prospects of man, the feature of it most appalling to the
imagination is that hell-fire--a torment exceeding the most horrible
which fancy can conceive, and extending into eternity--awaits the
enormous majority of the human race. The dreadful probability seized
hold on the young Bunyan's mind. He shuddered at it when awake. In the
visions of the night it came before him in the tremendous details of
the dreadful reality. It became the governing thought in his nature.

Such a belief, if it does not drive a man to madness, will at least
cure him of trifling. It will clear his mind of false sentiment, take
the nonsense out of him, and enable him to resist vulgar temptation as
nothing else will. The danger is that the mind may not bear the
strain, that the belief itself may crack and leave nothing. Bunyan was
hardly tried, but in him the belief did not crack. It spread over his
character. It filled him first with terror; then with a loathing of
sin, which entailed so awful a penalty; then, as his personal fears
were allayed by the recognition of Christ, it turned to tenderness
and pity.

There was no fanaticism in Bunyan; nothing harsh or savage. His
natural humour perhaps saved him. His few recorded sayings all refer
to the one central question; but healthy seriousness often best
expresses itself in playful quaintness. He was once going somewhere
disguised as a waggoner. He was overtaken by a constable who had a
warrant to arrest him. The constable asked him if he knew that devil
of a fellow Bunyan. 'Know him!' Bunyan said. 'You might call him a
devil if you knew him as well as I once did.'

A Cambridge student was trying to show him what a divine thing reason
was--'reason, the chief glory of man which distinguished him from a
beast,' &c., &c.

Bunyan growled out: 'Sin distinguishes man from beast. Is sin divine?'

He was extremely tolerant in his terms of Church membership. He
offended the stricter part of his congregation by refusing even to
make infant baptism a condition of exclusion. The only persons with
whom he declined to communicate were those whose lives were openly
immoral. His chief objection to the Church of England was the
admission of the ungodly to the Sacraments. He hated party titles and
quarrels upon trifles. He desired himself to be called a Christian or
a Believer, or 'any name which was approved by the Holy Ghost.'
Divisions, he said, were to Churches like wars to countries. Those who
talked mos