ly to be found in the Apocrypha. And
there was a further distressing possibility, which has occurred to
others besides Bunyan. Perhaps the day of grace was passed. It came on
him one day as he walked in the country that perhaps those good people
in Bedford were all that the Lord would save in those parts, and that
he came too late for the blessing. True, Christ had said, 'Compel them
to come in, for yet there is room.' It might be 'that when Christ
spoke those words,' He was thinking of him--him among the rest that
he had chosen, and had meant to encourage him. But Bunyan was too
simply modest to gather comfort from such aspiring thoughts. Be
desired to be converted, craved for it, longed for it with all his
heart and soul. 'Could it have been gotten for gold,' he said, 'what
would I not have given for it. Had I had a whole world it had all gone
ten thousand times over for this, that my soul might have been in a
converted state. But, oh! I was made sick by that saying of Christ:
"He called to Him whom He would, and they came to Him." I feared He
would not call me.'

Election, conversion, day of grace, coming to Christ, have been pawed
and fingered by unctuous hands for now two hundred years. The bloom is
gone from the flower. The plumage, once shining with hues direct from
heaven, is soiled and bedraggled. The most solemn of all realities
have been degraded into the passwords of technical theology. In
Bunyan's day, in camp and council chamber, in High Courts of
Parliament, and among the poor drudges in English villages, they were
still radiant with spiritual meaning. The dialect may alter; but if
man is more than a brief floating bubble on the eternal river of time;
if there be really an immortal part of him which need not perish; and
if his business on earth is to save it from perishing, he will still
try to pierce the mountain barrier. He will still find the work as
hard as Bunyan found it. We live in days of progress and
enlightenment; nature on a hundred sides has unlocked her storehouses
of knowledge. But she has furnished no 'open sesame' to bid the
mountain gate fly wide which leads to conquest of self. There is still
no passage there for 'body and soul and sin.'

CHAPTER III.

GRACE ABOUNDING.

The women in Bedford, to whom Bunyan had opened his mind, had been
naturally interested in him. Young and rough as he was, he could not
have failed to impress anyone who conversed with him with a sense that