ive considers this to have
been a mistake. Mr. Wiseman answers that even in the most desperate
cases, kindness in parents is more likely to succeed than severity,
and if it fails they will have the less to reproach themselves with.
The kindness is, of course, thrown away. Badman continues a loose
blackguard, extravagant, idle and dissolute. He comes to the edge of
ruin. His situation obliges him to think; and now the interest of the
story begins. He must repair his fortune by some means or other. The
easiest way is by marriage. There was a young orphan lady in the
neighbourhood, who was well off and her own mistress. She was a
'professor' eagerly given to religion, and not so wise as she ought to
have been. Badman pretends to be converted. He reforms, or seems to
reform. He goes to meeting, sings hymns, adopts the most correct form
of doctrine, tells the lady that he does not want her money, but that
he wants a companion who will go with him along the road to Heaven. He
was plausible, good-looking, and, to all appearance, as absorbed as
herself in the one thing needful. The congregation warn her, but to no
purpose. She marries him, and finds what she has done too late. In
her fortune he has all that he wanted. He swears at her, treats her
brutally, brings prostitutes into his house, laughs at her religion,
and at length orders her to give it up. When she refuses, Bunyan
introduces a special feature of the times, and makes Badman threaten
to turn informer, and bring her favourite minister to gaol. The
informers were the natural but most accursed products of the
Conventicle Acts. Popular abhorrence relieved itself by legends of the
dreadful judgments which had overtaken these wretches.

In St. Neots an informer was bitten by a dog. The wound gangrened and
the flesh rotted off his bones. In Bedford 'there was one W. S.'
(Bunyan probably knew him too well), 'a man of very wicked life, and
he, when there seemed to be countenance given to it, would needs turn
informer. Well, so he did, and was as diligent in his business as most
of them could be. He would watch at nights, climb trees and range the
woods of days, if possible to find out the meeters, for then they were
forced to meet in the fields. Yea, he would curse them bitterly, and
swore most fearfully what he would do to them when he found them.
Well, after he had gone on like a Bedlam in his course awhile, and had
done some mischief to the people, he was stricken by the