all that he
had learnt at school, and took to amusements and doubtful adventures,
orchard-robbing, perhaps, or poaching, since he hints that he might
have brought himself within reach of the law. In the most passionate
language of self-abhorrence, he accuses himself of all manner of sins,
yet it is improbable that he appeared to others what in later life he
appeared to himself. He judged his own conduct as he believed that it
was regarded by his Maker, by whom he supposed eternal torment to have
been assigned as the just retribution for the lightest offence. Yet he
was never drunk. He who never forgot anything with which he could
charge himself, would not have passed over drunkenness, if he could
remember that he had been guilty of it; and he distinctly asserts,
also, that he was never in a single instance unchaste. In our days, a
rough tinker who could say as much for himself after he had grown to
manhood, would be regarded as a model of self-restraint. If, in
Bedford and the neighbourhood, there was no young man more vicious
than Bunyan, the moral standard of an English town in the seventeenth
century must have been higher than believers in Progress will be
pleased to allow.

He declares that he was without God in the world, and in the sense
which he afterwards attached to the word this was probably true. But
serious thoughts seldom ceased to work in him. Dreams only reproduce
the forms and feelings with which the waking imagination is most
engaged. Bunyan's rest continued to be haunted with the phantoms which
had terrified him when a child. He started in his sleep, and
frightened the family with his cries. He saw evil spirits in monstrous
shapes and fiends blowing flames out of their nostrils. 'Once,' says a
biographer, who knew him well, and had heard the story of his visions
from his own lips, 'he dreamed that he saw the face of heaven as it
were on fire, the firmament crackling and shivering with the noise of
mighty thunder, and an archangel flew in the midst of heaven, sounding
a trumpet, and a glorious throne was seated in the east, whereon sat
One in brightness like the morning star. Upon which, he thinking it
was the end of the world, fell upon his knees and said, "Oh, Lord,
have mercy on me! What shall I do? The Day of Judgment is come and I
am not prepared."'

At another time 'he dreamed that he was in a pleasant place jovial and
rioting, when an earthquake rent the earth, out of which came bloody
flames,