....

make them speak," and "as if they had found a new world." "At this," he says, "I felt my own heart began to shake, and mistrust my condition to be naught." When he left them to go about his employment, their talk and discourse went with him, while his heart tarried behind; for, he says, "I was greatly affected with their words, both because by them I was convinced that I wanted the true tokens of a truly godly man, and also because by them I was convinced of the happy and blessed condition of him that was such a one."

These poor women were members of a small Baptist congregation at Bedford, who had for their pastor a man whose religious history is not less remarkable than that of Bunyan himself. Formerly a major in the king's army, and having narrowly escaped execution as a rebel, John Gifford had come a stranger to Bedford, where he practised physic; leading, at the same time, the genuine life of a cavalier. Profligate and reckless, a drunkard, a gambler, and abominably profane, he entertained the most savage hatred of all Puritans. Yet was this man, when in a state of desperation occasioned by losses from gambling, "startled into a sense of his real condition" by meeting with one of the works of Robert Bolton; the perusal of which, after a mental conflict of some weeks, wrought a cure of his diseased mind and heart; and, joining himself to the company of those whom he had formerly most despised, he became at length their chosen pastor. From the members of this little flock, Bunyan received the first elements of evangelical instruction; and the more he went among these poor people, to whom he had been thus casually introduced, the more he questioned his own condition, and the more his heart was softened "under the conviction of what, by scriptnre, they asserted." His mind now became earnestly fixed upon eternity, and almost absorbed with things relating to the kingdom of heaven: but still his knowledge was that of infancy. Of this he was now humbly conscious, and a wise distrust of himself drove him to his knees. About this time he met with

some publications of the Ranters; a sect whose tenets would appear, from Baxter's account, to have been a compound of the Quaker mysticism and the grossest practical Antinomianism. The works alluded to were "highly in esteem” among a certain class; and they were, probably, at once specious and mystical, for Bunyan was not able to understand them sufficiently to form any judgment about them. He therefore betook himself to hearty prayer in this manner: "O Lord, I am a fool, and not able to know the truth from error: Lord, 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 foot; let me not be deceived, I humbly beseech thee." Such a prayer as this was never denied. "Blessed be God," continues Bunyan, "who put it into my heart to cry to him to be kept and directed, still distrusting my own wisdom; for I have since seen even the effects of that prayer, in his preserving me not only from Ranting errors, but from those also that have sprung up since. The Bible was precious to me in those days. And now, And now, methought, I began to look into the Bible with new eyes, and read as I never did before; and especially the Epistles of the Apostles were sweet and pleasant to me; and indeed then I was never out of the Bible, either by reading or meditation; still crying out to God, that I might know the truth and way to heaven and glory."

Bunyan's preservation from these seducing and fatal errors was the more remarkable, as his most intimate religious companion, the poor man whose "pleasant talk" of the Scriptures first led him to take to reading the Bible, about this time turned " a most devilish Ranter:" in fact, from the account given of him, he must have become both atheist and libertine. Shocked at his abominable principles, Bunyan at once broke off all intercourse with him. But he was also thrown into the company of several others, who, though formerly strict in religion, were also drawn away by these Ranters, and who endeavoured to instil their

fanatical tenets into the as yet ill-furnished mind of our poor novice. Although he escaped the snare, he was, for a long time, greatly harassed with the anxious doubts, the scriptural problems, and the practical difficulties which beset the path of religious inquiry along which he was groping his solitary way. "Tossed betwixt the devil and his own ignorance," he was sometimes so perplexed that he could not tell what to do. He had no friend to advise with, no spiritual guide to set him right. While in this state of mind, the happiness of the poor people at Bedford was presented to him in a kind of vision—a waking dream; or, perhaps, during actual slumber, such as will often for a few moments unconsciously suspend the voluntary action of an exhausted mind. Whether dream or reverie, it left a powerful impression; and in it, Dr. Southey thinks, "the germ of the Pilgrim's Progress may plainly be perceived." May we not rather say, the germinating of that imagination which was afterwards to ripen into genius? "I saw," says Bunyan, " as if they were on the sunny side of some high mountain, there refreshing themselves with the pleasant beams of the sun, while I was shivering and shrinking in the cold, afflicted with frost, snow, and dark clouds. Methought also, betwixt me and them I saw a wall that did compass about this mountain. Now, through this wall my soul did greatly desire to pass, concluding that, if I could, I would even go into the very midst of them, and there also comfort myself with the heat of their sun. About this wall, I bethought myself to go again and again, still prying as I went, to see if I could find some way or passage by which I might enter therein; but none could I find for some time. At the last I saw, as it were, a narrow gap, like a little doorway in the wall, through which I attempted to pass. Now, the passage being very strait and narrow, I made many efforts to get in, but all in vain, even until I was well nigh quite beat out by striving to get in. At last, with great striving, methought I at first did get in my head, and after that, by a sideling striving, my shoulders and my whole body. Then I was

