in a modern ear like a cracked bell. We have grown so accustomed to them as a cant, that we can hardly believe that they ever stood for sincere convictions. Yet these forms were once alive with the profoundest of all moral truths-a truth not of a narrow theology, but which lies at the very bottom of the well, at the fountain-head of human morality; namely, that a man who would work out his salvation must cast out self, though he rend his heartstrings in doing it: not love of self-indulgence only, but self-applause, self-confidence, self-conceit and vanity, desire or expectation of reward; self in all the subtle ingenuities with which it winds about the soul. In one dialect or another, he must recognize that he is himself a poor creature not worth thinking of, or he will not take the first step towards excellence in any single thing which he undertakes.

Bunyan left the women and went about his work, but their talk went with him. "He was greatly affected." "He saw that he wanted the true tokens of a godly man." He sought them out, and spoke with them again and again. He could not stay away; and the more he went, the more he questioned his condition.

"I found two things," he says, "at which I did sometimes marvel, considering what a blind, ungodly wretch but just before I was; one, a great softness and tenderness of heart, which caused me to fall under the conviction of what, by Scripture, they asserted; the other, a great bending of my mind to a continual meditating on it. My mind was now like a horse-leech at the vein, still crying, Give, give; so fixed on eternity and on the kingdom of heaven (though I knew but little), that neither pleasure, nor profit, nor persuasion, nor threats could loosen it or make it let go its hold. It is in very deed a certain truth; it would have been then as difficult for me to have taken my mind from heaven to earth, as I have found it often since to get it from earth to heaven."

Ordinary persons who are conscious of trying to do right, who resist temptations, are sorry when they slip, and determine to be more on their guard for the future, are well contented with the condition which they have reached. They are respectable; they are right-minded in common things; they fulfil their every-day duties to their families and to society with a sufficiency for which the world speaks well of them, as indeed it ought to speak; and they themselves acquiesce in the world's verdict. Any passionate agitation about the state of their souls they consider unreal and affected. Such men may be amiable in private life, good neighbours, and useful citizens; but be their talents what they may, they could not write a Pilgrim's Progress, or even reach the Delectable Mountains, or even be conscious that such mountains exist.

Bunyan was on the threshold of the higher life. He knew that he was a very poor creature. He longed to rise to something better. He was a mere ignorant, untaught mechanic. He had not been to school with Aristotle and Plato. He could not help himself, or lose himself in the speculations of poets and philosophers.

He had only the Bible, and, studying the Bible, he found that the wonder-working power in man's nature was Faith. Faith! What was it? What did it mean? Had he faith? He was but "a poor sot," and yet he thought that he could not be wholly without it. The Bible told him that if he had faith as a grain of mustard-seed, he could work miracles. He did not understand Oriental metaphors; here was a simple test which could be at once applied.

"On day," he writes, "as I was between Elstow and Bedford, the temptation was hot upon me to try if I had faith by doing some miracle. I must say to the puddles that were in the horse-pads, "be dry," and truly at one time I was agoing to say so indeed. But just as I was about to speak, the thought came into my mind: Go under yonder hedge first and pray that God would make you able. But when I had concluded to pray, this came hot upon me, that if I prayed and came again and tried to do it, and yet did nothing notwithstanding, then be sure I had no faith, but was a castaway, and lost. Nay, thought I, if it be so, I will never try it yet, but will stay a little longer. Thus was I tossed between the devil and my own ignorance, and so perplexed at some times that I could not tell

what to do."

Common-sense will call this disease, and will think impatiently that the young tinker would have done better to attend to his business. But it must be observed that Bunyan was attending to his business, toiling all the while with grimed hands over his pots and kettles. No one ever complained that the pots and kettles were ill-mended. It was merely that, being simple-minded, he found in his Bible that, besides earning his bread, he had to save or lose his soul. Having no other guide, he took its words literally, and the directions puzzled him.

He grew more and more unhappy, more lowly in his own eyes

"Wishing him like to those more rich in hope "—

like the women who were so far beyond him on the heavenly road. He was a poet without knowing it, and his gifts only served to perplex him further. His speculations assumed bodily forms which he supposed to be actual visions. He saw his poor friends sitting on the sunny side of a high mountain refreshing themselves in the warmth, while he was shivering in frost, and snow, and mist. The mountain was surrounded by a wall, through which he tried to pass, and searched long in vain for an opening through it. At last he found one, very straight and narrow, through which he struggled, after desperate efforts. "It showed him," he said, "that none could enter into life but those who were in downright earnest, and unless they left the wicked world behind them; for here was only room for body and soul, but not for body and soul and sin." The vision brought him no comfort, for it passed away, and left him still on the wrong side: a little comfortable self-conceit would have set him at rest. But, like all real men, Bunyan had the worst opinion of himself. He looked at his Bible again. He found that he must be elected. Was he elected? He could as little tell as whether he

had faith. He knew that he longed to be elected, but "the Scrip ture trampled on his desire;” for it said, “It is not of him that willeth, or of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy; therefore, unless God had chosen him, his labour was in vain. The devil saw his opportunity; the devil, among his other attributes, must have possessed that of omnipresence; for whenever any human soul was in straits, he was personally at hand to take advan tage of it.

"It may be that you are not elected," the tempter said to Bunyan. "It may be so indeed," thought he. "Why, then," said Satan, "you had as good leave off and strive no farther; for if, indeed, you should not be elected and chosen of God, there is no talk of your being saved."

