Christ would not forgive me, nor pardon my transgressions. Then I fell to musing on this also ;-and whilst I was thinking of it, and fearing it should be so, I felt my heart sink in despair; concluding it was too late."-Southey's Life.

There was nothing to warrant this conclusion, even in the supposed frowns or threatenings of Christ. "Some grievous punishment,” was all that they suggested to Bunyan, whilst he gazed on these vivid embodyings of his own fears. It was not until he began to muse on them, that he plunged into despair. They were all quite over and gone before he began to muse. His rash conclusions were, I grant, very rapid: not, however, unnaturally so. Such thunder usually follows hard after swift lightning, and rolls both longer and farther than the flash indicates. Penrose understood the rapid movements of Despair, when he sang :

"Drawn by her pencil, the Creator stands,

(His beams of Mercy thrown aside) With thunder arming his uplifted hands, And hurling Vengeance wide.

Hope, at the sight aghast, affrighted flies,

And dashed on Terror's rocks, Faith's last dependence dies."

Accordingly, when Bunyan mused until he despaired, he soon became desperate. "Concluding it was too late, I resolved to go on in sin: for, thought I, if the case be thus, my state is surely miserable; miserable if I leave my sins; (see how he forgets the first words suggested to him by the Holy Spirit!) and but miserable if I follow them." Now he perverts the divine conviction! What, I ask, could be expected, but that this process of reasoning should end in the horrid conclusion, "I can but be damned; and if I must be so, I had as good be damned for many sins, as for few." Awful as this is, it is not very uncommon. I have known many instances of it. Bunyan himself, although the recollection of it shocked him to the very end of his life, had ceased to wonder at it before he recorded it. "I am very confident," he says, "that this temptation of the

Devil is more usual among poor creatures than many are aware of; even to overrun the spirits with a scurvy and seired frame of heart, and a benumbing of conscience; which frame he stilly and slyly supplieth with such despair, that, though not much guilt attendeth such, yet they have continually a secret conclusion within them, that there is no hope for them; for they have loved sins, therefore after them they will go." He confirms his opinion by quoting the following texts :-" But thou saidst, There is no Hope: no, for I have loved strangers, and after them I will go.' "And they said, There is no Hope: but we will walk every one after our own devices, and we will every one do the imagination of his evil heart."-Jer. ii. 25; xviii. 12.

It is worthy of notice, that Bunyan, although horrorstruck by the vision, had pride or self-command enough to keep silence all the time. He was unable to hold his Cat; but he held his peace. Not a word betrayed the cause of his sudden stop from playing. "I stood," he says, "in the midst of my play before all my companions; but yet I told them nothing. They wondered, no doubt, to see their ringleader drop his Cat, and stand stock-still. He saw that wonder in their looks, and was too proud to confess his secret. He could not look so bold or calm as they did; but he did not own himself crest-fallen. He could not brook the idea of seeming a coward or craven, before those who had always seen him the master-spirit of their revels and blasphemy. His expression, "I told them nothing," tells us a great deal!

It was some such considerations, I have no doubt, that kept him silent. He saw at a glance, that his fame would be gone for ever, and his leadership lost, if he breathed his fears or his forebodings upon the village green. He knew that he would be twitted and taunted by the only companions he had, for allowing himself to be frightened by "our Parson," in the morning. All this had more weight with him at the time, than he himself suspected when he

wrote the emphatic words, "I told them nothing." It was that they might discover nothing, and suspect but little, that he rushed "desperately to his sport again.”

This, also, is no uncommon thing, even amongst young men who have far more literary and social resources to fall back upon than the Tinker had; and much stronger family reasons for quitting the chair of the scorner and the haunts of the wild. Many "keep it up," as they phrase it, because they would be laughed at if they let it down. O, how

"The world's dread laugh"

can bind young men to the chariot-wheels of some dashing Leader of vice or vanity, although he himself is just as much bound to his chariot by the same laugh, as they are to its wheels! They are afraid of his jibes, and he is afraid of their scorn and thus both keep it up, although both are often sick of each other. I knew, in early life, an old man, the oracle of a village, who seemed inspired with new life from day to day, as he spread Infidelity amongst raw lads. I wondered at his apparent hilarity. After a time, I heard that he was dying. I went to see him. He had swallowed poison, and was cursing both himself and his dupes for their folly. It was an awful scene! I succeeded, however, in saving his life, by forcing him to swallow tar-water. He said, that he would unsay all his old maxims before his young dupes. But he never did. I had to tell them the tale of horror. He recovered, only to drink and speculate. They soon rallied their spirits, to laugh at the tar-water.

CHAPTER V.

BUNYAN'S SECOND REFORMATION.

BUNYAN'S first reformation, as we have seen, did not amount to much, nor last long. He turned over a new leaf, and but one leaf; and that he soon turned back to its old place; for he seems neither to have gone to Church again, nor to have read with his wife, for some time, after he determined to "go on in sinning."

This will not be wondered at, when the form of that determination is read. We have seen that he returned desperately to his sport on the green, when his pride rallied his spirits. This he did, he says, under a "kind of despair," which possessed his soul with a persuasion, that he "could never attain to other comfort, than that which sinning could furnish. This would have been an ensnaring temptation to any man. To Bunyan it was an inflaming one. It set on fire the whole course of his nature. "Heaven was gone," he says; "wherefore I found within me a great desire to take my fill of sin still studying what sin was yet to be committed, that I might taste the sweetness of it. And I made as much haste as I could to fill my belly with its delicacies, lest I should die before 1 had my desires for that I greatly feared."

This is as explicit as it is awful. And yet, Dr. Southey says, that swearing was "the only actual sin to which he was addicted!" Bunyan himself says of the preceding confession, "In these things, I protest before God, I lie

not; neither do I frame this sort of speech. These were really, strongly, and with all my heart, my desires. The good Lord, whose mercy is unsearchable, forgive my transgressions! Now, therefore, I went on in sin with great greediness of mind; still grudging that I could not be satisfied with it as I would."

Now, although Bunyan often calls vanities, vices; and follies, sins; and sinful desires, transgressions; both his sense and Saxon are too good to allow such a confession to be interpreted of swearing only. I know that it does not mean sensuality, nor habitual drunkenness; but I am quite sure that it means more than swearing, or even than blaspheming. It means theft also: petty, it may be; but still theft. Hence, when his conscience became tender, he says, "I durst not take a pin or stick, though but so big as a straw; for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch." In like manner, one of the first compliments paid to him on his reformation, by his neighbours, was, that "now he had become a truly honest man." Thus he had not been distinguished for honesty before. Tinker-like, he had, no doubt, taken so many stakes from the hedges, and stray fowls from the farms, that neither the farmers nor their wives would have countersigned the assertion of Dr. Southey, that "swearing was his only actual sin."

But, whatever the confession included, Bunyan says, "This did continue with me about a month or more; but one day, as I was standing at a neighbour's shop-window, cursing and swearing, and playing the mad-man, after my wonted manner, there sat within, the woman of the house, and heard me; who, though she was a very loose ungodly wretch" (in this all the old accounts of her agree), "yet protested, I swore and cursed at that most fearful rate, that she was made to tremble to hear me: and told me farther, that I was the ungodliest fellow for swearing that she ever heard in all her life; and that I, by thus doing,