am so accustomed to it, that it is in vain for me to think of a reformation." From that hour, however, the reformation of this, the only actual sin to which he was addicted, began. Even to his own wonder it took place; and he who till then had not known how to speak, unless he put an oath before and another behind, to make his words have authority, discovered that he could speak better and more pleasantly without such expletives than he had ever done before.

Soon afterwards he fell in company with a poor man, who talked to him concerning religion and the Scriptures in a manner which took his attention, and sent him to his Bible. He began to take great pleasure in reading it, especially the historical parts; the Epistles he says he "could not away with, being as yet ignorant both of the corruption of our nature, and of the want and worth of Christ to save us.' And this produced such a change in his whole deportment, that his neighbours took him to be a new man, and were amazed at his conversion from prodigious profaneness to a moral and religious life. They began to speak well of him, both to his face and behind his back, and he was well pleased at having obtained and, as he thought, deserved their good opinion. And yet, he says, "I was nothing but a poor painted hypocrite,-I did all I did either to be seen of, or to be well spoken of, by men. I knew not Christ, nor Grace, nor Faith, nor Hope; and, as I have well seen since, had I then died, my state had been most fearful.”

Bunyan had formerly taken great delight in bell-ringing; but now that his conscience "began to be tender," he thought it "a vain practice," in other words, a sin; yet he so hankered after this his old exercise, that though he durst not pull a rope himself, he would go and look at the ringers, not without a secret feeling that to do so was unbecoming the religious character which he now professed. A fear came upon him that one of the bells might fall: to secure himself against such an accident, he stood under a beam that lay athwart the steeple, from side to side; but his apprehensions being once awakened, he then considered that the bell might fall with a swing, hit the wall first, rebound, and so strike him in its descent. Upon this he retired to the steeple-door, thinking himself safe enough there; for if the bell should fall, he could slip out. Farther than the door

H

he did not venture, nor did he long continue to think himself secure there; for the next fancy which possessed him was that the steeple itself might fall; and this so possessed him and so shook his mind that he dared not stand at the door longer, but fled for fear the tower should come down upon him,-to such a state of nervous weakness had a diseased feeling brought his strong body and strong mind.—The last amusement from which he weaned himself was that of dancing; it was a full year before he could quite leave that: but in so doing, and in anything in which he thought he was performing his duty, he had such peace of mind, such satisfaction, that—-" to relate it," he says, "in mine own way, I thought no man in England could please God better than I.-Poor wretch as I was, I was all this while ignorant of Jesus Christ, and going about to establish my own righteousness, and had perished therein, had not God in mercy showed me more of my state by nature."

Mr. Scott, in the Life of Bunyan prefixed to his edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, says it is not advisable to recapitulate those impressions which constitute a large part of his religious experience. But Bunyan's character would be imperfectly understood, and could not be justly appreciated, if this part of his history were kept out of sight. To respect him as he deserves, to admire him as he ought to be admired, it is necessary that we should be informed not only of the coarseness and brutality of his youth, but of the extreme ignorance out of which he worked his way, and the stage of burning enthusiasm through which he passed, a passage not less terrible than that of his own Pilgrim in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.* His ignorance, like the brutal manners from which he had now been reclaimed, was the consequence of his low station in life; but the enthusiasm which then succeeded, was brought on by the circumstances of an age in

[We are much of the opinion thus forcibly expressed. The history of a man so distinguished by natural talents as Bunyan is connected with that of his age, nor can we so well conceive the dangers of fanaticism, as when we behold the struggles of so pure and so powerful a spirit involved in its toils. It may be easily supposed that of those around him there were many who fell into the same temptations, and struggled with them in vain; and that in not a few instances the doctrine which summoned all men to the exercise of the private judgment, as it was called, led the way to the wildest, most blasphemous, and most fatal excesses. Don Quixote's Balsam was not a more perilous medicine.-SIR WALTER SCOTT, Quar. Rev. vol. xliii. p. 475.]

which hypocrisy was regnant, and fanaticism rampant throughout the land. "We intended not," says Baxter, "to dig down the banks, or pull up the hedge and lay all waste and common, when we desired the prelate's tyranny might cease."

No; for the intention had been under the pretext of abating one tyranny, to establish a far severer and more galling in its stead: in doing this, the banks had been thrown down, and the hedge destroyed; and while the bestial herd who broke in rejoiced in the havock, Baxter and other such erring though good men stood marvelling at the mischief which never could have been effected if they had not mainly assisted in it. The wildest opinions of every kind were abroad, "divers and strange doctrines" with every wind of which, men having no longer an anchor whereby to hold were carried about and tossed to and fro. They passed with equal facility from strict puritanism to the utmost licence of practical and theoretical impiety, as antinomians or as atheists; and from extreme profligacy to extreme superstition in any of its forms. The poor man by whose conversation Bunyan was first led into "some love and liking of religion," and induced to read the Bible and delight in it, became a Ranter, wallowed in his sins as one who was secure in his privilege of election; and finally, having corrupted his heart, perverted his reason, and seared his conscience, laughed at his former professions, persuaded himself that there was neither a future state for man, nor a God to punish or to save him, and told Bunyan that he had gone through all religions, and in this persuasion had fallen upon the right at last!

