to be a snare to him, and he abandoned it; he
had been fond of dancing, but he gave it up. Music and singing he
parted with, though it distressed him to leave them. Of all
amusements, that in which he had most delighted had been in ringing
the bells in Elstow church tower. With his bells he could not part all
at once. He would no longer ring himself: but when his friends were
enjoying themselves with the ropes, he could not help going now and
then to the tower door to look on and listen; but he feared at last
that the steeple might fall upon him and kill him. We call such
scruples in these days exaggerated and fantastic. We are no longer in
danger ourselves of suffering from similar emotions. Whether we are
the better for having got rid of them, will be seen in the future
history of our race.

Notwithstanding his struggles and his sacrifices, Bunyan found that
they did not bring him the peace which he expected. A man can change
his outward conduct, but if he is in earnest he comes in sight of
other features in himself which he cannot change so easily; the
meannesses, the paltrinesses, the selfishnesses which haunt him in
spite of himself, which start out upon him at moments the most
unlocked for, which taint the best of his actions and make him loathe
and hate himself. Bunyan's life was now for so young a person a model
of correctness; but he had no sooner brought his actions straight than
he discovered that he was admiring and approving of himself. No
situation is more humiliating, none brings with it a feeling of more
entire hopelessness. 'All this while,' he says, 'I knew not Christ,
nor grace, nor faith, nor hope, and had I then died my state had been
most fearful. I was but a poor painted hypocrite, going about to
establish my own righteousness.'

Like his own Pilgrim, he had the burden on his back of his conscious
unworthiness. How was he to be rid of it?

'One day in a street in Bedford, as he was at work in his calling, he
fell in with three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun
talking about the things of God.' He was himself at that time 'a brisk
talker' about the matters of religion, and he joined these women.
Their expressions were wholly unintelligible to him. 'They were
speaking of the wretchedness of their own hearts, of their unbelief,
of their miserable state. They did contemn, slight, and abhor their
own righteousness as filthy and insufficient to do them any good. They
spoke of a new bi