except in "The Confessions of St. Augustine," his
"Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners." Bunyan's first experiences
after his introduction to Mr. Gifford and the inner circle of his
disciples were most discouraging. What he heard of God's dealings with
their souls showed him something of "the vanity and inward wretchedness
of his wicked heart," and at the same time roused all its hostility to
God's will. "It did work at that rate for wickedness as it never did
before." "The Canaanites _would_ dwell in the land." "His heart
hankered after every foolish vanity, and hung back both to and in every
duty, as a clog on the leg of a bird to hinder her from flying." He
thought that he was growing "worse and worse," and was "further from
conversion than ever before." Though he longed to let Christ into his
heart, "his unbelief would, as it were, set its shoulder to the door to
keep Him out."

Yet all the while he was tormented with the most perverse scrupulosity of
conscience. "As to the act of sinning, I never was more tender than now;
I durst not take a pin or a stick, though but so big as a straw, for my
conscience now was sore, and would smart at every twist. I could not now
tell how to speak my words, for fear I should misplace them. Oh! how
gingerly did I then go in all I did or said: I found myself in a miry
bog, that shook if I did but stir, and was as those left both of God, and
Christ, and the Spirit, and all good things." All the misdoings of his
earlier years rose up against him. There they were, and he could not rid
himself of them. He thought that no one could be so bad as he was; "not
even the Devil could be his equal: he was more loathsome in his own eyes
than a toad." What then must God think of him? Despair seized fast hold
of him. He thought he was "forsaken of God and given up to the Devil,
and to a reprobate mind." Nor was this a transient fit of despondency.
"Thus," he writes, "I continued a long while, even for some years
together."

This is not the place minutely to pursue Bunyan's religious history
through the sudden alternations of hopes and fears, the fierce
temptations, the torturing illusions, the strange perversions of isolated
scraps of Bible language--texts torn from their context--the harassing
doubts as to the truth of Christianity, the depths of despair and the
elevations of joy, which he has portrayed with his own inimitable graphic
power. It is a picture of fearful fasc