ertain. Doubt, as he had
felt it, was a direct enemy of morality and purity, and as such he had
fought with it and conquered it. Protestant Christianity was true. All
mankind were perishing unless they saw it to be true. This was his
message; a message--supposing him to have been right--of an importance
so immeasurable that all else was nothing. He was still 'afflicted
with the fiery darts of the devil,' but he saw that he must not bury
his abilities. 'In fear and trembling,' therefore, he set himself to
the work, and 'did according to his power preach the Gospel that God
had shewn him.'

'The Lord led him to begin where his Word began--with sinners. This
part of my work,' he says, 'I fulfilled with a great sense, for the
terrors of the law and guilt for my transgressions lay heavy on my
conscience. I preached what I felt. I had been sent to my hearers as
from the dead. I went myself in chains to preach to them in chains,
and carried that fire in my own conscience that I persuaded them to
beware of. I have gone full of guilt and terror to the pulpit door;
God carried me on with a strong hand, for neither guilt nor hell could
take me off.'

Many of Bunyan's addresses remain in the form of theological
treatises, and that I may not have to return to the subject, I shall
give some account of them. His doctrine was the doctrine of the best
and strongest minds in Europe. It had been believed by Luther, it had
been believed by Knox. It was believed at that moment by Oliver
Cromwell as completely as by Bunyan himself. It was believed, so far
as such a person could be said to believe anything, by the all
accomplished Leibnitz himself. Few educated people use the language of
it now. In them it was a fire from heaven shining like a sun in a dark
world. With us the fire has gone out; in the place of it we have but
smoke and ashes, and the Evangelical mind in search of 'something
deeper and truer than satisfied the last century,' is turning back to
Catholic verities. What Bunyan had to say may be less than the whole
truth: we shall scarcely find the still missing part of it in lines of
thought which we have outgrown.

Bunyan preached wherever opportunity served--in woods, in barns, on
village greens, or in town chapels. The substance of his sermons he
revised and published. He began, as he said, with sinners, explaining
the condition of men in the world. They were under the law, or they
were under grace. Every person that came i