es: the
ignobility of fashionable life; the infamies of empire; the
spuriousness of the church, the vain conceit of the professions; the
meannesses and cruelties that go with great success; and every other
pompous crime and lying institution of this world. To all patience
with such things his experience has been for him a perroanent ministry
of death.

Bunyan also leaves this world to the enemy.

"I must first pass a sentence of death," he says, "upon everything that
can properly be called a thing of this life, even to reckon myself, my
wife, my children, my health, my enjoyments, and all, as dead to me,
and myself as dead to them; to trust in God through Christ, as touching
the world to come, and as touching this world, to count the grave my
house, to make my bed in darkness, and to say to corruption, Thou art
my father and to the worm, Thou art my mother and sister.... The
parting with my wife and my poor children hath often been to me as the
pulling of my flesh from my bones, especially my poor blind child who
lay nearer my heart than all I had besides. Poor child, thought I,
what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou
must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a
thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure that the wind should
blow upon thee. But yet I must venture you all with God, though it
goeth to the quick to leave you."[97]

[97] In my quotations from Bunyan I have omitted certain intervening
portions of the text.

The "hue of resolution" is there, but the full flood of ecstatic
liberation seems never to have poured over poor John Bunyan's soul.

These examples may suffice to acquaint us in a general way with the
phenomenon technically called "Conversion." In the next lecture I
shall invite you to study its peculiarities and concomitants in some
detail.

Lecture IX

CONVERSION

To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience
religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the
process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and
consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously
right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon
religious realities. This at least is what conversion signifies in
general terms, whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation
is needed to bring such a moral change about.

Before entering upon a minuter study of t