st twenty times together. But the fatal
moment at last came, and the weakened will yielded, against itself. One
morning as he lay in his bed, the voice came again with redoubled force,
and would not be silenced. He fought against it as long as he could,
"even until I was almost out of breath," when "without any conscious
action of his will" the suicidal words shaped themselves in his heart,
"Let Him go if He will."

Now all was over. He had spoken the words and they could not be
recalled. Satan had "won the battle," and "as a bird that is shot from
the top of a tree, down fell he into great guilt and fearful despair." He
left his bed, dressed, and went "moping into the field," where for the
next two hours he was "like a man bereft of life, and as one past all
recovery and bound to eternal punishment." The most terrible examples in
the Bible came trooping before him. He had sold his birthright like
Esau. He a betrayed his Master like Judas--"I was ashamed that I should
be like such an ugly man as Judas." There was no longer any place for
repentance. He was past all recovery; shut up unto the judgment to come.
He dared hardly pray. When he tried to do so, he was "as with a tempest
driven away from God," while something within said, "'Tis too late; I am
lost; God hath let me fall." The texts which once had comforted him gave
him no comfort now; or, if they did, it was but for a brief space. "About
ten or eleven o'clock one day, as I was walking under a hedge and
bemoaning myself for this hard hap that such a thought should arise
within me, suddenly this sentence bolted upon me, 'The blood of Christ
cleanseth from all sin,'" and gave me "good encouragement." But in two
or three hours all was gone. The terrible words concerning Esau's
selling his birthright took possession of his mind, and "held him down."
This "stuck with him." Though he "sought it carefully with tears," there
was no restoration for him. His agony received a terrible aggravation
from a highly coloured narrative of the terrible death of Francis Spira,
an Italian lawyer of the middle of the sixteenth century, who, having
embraced the Protestant religion, was induced by worldly motives to
return to the Roman Catholic Church, and died full of remorse and
despair, from which Bunyan afterwards drew the awful picture of "the man
in the Iron Cage" at "the Interpreter's house." The reading of this book
was to his "troubled spirit" as "salt when rub