exceeding glad, went and sat down in the midst of them, and so was comforted with the light and heat of their sun. Now this mountain and wall, &c. was thus made out to me. The mountain signified the church of the living God; the sun that shone thereon, the comfortable shining of his merciful face on them that were therein; the wall, I thought, was the Word, that did make separation between the Christian and the world; and the gap which was in the wall, I thought, was Jesus Christ, who is the way to God the Father. . . . . But forasmuch as the passage was wonderful narrow, even so narrow that I could not but with great difficulty enter in thereat; it showed me that none could enter into life, but those that were in downright earnest, and unless also they left that wicked world behind them; for here was only room for body and soul, but not for body and soul and sin."

This resemblance" abode many days" upon his spirit, exciting a "vehement desire to be one of that number who did sit in the sunshine." Yet more than a year appears to have elapsed before he could take courage to disclose the state of his feelings to those poor people at Bedford. When he did, they introduced him to their pastor, who invited Bunyan to his house, and had some conversation with him, but evidently had not penetration enough to discover the character of the extraordinary man thus brought under his notice. In the meanwhile, and for a long time after this interview, Bunyan's mind, being left to prey upon itself, was overclouded with the deepest spiritual distress. The workings of his thoughts during this fiery ordeal, of which he has given so vivid a description, were, no doubt, of that morbid character which any deep-seated anxiety or intense emotion is apt to assume, when the mind begins to act upon the body, and physical effects re-act upon mental operations. Dr. Southey has been pleased to describe this stage of Bunyan's experience as "a burning and feverish enthusiasm," during which he was "shaken continually by the hot and cold fits of a spiritual ague." That his imagination "was wrought to a state of excitement, in which

its own shapings became vivid as realities, and affected him more forcibly than impressions from the external world," is, we admit, very apparent. But there was nothing factitious in Bunyan's feelings, nothing unreasonable in his anxieties, nothing enthusiastic in his creed. If, for the time, the calm exercise of his understanding, not sufficiently fortified by religious knowledge, was overborne by the morbid action of his imagination, this natural effect of over-excited feelings under a real and rational cause, is not to be confounded with the hallucinations of a distempered intellect. "Where there is no error of the imagination, no misjudging of realities, no calculations which reason condemns, there," it has been remarked by a philosophical writer," is no enthusiasm, even though the soul may be on fire with the velocity of its movement in pursuit of its chosen object." If this be a correct definition of the term, Bunyan was at no period of his history an enthusiast: his repelling the fanatical notions of the Ranters proves this. False notions, false by exaggeration, of the corruption of our nature, are supposed by Dr. Southey to have laid upon Bunyan's mind that heavy burden of distress, "heavy as that with which his own Christian begins his pilgrimage." But this remark is not warranted by any thing in the narrative, nor by the practical effect or tendency of those notions which Bunyan had derived from the Scriptures,the main and almost only source of his knowledge. The "sense of inward and original pollution," which produced so much self-loathing and horrible despondency, could not have been produced by any doctrinal notion, true or false, but was an impression upon the spirit, such as only the mind that has been itself wounded can understand, and He who made the spirit alone can heal. The source of such feelings lies deeper in human nature than this world's philosophy can reach. But when we find a similar feeling of self-loathing and abasement seizing upon the minds of the holy man of Uz and the rapt Isaiah, under a sense of the

Natural History of Enthusiasm, p. 7.