Lord Willbewill was as high-born as any man
in Mansoul, and was as much a freeholder as any of them were, if not
more. Besides, if I remember my tale aright, he had some privileges
peculiar to himself in that famous town. Now, together with these, he
was a man of great strength, resolution, and courage; nor in his occasion
could any turn him away. But whether he was too proud of his high
estate, privileges, and strength, or what (but sure it was through pride
of something), he scorns now to be a slave in Mansoul, as his own proud
word is, so that now, next to Diabolus himself, who but my Lord
Willbewill in all that town? Nor could anything now be done but at his
beck and good pleasure throughout that town. Indeed, it will not out of
my thoughts what a desperate fellow this Willbewill was when full power
was put into his hand. All which--how this apostate prince lost power
and got it again, and lost it and got it again--the interested and
curious reader will find set forth with great fulness and clearness in
many powerful pages of the _Holy War_.

John Bunyan was as hard put to it to get the right name for this head of
the gentry of Mansoul as Paul was to get the right name for sin in the
seventh of the Romans. In that profoundest and intensest of all his
profound and intense passages, the apostle has occasion to seek about for
some expression, some epithet, some adjective, as we say, to apply to sin
so as to help him to bring out to his Roman readers something of the
malignity, deadliness, and unspeakable evil of sin as he had sin living
and working in himself. But all the resources of the Greek language,
that most resourceful of languages, utterly failed Paul for his pressing
purpose. And thus it is that, as if in scorn of the feebleness and
futility of that boasted tongue, he tramples its grammars and its
dictionaries under his feet, and makes new and unheard-of words and
combinations of words on the spot for himself and for his subject. He
heaps up a hyperbole the like of which no orator or rhetorician of Greece
or Rome had ever needed or had ever imagined before. He takes sin, and
he makes a name for sin out of itself. The only way to describe sin, he
feels, the only way to characterise sin, the only way to aggravate sin,
is just to call it sin; sinful sin; 'sin by the commandment became
exceeding sinful.' And, in like manner, John Bunyan, who has only his
own mother tongue to work with, in his straits