Some of the Ranters' books were put into Bunyan's hands. Their effect was to perplex him: he read in them, and thought upon them, and betook himself properly and earnestly thus to prayer "Lord, I am not able to know the truth from error: leave me not to my own blindness, either to approve of or condemn this doctrine. If it be of God, let me not despise it; if it be of the devil, let me not embrace it. Lord, I lay my soul in this matter only at thy feet; let me not be deceived, I humbly beseech thee!" And he was not deceived; for though he fell in with many persons who, from a strict profession of religion, had persuaded themselves that, having now attained to the perfection of the Saints, they were discharged from all obligations

of morality, and nothing which it might please them to do would be accounted to them as sin, neither their evil arguments nor their worse example infected him. "Oh," he 66 says, these temptations were suitable to my flesh, I being but a young man, and my nature in its prime; but God, who had, as I hope, designed me for better things, kept me in the fear of his name, and did not suffer me to accept such cursed principles. And blessed be God who put it in my heart to cry to him to be kept and directed, still distrusting mine own wisdom.”

These people could neither corrupt his conscience nor impose upon his understanding; he had no sympathies with them. But one day when he was tinkering in the streets of Bedford, he overheard three or four poor women, who as they sat at a door in the sunshine were conversing about their own spiritual state. He was himself "a brisk talker in the matter of religion," but these persons were in their discourse "far above his reach." Their talk was about a new birth,-how they were convinced of their miserable state by nature,-how God had visited their souls with his love in the Lord Jesus,--with what words and promises they had been refreshed and supported against the temptations of the devil,-how they had been afflicted under the assaults of the enemy, and how they had been borne up; and of their own wretchedness of heart, and of their unbelief, and the insufficiency of their own righteousness. "Methought," says Bunyan, "they spake as if you did make them speak. They spake with such pleasantness of Scripture language, and with such appearance of grace in all they said, that they were to me as if they had found a new world, as if they were 'people that dwelt alone, and were not to be reckoned among their neighbours.' He felt his own heart shake as he heard them; and when he turned away and went about his employment again, their talk went with him, for he had heard enough to convince him that he "wanted the true tokens of a true godly man," and to convince him also of the blessed condition of him that was indeed one.

He made it his business therefore frequently to seek the conversation of these women. They were members of a small Baptist congregation, which a Kentish man, John Gifford by name, had formed at Bedford. Gifford's history is remarkable: he had been a major in the king's army, and continuing true to

the cause after the ruin of his party, engaged in the insurrection of his loyal countrymen, for which he and eleven others were condemned to the gallows. On the night before the intended execution, his sister came to visit him: she found the sentinels who kept the door asleep, and she urged him to take the opportunity of escaping, which he alone of the prisoners was able to attempt, for his companions had stupified themselves with drink. Gifford passed safely through the sleeping guard, got into the field, lay there some three days in a ditch till the great search for him was over, then by help of his friends was conveyed in disguise to London, and afterwards into Bedfordshire, where as long as the danger continued he was harboured by certain royalists of rank in that county. When concealment was no longer necessary, he came as a stranger to Bedford, and there practised physic; for in those days they who took upon themselves the cure of bodies seem to have entered upon their practice with as little scruple concerning their own qualifications for it as they who undertook the cure of souls: if there was but a sufficient stock of boldness to begin with, it sufficed for the one that they were needy, for the others that they were enthusiastic.

Gifford was at that time leading a profligate and reckless life, like many of his fellow-sufferers whose fortunes had been wrecked in the general calamity; he was a great drinker, a gambler, and oaths came from his lips with habitual profaneness. Some of his actions are indeed said to have evinced as much extravagance of mind as wickedness of heart; and he hated the Puritans so heartily for the misery which they had brought upon the nation, and upon himself in particular, that he often thought of killing a certain Anthony Harrington, for no other provocation than because he was a leading man among persons of that description in Bedford. For a heart and mind thus diseased there is but one cure; and that cure was vouchsafed at a moment when his bane seemed before him. He had lost one night about fifteen pounds in gambling; a large sum for one so circumstanced the loss made him furious: and "many desperate thoughts against God" arose in him, when looking into one of the books of Robert Bolton, what he read in it startled him into a sense of his own condition. He continued some weeks under the weight of that feeling; and when it passed away, it left him