must have anticipated. But they can never have imagined that their parting gift of the loaf and the flagon would have saved the pilgrim’s life in his hour of sorest stress and direst need. I suppose that Bunyan meant that the church projects her gracious influences far beyond her own walls. In the hour of their distress, those wayfarers who have gone forth from her shelter derive succour from her earlier ministries and bless her in their pain.

IV

Only those who have watched the daughters of the Orient grinding corn into flour between their heavy stones know how sacramental a thing is that loaf of bread that the Sisters slipped into the pilgrim’s wallet. The golden corn is the life and laughter of the fruitful field; it is cut down and thrashed out and crushed to powder in order that hungry men may live. Only those who have watched the sons of the east treading the crimson winepress know how sacramental a thing is that flagon of wine that the Sisters handed to their departing guest. The wealthy and luscious clusters are the exuberance of nature, the bounty of the fertile plains, the pride of earth’s sunniest climes; they are torn off, and thrown into the pit, and trampled underfoot that their lifeblood may stimulate the flagging energies and exhilarate the drooping spirits of the fainting sons of men. The corn gives its body and the grapes give their blood that men may live by their death. Among all the myriad marvels of hillside and valley there is nothing in this sacramental world quite as sacramental as that loaf of bread and that flagon of wine. Now let me think.

V

A loaf of bread and a flagon of wine! When, after his conflict, Christian lay upon the grass, sore wounded and completely spent, he ate of the bread and drank of the wine that the Sisters of the Palace Beautiful had slipped into his wallet. And, straight-away, he was refreshed and revived and went on his way. It is always by means of the bread and the wine that the healing virtues come. Under instructions from their Lord, the Sisters of the Palace Beautiful still dispense the sacred bread and the holy wine, and tell its mystic meaning. There is nothing so soothing to a suffering soul as the story of a suffering Saviour. Dereliction is strangely comforted by Gethsemane. The Son of God hung upon a tree, and the leaves of that tree are for the healing of the nations. Tell a stricken world of a stricken Redeemer — stricken, smitten of God and afflicted — and that stricken world feels instinctively that the Holiest is not remote from the lowliest

Never a heartache, never a groan,
Never a teardrop, never a moan,
Never a danger, but there, on the Throne
Moment by moment, He feels for His own.

A loaf of bread and a flagon of wine! He took a loaf of bread and, breaking it, said: ‘Take, eat, this is my body that is broken for you, broken for you!’

A loaf of bread and a flagon of wine! He took a flagon of wine and, pouring it out, said, ‘Drink ye all of it; this is my blood that is shed for you, shed for you!’

A loaf of bread and a flagon of wine! There is wondrous virtue for a wounded world in a loaf of bread and a flagon of wine; and I was glad to have the fact brought home to me afresh as I stood beside the crumbling monument at Forgetful Green this afternoon.