carelessness, takes a very different
estimate of sin from that of the world, even the decent moral world, in
general. It realizes its own offences, venial as they appear to others,
as sins against infinite love--a love unto death--and in the light of the
sacrifice on Calvary, recognizes the heinousness of its guilt, and while
it doubts not, marvels that it can be pardoned. The sinfulness of
sin--more especially their own sin--is the intensest of all possible
realities to them. No language is too strong to describe it. We may not
unreasonably ask whether this estimate, however exaggerated it may appear
to those who are strangers to these spiritual experiences, is altogether
a mistaken one?

The spiritual instinct was very early awakened in Bunyan. While still a
child "but nine or ten years old," he tells us he was racked with
convictions of sin, and haunted with religious fears. He was scared with
"fearful dreams," and "dreadful visions," and haunted in his sleep with
"apprehensions of devils and wicked spirits" coming to carry him away,
which made his bed a place of terrors. The thought of the Day of
Judgment and of the torments of the lost, often came as a dark cloud over
his mind in the midst of his boyish sports, and made him tremble. But
though these fevered visions embittered his enjoyment while they lasted,
they were but transient, and after a while they entirely ceased "as if
they had never been," and he gave himself up without restraint to the
youthful pleasures in which his ardent nature made him ever the
ringleader. The "thoughts of religion" became very grievous to him. He
could not endure even to see others read pious books; "it would be as a
prison to me." The awful realities of eternity which had once been so
crushing to his spirit were "both out of sight and mind." He said to
God, "depart from me." According to the later morbid estimate which
stigmatized as sinful what were little more than the wild acts of a
roystering dare-devil young fellow, full of animal spirits and with an
unusually active imagination, he "could sin with the greatest delight and
ease, and take pleasure in the vileness of his companions." But that the
sense of religion was not wholly dead in him even then, and that while
discarding its restraints he had an inward reverence for it, is shown by
the horror he experienced if those who had a reputation for godliness
dishonoured their profession. "Once," he says, "when I was