o merit to anyone. He would
not have it supposed that only the profane or grossly wicked were in
danger from the law. 'A man,' he says, 'may be turned from a vain,
loose, open, profane conversation and sinning against the law, to a
holy, righteous, religious life, and yet be under the same state and
as sure to be damned as the others that are more profane and loose.'
The natural man might think it strange, but the language of the curse
was not to be mistaken. Cursed is every one who has failed to fulfil
the whole law. There was not a person in the whole world who had not
himself sinned in early life. All had sinned in Adam also, and St.
Paul had said in consequence, 'There is none that doeth good, no, not
one! The law was given not that we might be saved by obeying it, but
that we might know the holiness of God and our own vileness, and that
we might understand that we should not be damned for nothing. God
would have no quarrelling at His just condemning of us at that day.'

This is Bunyan's notion of the position in which we all naturally
stand in this world, and from which the substitution of Christ's
perfect fulfilment of the law alone rescues us. It is calculated, no
doubt, to impress on us a profound horror of moral evil when the
penalty attached to it is so fearful. But it is dangerous to introduce
into religion metaphysical conceptions of 'law.' The cord cracks that
is strained too tightly; and it is only for brief periods of high
spiritual tension that a theology so merciless can sustain itself. No
one with a conscience in him will think of claiming any merit for
himself. But we know also that there are degrees of demerit, and,
theory or no theory, we fall back on the first verse of the English
Liturgy, as containing a more endurable account of things.

For this reason, among others, Bunyan disliked the Liturgy. He thought
the doctrine of it false, and he objected to a Liturgy on principle.
He has a sermon on Prayer, in which he insists that to be worth
anything prayer must be the expression of an inward feeling; and that
people cannot feel in lines laid down for them. Forms of prayer he
thought especially mischievous to children, as accustoming them to use
words to which they attached no meaning.

'My judgment,' he says, 'is that men go the wrong way to learn their
children to pray. It seems to me a better way for people to tell their
children betimes what cursed creatures they are, how they are under
the wr