a strange seizure on my
spirit; it brought light with it, and commanded a silence in my heart
of all those tumultuous thoughts that before did use, like masterless
hell-hounds, to roar and bellow and make a hideous noise within me. It
showed me that Jesus Christ had not quite forsaken and cast off my
Soul."

Such periods accumulate until he can write: "And now remained only the
hinder part of the tempest, for the thunder was gone beyond me, only
some drops would still remain, that now and then would fall upon
me";--and at last: "Now did my chains fall off my legs indeed; I was
loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations also fled away; so
that from that time, those dreadful Scriptures of God left off to
trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing, for the grace and love of
God.... Now could I see myself in Heaven and Earth at once; in Heaven
by my Christ, by my Head, by my Righteousness and Life, though on Earth
by my body or person.... Christ was a precious Christ to my soul that
night; I could scarce lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph
through Christ."

Bunyan became a minister of the gospel, and in spite of his neurotic
constitution, and of the twelve years he lay in prison for his
non-conformity, his life was turned to active use. He was a peacemaker
and doer of good, and the immortal Allegory which he wrote has brought
the very spirit of religious patience home to English hearts.

But neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called
healthy-minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness
ever to forget its taste, and their redemption is into a universe two
stories deep. Each of them realized a good which broke the effective
edge of his sadness; yet the sadness was preserved as a minor
ingredient in the heart of the faith by which it was overcome. The
fact of interest for us is that as a matter of fact they could and did
find SOMETHING welling up in the inner reaches of their consciousness,
by which such extreme sadness could be overcome. Tolstoy does well to
talk of it as THAT BY WHICH MEN LIVE; for that is exactly what it is, a
stimulus, an excitement, a faith, a force that re-infuses the positive
willingness to live, even in full presence of the evil perceptions that
erewhile made life seem unbearable. For Tolstoy's perceptions of evil
appear within their sphere to have remained unmodified. His later
works show him implacable to the whole system of official valu