e
mercies were sent as warnings, but he says that he was too careless
to profit by them. He thought that he had forgotten God altogether,
and yet it is plain that he had not forgotten. A bad young man, who
has shaken off religion because it is a restraint, observes with
malicious amusement the faults of persons who make a profession of
religion. He infers that they do not really believe it, and only
differ from their neighbours in being hypocrites. Bunyan notes this
disposition in his own history of Mr. Badman. Of himself, he says:
'Though I could sin with delight and ease, and take pleasure in the
villanies of my companions, even then, if I saw wicked things done by
them that professed goodness, it would make my spirit tremble. Once,
when I was in the height of my vanity, hearing one swear that was
reckoned a religious man, it made my heart to ache.'

He was now seventeen, and we can form a tolerably accurate picture of
him--a tall, active lad, working as his father's apprentice, at his
pots and kettles, ignorant of books, and with no notion of the world
beyond what he could learn in his daily drudgery, and the talk of the
alehouse and the village green; inventing lies to amuse his
companions, and swearing that they were true; playing bowls and
tipcat, ready for any reckless action, and always a leader in it, yet
all the while singularly pure from the more brutal forms of vice, and
haunted with feverish thoughts, which he tried to forget in
amusements. It has been the fashion to take his account of himself
literally, and represent him as the worst of reprobates, in order to
magnify the effects of his conversion, and perhaps to make
intelligible to his admiring followers the reproaches which he heaps
upon himself. They may have felt that they could not be wrong in
explaining his own language in the only sense in which they could
attach a meaning to it. Yet, sinner though he may have been, like all
the rest of us, his sins were not the sins of coarseness and
vulgarity. They were the sins of a youth of sensitive nature and very
peculiar gifts: gifts which brought special temptations with them, and
inclined him to be careless and desperate, yet from causes singularly
unlike those which are usually operative in dissipated and uneducated
boys.

It was now the year 1645. Naseby Field was near, and the first Civil
War was drawing to its close. At this crisis Bunyan was, as he says,
drawn to be a soldier; and it is extremely