A comforting test suggested itself. "Look at the generations of old; did any ever trust in the Lord and was confounded?" But these exact words, unfortunately, were only to be found in the Apocrypha. And there was a further distressing possibility, which has occurred to others besides Bunyan. Perhaps the day of grace was passed. It came on him one day as he walked in the country that perhaps those good people in Bedford were all that the Lord would save in those parts, and that he came too late for the blessing. True, Christ had said, "Compel them to come in, for yet there is room." It might be "that when Christ spoke those words," He was thinking of him-him among the rest that he had chosen, and had meant to encourage him. But Bunyan was too simply modest to gather comfort from such aspiring thoughts. He desired to be converted, craved for it, longed for it with all his heart and soul. "Could it have been gotten for gold," he said, "what would I not have given for it! Had I had a whole world it had all gone ten thousand times over for this, that my soul might have been in a converted state. But, oh! I was made sick by that saying of Christ: 'He called to Him whom He would, and they came to Him.' I feared He would not call me."

Election, conversion, day of grace, coming to Christ, have been pawed and fingered by unctuous hands for now two hundred years. The bloom is gone from the flower. The plumage, once shining with hues direct from heaven, is soiled and bedraggled. The most solemn of all realities have been degraded into the passwords of technical theology. In Bunyan's day, in camp and council chamber, in High Courts of Parliament, and among the poor drudges in English villages, they were still radiant with spiritual meaning. The dialect may alter; but if man is more than a brief floating bubble on the eternal river of time; if there be really an immortal part of him which need not perish; and if his business on earth is to save it from perishing-he will still try to pierce the mountain barrier: he will still find the work as hard as Bunyan found it. We live in days of progress and enlightenment; nature on a hundred sides has unlocked her storehouses of knowledge. But she has furnished no open sesame to bid the mountain gate fly wide which leads to conquest of self. There is still no passage there for "body and soul and sin."

CHAPTER III.

" GRACE ABOUNDING."

THE Women in Bedford, to whom Bunyan had opened his mind, had been naturally interested in him. Young and rough as he was, he could not have failed to impress anyone who conversed with him with a sense that he was a remarkable person. They mentioned him to Mr. Gifford, the minister of the Baptist Church at Bedford. John Gifford had, at the beginning of the Civil War, been a loose young officer in the king's army. He had been taken prisoner when engaged in some exploit which was contrary to the usages of war. A court-martial had sentenced him to death, and he was to have been shot in a few hours, when he broke out of his prison with his sister's help, and, after various adventures, settled at Bedford as a doctor. The near escape had not sobered him. He led a disorderly life, drinking and gambling, till the loss of a large sum of money startled him into seriousness. In the language of the time, he became convinced of sin, and joined the Baptists, the most thorough-going and consistent of all the Protestant sects. If the Sacrament of Baptism is not a magical form, but is a personal act, in which the baptised person devotes himself to Christ's service, to baptise children at an age when they cannot understand what they are doing may well seem irrational and even impious.

Gifford, who was now the head of the Baptist community in the town, invited Bunyan to his house, and explained the causes of his distress to him. He was a lost sinner. It was true that he had parted with his old faults, and was leading a new life. But his heart was unchanged; his past offences stood in record against him. He was still under the wrath of God, miserable in his posi tion, and therefore miserable in mind. He must become sensible of his lost state, and lay hold of the only remedy, or there was no hope for him.

There was no difficulty in convincing Bunyan that he was in a bad way. He was too well aware of it already. In a work of fiction the conviction would be followed immediately by consoling grace. In the actual experience of a living human soul, the medicine operates less pleasantly.

"I began," he says, "to see something of the vanity and inward wretchedness of my wicked heart, for as yet I knew no great matter

therein. But now it began to be discovered unto me, and to work for wickedness as it never did before. Lusts and corruptions would strongly put themselves forth within me in wicked thoughts and desires which I did not regard before. Whereas, before, my soul was full of longing after God; now my heart began to hanker after every foolish vanity."

Constitutions differ. Mr. Gifford's treatment, if it was ever good for any man, was too sharp for Bunyan. The fierce acid which had been poured into his wounds set them all festering again. He frankly admits that he was now farther from conversion than before. His heart, do what he would, refused to leave off desiring forbidden pleasures, and while this continued, he supposed that he was still under the law, and must perish by it. He compared himself to the child who, as he was being brought to Christ, was thrown down by the devil and wallowed foaming. A less healthy nature might have been destroyed by these artificially created and exaggerated miseries. He supposed he was given over to unbelief and wickedness, and yet he relates, with touching simplicity :—

"As to the act of sinning I was never more tender than now. I durst not take up a pin or a stick, though but so big as a straw, for my conscience now was sore, and would smart at every touch. I could not tell how to speak my words for fear I should misplace them."

he was

But the care with which he watched his conduct availed him nothing. He was on a morass "that shook if he did but stir," and "there left both of God, and Christ, and the Spirit, and of all good things." Behind him lay the faults of his childhood and youth, every one of which he believed to be recorded against him. Within were his disobedient inclinations, which he conceived to be the presence of the devil in his heart. If he was to be presented clean of stain before God he must have a perfect righteousness, which was to be found only in Christ, and Christ had rejected him. "My original and inward pollution," he writes, was my plague and my affliction. I was more loathsome in my own eyes than was a toad, and I thought I was so in God's eyes too. I thought every one had a better heart than I had. I could have changed heart with anybody. I thought none but the devil himself could equal me for inward wickedness and pollution. Sure, thought I, I am given up to the devil and to a reprobate mind; and thus I continued for a long while, even for some years together."

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And all the while the world went on so quietly; these things over which Bunyan was so miserable not seeming to trouble anyone except himself; and as if they had no existence except on Sundays and in pious talk. Old people were hunting after the treasures of this life, as if they were never to leave the earth. Professors of religion complained when they lost fortune or health; what were fortune and health to the awful possibilities which lay beyond the grave? To Bunyan the future life of Christianity was a reality as certain as the next day's sunrise; and he could have been happy on bread and water if he could have felt himself pre